Why the ‘Lost Generation’ of white, male scientists must sue |
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Jacob Savage’s recent essay in Compact about the “lost generation” of millennial white men struck many readers as a shocking revelation. It argues that around 2014, elite institutions underwent a fundamental shift. Affirmative action policies stopped being a gentle preference and increasingly became a guiding principle under initiatives aimed at promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. While 2014 marked the turn, George Floyd’s death was the accelerant. Discrimination against white men became overt, pervasive, and framed as an urgent moral duty.
Ibram X. Kendi issued the moment’s guiding principle in his 2019 book, ironically titled How to Be an Antiracist: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” Academia, media, entertainment, and the sciences all underwent rapid transformation. White men were no longer merely disadvantaged — they were being explicitly excluded.
For people such as me who were in academia during those years, Savage’s article felt like stating the obvious.
I began graduate school in 2013 to pursue a career as an evolutionary biologist. I was the first in my family to go to college. I’d dreamed of being a scientist since I was a child and spent over 12 years actively pursuing this goal. I got my doctorate from the University of California, Santa Barbara; did a postdoctoral fellowship at the Pennsylvania State University; won a top National Science Foundation research grant; and published nearly 30 papers in scientific journals. My CV was advanced for my career stage. However, by 2020, when I was job hunting for tenure-track faculty positions, I observed nonwhite peers with significantly weaker resumes receiving numerous job interviews and offers, while I couldn’t even secure a phone call.
The reason was clear the moment you read the job advertisements. Openings would emphasize a “strong interest” in candidates from “diverse and underrepresented backgrounds,” followed by long,........