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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   24887 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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I'm currently adjacent to an R1 research university, and here's what's been happening:

  1. After the administration cancelled grants which contained diversity-speak, faculty who were supporting DEI due to social pressure have quietly stopped promoting it, while the true believers have started communicating by FOIA-untraceable means. Outreach and education programs which had been set up to give special scientific mentoring opportunities to black students have suddenly dried up due to a lack of faculty support; the minority of faculty who still want to support these programs are still running them, but at much reduced headcount. The programs are only discussed in meetings and not by email.
  2. Everyone is concerned about funding. NIH restructuring earlier this year will result in at least one full unfunded "gap year" between grants, if not more. Furthermore, the federal government has not been paying out on its existing grant obligations, so the institution has been covering staff salaries out of its endowment. This will continue during the government shutdown, but at some point the institution may need to dip into its investments to pay salaries (instead of funding salaries off the interest on those investments), and at that point layoffs are on the table.
  3. The foci of scientific research are shifting with the political winds. A faculty member who last year gave a talk about "the ethics of whole-genome studies on minority groups", which heavily implied that Native Americans are due some special degree of genetic privacy, this year talked about an actual study design and how they support study participants for long-term follow-up. A staff member whose poster last year was about diversity in science gave a poster this year about the opioid epidemic.
  4. "Diversity, equity, and inclusion" as a term has disappeared. Its institutional replacement is "inclusivity".
  5. Mandatory training was nice this year; it focused on harrassment and publication ethics, and HR lady removed the snide remarks about "white men".
  6. Racial and gender interest groups still exist, but they are no longer advertising their meetings in traceable ways. The departmental "women's cafe" is now advertised on posters in the corridors, rather than by (more FOIA-able) email and intranet.
  7. Humanities students remain absolutely woke-brainwashed; during class discussions, the younger and humanities students will try to shoehorn any and all concepts into DEI jargon, or derail the discussion to be about minorities. A discussion about "what makes teaching effective" ends in "Student learning depends on their identity and positionality."
  8. In contrast, older students (whose day jobs involve work in radiology or physical therapy) and engineers are more likely to remove woke jargon and project woke claims into a concept-space where things actually make sense and testable claims can actually be made.
  9. I'm editing an effort-post on this, but the actual scholarship for the DEI position is incredibly intellectually weak. Every intervention on behalf of diversity is claimed to have huge positive effects in multiple dimensions; the actual citations go to junk studies (small N, self-reported results, no control group) which only support a fraction of the broad claims made. I think this is due to the same effect which results in woke movies sucking: the focus on diversity is a shield against criticism which would otherwise improve the scholarship. There is also a survivorship bias for early-career faculty whose research supports woke positions.

So, as someone who once wanted to be a professor but gave up on it because I'm a white male with some non-woke beliefs and the whole thing seemed hopelessly rigged against me... is there any chance for me to go back into academia now and get a position? or is it still just clogged with way too many grad students chasing way too few tenured positions, and the whole system rigged in favor of woke types?

Giving up academia because of idpol is like escaping a burning building because you’re worried about getting ash on your shoes.

The economics of postdocs and tenure have not changed. What constitutes polite society amongst your peers has not changed. Every reason you’d have to avoid it is still there, except you might get a welfare payment from Vance for your trouble.

Yeah that's what i figured. Still almost no chance of getting a good job there i think (mwaning tenured and working on something interesting)

Field and institution are everything. Are you seeking a professorship at Yale in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department? If so you'll be waiting for a cold day in hell. Are you seeking a professorship at Colorado School of Mines in Petroleum Engineering? If so you were never at risk.

As for whether or not a position is attainable, odds are grim, for multiple reasons. The evergreen issue of academia being a pyramid scheme where successful P.I.s and labs are built on the back of the dirt cheap labor of grad students and post docs still applies, and most of those people will still never hold a professorship, and most of those professors will never receive tenure. Things are slightly worse now because of the job market (when private industry tightens purse strings staying in academia always becomes more appealing), but only by degrees.

If you want to shoot for a professorship, be prepared to work very hard to compete against other people who are among the very best in the world at the very thing you are doing. The system nearly as much rigged in favor of woke types, as it is rigged in favor of people willing to nolife grind out a strong publication history early in your career.

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