Raising the Drawbridge

Sometime in the late aughts. Pasadena City College.

In my decade or so serving on hiring committees, I’ve never come across an applicant as qualified and gifted as George. The college has opened a tenure-track position for a new political scientist, and the committee (which always includes two people outside the discipline) has read more than 200 applications. We brought in twelve for the first-round of interviews, then cut that number to three for the second round. All three finalists appear to be in their early thirties. Each has a reputable degree. Each has spent several years as an adjunct professor — what we sometimes call a “freeway flyer” — and each provides excellent teaching evaluations. *

George is clearly, undeniably, the best. His student evaluations aren’t just laudatory, they border on the worshipful. The department chair at the college where he adjuncts has written us a three-page letter, saying that George is the most gifted teacher she’s ever seen in her career. She is sure we’ll hire him, and that will be our gain — and her college’s loss. When George gives his teaching demonstration, something each finalist offers, he is funny, insightful, and masterfully compelling. He makes the topic — the process of repealing constitutional amendments — fascinating and comprehensible.

When I say George was the best candidate, I want to be clear this was not just my view. This was an opinion universally held by the hiring committee. When it came time for final decisions, we each praised him to the heavens. We expressed regret, too. After all, we knew George wasn’t going to get the job. Before we even sent out the hiring announcement, we had agreed to hire a woman of color for the position. Two of the finalists met that description, and after expressing our admiration for George and our regret that in his whiteness and his maleness the poor fellow never stood a chance, we moved on to the tough question of picking our winner. Let me be clear: these two women were also superb candidates. The college would not suffer if either were hired. Yet by any measure save a rigid commitment to ethnic diversity, neither was close to George’s equal.

On Monday, Compact Magazine published an essay by Jacob Savage called The Lost Generation. It has generated loads of discussion on X and BlueSky and even in the New York Times. Savage describes trying to land a job as a writer in Los Angeles, and hearing, over and over again, that there were no positions in the entertainment industry for young white men. The aging white guys (Boomers, or Gen Xers like me) who dominate the industry had done what I agreed to do with George: pull up the ladder — or raise the drawbridge. In the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion, it was time to hire — exclusively — the traditionally underrepresented. Jacob, like George, never stood a chance.

The usual suspects have staked out the usual positions. Lefties have mocked Savage, suggesting, as you can probably guess, that his professional failures are due solely to his inadequacies and not to his skin color. They accuse him of having the entitlement of a mediocre white man. (If you are a true progressive, you believe that “entitled mediocre white man” is a tautology, or a string of synonyms. You are ever so clever like that.) On the right, there is rage — and talk of convening tribunals, Nuremberg style, to hold those who denied whites their civil liberties to account.

I have confessed my part. (I am advised that given the extreme vagueness of what I share here, I am not at any legal risk.) Hired to a tenure-track job in 1994, when I was a very immature 27, I was told many times I’d be the “last white male historian” to be hired full-time at PCC, and for the remainder of my time at the college, it proved true. It proved true because I accepted what I was told — that students needed more professors who “looked like them,” and that the diversification of the academy was long overdue. I was told that I’d gotten the job due as much to unmerited racial privilege as to any talent. I could atone for that error by attributing any signs of white male excellence to that unmerited privilege — and vote accordingly when serving on hiring committees.

Again, white men were not always the best candidates. There were times that the non-white, non-male candidate we hired was unquestionably superior to any other applicant. There were other times — several — where they weren’t. We did not put any of this in writing, and we retained plausible deniability. But we did what we did, and it was wrong.

When I was in college, my roommate Oscar told me I had what he called “white boy mojo.” I had told him that I’d picked Berkeley because my parents, grandparents, two great-grandfathers and a host of cousins had gone there. It was a family tradition. Oscar, the son of Mexican immigrant farm workers from the Central Valley, was a first-generation student. And though he was a bright and funny engineering major, Oscar declared he could see a confidence in me that he attributed to my color, my class, and my ancestors.

One day in our junior year, when we were no longer roommates but still friends, Oscar asked me to go with him to see an administrator. “I need your white boy mojo,” he said with a pained grin, caught between jest and anger.

“How is my being there going to help?” I didn’t see it.

“You’re going to sit with me in this meeting, and you’ll walk in with the attitude you always have, which is that people in authority want to help you and you deserve that help. While I’m talking, just look at me, and then look at the guy on the other side of the desk, and then look back at me.”

This sounded like something out of an acting class. “Really? That’s going to make a difference?”

Oscar nodded. “Yes, and it’s gonna be a two-fer. You’ll be helping me, and I’m going to help open your eyes to what you can’t see.”

We went to that administrator, and I did as Oscar had asked, and the administrator stared at me a great deal, and I smiled a great deal, and whatever it was that Oscar needed, he got that day.

Afterwards, I told Oscar I wasn’t sure if I was proud or ashamed. “Shut up about your feelings,” he said. “I owe you a slice of pizza at Blondie’s, though. Let’s go.”

Years later, when I thought of George getting that disappointing phone call that he had not been chosen, I tried to reassure myself that he possessed that same intangible-yet-potent “white boy mojo.” After all, everyone seemed to believe that white men were endowed with this marvelous, door-opening confidence! Everyone said that the world was set up to accommodate us, to take our voices seriously, to throw opportunities at our feet! After all, I could apparently charm university administrators and hiring committees, and that couldn’t possibly be attributable to native talent. That mojo had to be the undeserved product of color, sex, and class. That was what everyone said. I had a marvelous invisible knapsack filled with goodies, and that was the sole source of my success!

I didn’t know if George came from affluence, poverty, or the middlest of middles, but I thought that maybe I had detected the mien of the well-brought-up. “He’ll be fine,” I told myself. “He’ll land on his feet. You did what you had to do.”

I know George’s real name. I have Googled him many times over the years. LinkedIn tells me he never got a tenure-track job. After a few more years as a freeway flyer – and who knows how many other fruitless applications – he now sells real estate.

No one is entitled to a tenure-track job. The supply far outstrips the demand. The one who was chosen instead was excellent.

But it should have been George.

*A gentleman is permitted to confess his own shortcomings, and Lord knows, I am garrulous on the subject. A gentleman is not at liberty to implicate others in wrongdoing. Therefore, I am deliberately vague about the year this happened. I think you can probably guess that George is a pseudonym. And no, it wasn’t for a political science position, but another tenure-track job in a different social science discipline. I served on an average of one hiring committee a year between the time I got tenure in 1998 and my unceremonious departure from PCC in 2013. If you wish to believe I am making all this up, you are free to do so. Even if you know the college’s history well, you will not be able to discover which position this was. Speculation will be fruitless. After all, as you can probably guess, this sort of thing happened very, very often.