Diversity Thursday

the tide crosses another bar

The above graphic remains one of the most descriptive graphics of our moment…or at least in the top five. I think it is helpful for this DivThu.

You may have noticed that we have not had a DivThu in a while. Well, it is time to take it out of mothballs to cover a really pivotal—but imperfect—article by Jacob Savage in Commentary Magazine called, “The Lost Generation.”

I’m going to have an extensive group of pull quotes down the post (but you really should read the entire thing as I only will pull from a few parts), but I’d like to cover a little ground first.

What a journey of the last two decades have been writing about what I started calling the Diversity Bullies, the Diversity Industry, a Zampolit here and there, and then everyone just came to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).

Over a decade ago, I had an individual pretty senior in OPNAV tell me I could be a lot more effective if I stopped writing about the Diversity issues I saw in the Navy. When something “substantive” I write gets sent around, some “important” people will dismiss it as coming from, “that Diversity guy.”

Well, the rest is history, I guess. All the denial, name calling, threats, nasty names…and here at the end of 2025, it is all mainstreamed. Living well is the best revenge.

Zen.

Bit by bit, step by step, inside and outside of government—people are coming forward.

The last year has been simply amazing with the progress we’ve made. DivThu had been plodding along, screaming into the void for two decades and, as I’ve mentioned before, I would not have thought we would have made such amazing progress as we have had in moving away from officially sanctioned discrimination.

A lot of other people, mostly working independently in ignored and unloved corners of the law, academia, and politics continued to move forward in search of an opening to move towards the promise of a truly equal society where people were not discriminated against simply by immutable characteristics.

The nation was working that way, but that threatened some people’s financial, ideological, and political power structures. Unity was bad. Using sectarianism to control people as groups was good for them—the hell with the larger cultural cost. The Cultural Marxist left pulled everyone into a very dark place.

We’ve all seen the graphs. I’ll mention it again, but I’ve got two decades of writing on the topic at the OG Blog and here. I won’t repeat all the arguments again or repost the examples, but it’s there. Just give it a read.

In all the discussions we only saw one group of people who were not a concern of the Zampolits when it came to “representation” — white males.

This whole project has been with us for decades, as a GenX guy, I saw it, but in the mid-2010s, it all went into hyperdrive, hitting Millennials and the GenZ men right in the forehead.

People wonder why young men—and not just white men but especially so—have shifted so hard to the right, embracing populism and a disgust of the ruling class? That has a lot to do with it.

You could feel in the first few years of the Biden Administration that things were getting better, as what had been a few people on the edges complaining, serious people and serious organizations with significant clout were in the fight. We noted as such at the time on a few of the DivThu. Why? Well, after the election of 2020 and the Red Guard’s success in that same year after the George Floyd overdose death, the mask came off.

All those who denied for years what the Diversity Industry was doing, were now proud about it. In the military, Gilday pushed Kendi…Milley fantasized about “white rage.”

If you had a problem with this overt sectarianism…well…as Rob Henderson put it at the time:

Over the last year, with bold action by the Trump Administration building off of significant victories in the courts during the Biden Administration, the fever broke. More and more, people are stepping forward. Nasty words no longer penetrate the calluses built up over years.

People became more and more confident that they were not alone, that no one really believed the slander being thrown about. Yes, there was fear in the air—but like the fear of the Stasi in the final years of East Germany—it was a fear of people whose power was based on something that could not survive the light of day or examination from a fair-minded, modern context.

Yes, the dead-enders would still fight, smear, and scheme to regain power…but the tide of history was too strong.

I mean, we’ve gone from this visual:

…to this:

As most of DivThu was focused on the Navy and U.S. military’s branch of the Diversity Industry, Jacob’s article is exceptionally helpful. He covers his very personal story, but also branches into other sectors of the civilian sector.

In his personal story and the overview of academia, you will see a very familiar story of what we saw in the Navy…and if Congress does not take more action…may very well return when the left in the form of the modern (D) party dominated by its hard left regains power in the Executive Branch.

Let’s dive in. Remember, Jacob is a Millenial…the generation mostly the children of the Baby Boomers who hold the levers of power and their GenX middle management executing higher direction and guidance.

Cronus and his children was never been a more appropriate allusion.

This was it, the moment our careers were supposed to take off. We’d put in our time—I’d been tutoring SATs and reselling tickets to make ends meet while I wrote—and five years seemed par for the course, based on the slightly older guys we knew who’d made it.

But of course, by 2016, we were already too late.

The showrunner emailed us back apologetically. “I had initially thought I might be able to bring you guys on,” he wrote, “but in the end it wasn’t possible.”

We met with the executive anyway—a Gen-X white guy—who told us how much he loved our pilot. But the writers room was small, he explained apologetically, and the higher-level writers were all white men. They couldn’t have an all-white-male room. Maybe, if the show got another season, they’d be able to bring us on.

They never did.

Many of you have been at these meetings. I have. Select lists come in…they are found wanting…results are delayed as there are adjustments…and a new list comes back.

Some packages go on one pile, others go on another. If the metrics don’t work, make them work.

It was real. In the zero-sum game of selection and promotion, for one to gain, another must lose. That is the personal loss.

If objective criteria that defines the most qualified are thrown to the side in the place of sectarian criteria in primacy, then you will have a less objectively qualified cohort selected…with the expected results. That is the institutional loss.

The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once. In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023.

In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life.

It was not a broad discrimination either. It was focused on the young, the vulnerable, the relatively powerless in both status, but also in the cultural vibe of the moment. Why defend a 20-something white male in 2015, when 60-something white men had so many advantages during the Carter Administration?

This isn’t a story about all white men. It’s a story about white male millennials in professional America, about those who stayed, and who (mostly) stayed quiet. The same identity, a decade apart, meant entirely different professional fates. If you were forty in 2014—born in 1974, beginning your career in the late-90s—you were already established. If you were thirty in 2014, you hit the wall.

Because the mandates to diversify didn’t fall on older white men, who in many cases still wield enormous power: They landed on us.

If you are GenX, you saw a little of this. Millennials and Zoomers experienced an order of magnitude greater.

Next he moves on to an industry in collapse and suffering from eye-rolling levels of political bias, the media.

It may be hard to remember now, but a decade ago the prevailing critique of American journalism was that it was woefully lacking in gender and racial diversity. There had been hope that New Media would be different, that the internet might bring in a wider range of voices. But by the mid-2010s that optimism was waning. “New-media ventures like Vox, BuzzFeed and Politico are trying to shake up the way people get their news and entertainment online,” NPR reported in 2014. “But critics say… those newsrooms and leadership roles are overwhelmingly made up of white men.”

…

But that view became harder to sustain. In 2019, David Haskell, who had just been named editor-in-chief of New York magazine, was asked to respond to staff disappointment that “another white man” had been elevated to the role. “I understand that reaction. Part of me shares it,” he told his staff. “The most effective way to move the needle on diversity hiring is for a strong, loud commitment to come from the very top of the masthead. I … plan to do exactly that.”

Andrew didn’t work at New York, but he watched similar pressures reshape his newsroom. He’d been there for five years, a beat reporter who couldn’t seem to move up, and suddenly all anybody could talk about were diversity metrics. Management was, as he put it, “obsessive about recruiting people of color.” But the pool was small, and anyone promising was quickly poached by The New York Times or cable news. “With all the declarations these newsrooms had been making, the imperatives—‘enough white guys already’—seemed to me to be the mantra,” he told me. “And you couldn’t help but wonder if that meant you were being passed up for opportunities, even in your own organization.”

The left, as all leftist movements do, in the end consumed their own. We all saw cringeworthy announcements of “allyship”, “male feminists”, rainbow “Safe Space” on faculty doors by straight white males, and all sorts of virtue signaling in a desperate attempt to be eaten last.

We all saw it.

And then 2020 happened, and the wheels came off.

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, newsrooms tripped over themselves to stage a “reckoning.” The New York Times solemnly promised “sweeping” reforms—on top of the sweeping reforms it had already promised. The Washington Post declared it would become “the most diverse and inclusive newsroom in the country.” CNN pledged a “sustained commitment” to race coverage, while Bon Appétit confessed that “our mastheads have been far too white for far too long” and that the magazine had “tokenize[d] many BIPOC staffers and contributors.” NPR went further still, declaring that diversity was nothing less than its “North Star.”

…

These weren’t empty slogans, either. In 2021, new hires at Condé Nast were just 25 percent male and 49 percent white; at the California Times, parent company of The Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune, they were just 39 percent male and 31 percent white. That year ProPublica hired 66 percent women and 58 percent people of color; at NPR, 78 percent of new hires were people of color.

“For a typical job we’d get a couple hundred applications, probably at least 80 from white guys,” the hiring editor recalled. “It was a given that we weren’t gonna hire the best person… It was jarring how we would talk about excluding white guys.” The pipeline hadn’t changed much—white men were still nearly half the applicants—but they were now filling c…

At The Atlantic, Andrew didn’t even get an interview. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief, had described his hiring philosophy back in 2019: “By opening up the possibilities of younger people, women, and people of color, by imagining their rise in a deliberate way, I’ve just widened the pool of potential leadership. There’s no quota system here.”

Goldberg was candid about another, less comfortable reality. “It’s really, really hard to write a 10,000-word cover story,” he said in that same interview. “There are not a lot of journalists in America who can do it. The journalists in America who do it are almost exclusively white males.”

With or without quotas, The Atlantic succeeded in hiring fewer of these white males. Since 2020, nearly two-thirds of The Atlantic‘s hires have been women, along with nearly 50 percent people of color. In 2024, The Atlantic announced that three-quarters of editorial hires in the past year had been women and 69 percent people of color.

The irony was, where older white men remained in charge, especially where they remained in charge, there was almost no room to move up. “If you hired a team of white guys around you, you were putting a target on your back,” recalled the hiring editor. At The New York Times Magazine (one of the few prestige magazines with a public masthead), Jake Silverstein, a Gen-X white man, serves as editor-in-chief, and Bill Wasik, another Gen-X white man, serves as editorial director. But of nine millennial senior editors and story editors below them, there’s just one white guy—and he’s been there since 2012, effectively grandfathered in.loser to 10 percent of open positions.

Suddenly, in Andrew’s newsroom, everything was driven by identity. There were endless diversity trainings, a racial “climate” assessment—at one point, reporters were told they had to catalog, in minute detail, the identity characteristics of all their sources. Andrew had been instrumental in forming the union at his company, and objected when negotiations shifted from severance pay and parental leave to demands for racial quotas. “They wanted to do like ... emergency hires of black people,” he said.

Why did LoM3Z’s “Longhouse” article resonate?

By the early 2020s, many journalists I spoke to noticed something else: The young white men who once flooded internship and fellowship pools had simply stopped applying. Gen-Z men had absorbed the message that journalism was not for them.

“The femaleness is striking,” a well-known Gen-X reporter with impeccable liberal bona fides confided. “It’s like, wow, where have the guys gone?”

In less than a decade, the entire face of the industry changed. The New York Times newsroom has gone from 57 percent male and 78 percent white in 2015 to 46 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. Condé Nast today is just 35 percent male and 60 percent white. BuzzFeed, a media operation that had been 52 percent male and 75 percent white in 2014, was just 36 percent male and 52 percent white by 2023.

But nothing explains the New Media story quite like Vox, whose explainers dominated 2010s discourse and whose internal demographics capture the decade’s professional shift. Back in 2013, when Ezra Klein came under fire for his start-up’s lack of diversity, Vox Media was 82 percent male and 88 percent white. By 2022 the company was just 37 percent male and 59 percent white, and by 2025 leadership was 73 percent female.

Recall the late 20-teens struggle sessions with leftist MilTwitter?

“Newsrooms were center-left places in 2005,” the prominent Gen-X reporter told me. “Now they’re incredibly left places… I imagine one reason newsrooms have gotten more explicitly lefty is that you have white guys and white women adopting a kind of protective coloration, allyship mindset, to get through the door.”

Andrew, for his part, was unable to adopt the performative allyship that had become expected. “I always thought I was an effeminate nerd growing up… but my way of expressing myself now puts me on the most masculine end of men in media,” he told me. “I started to pick up on the fact that there wasn’t much room for people who even speak in my timbre.’”

…

“If you’re a white man, you gotta be the superstar,” Andrew told me. “You can’t help feeling like no matter how good you are, you were born in the wrong year.”

As he saw it, the industry had its super-successful white guys who’d made it before 2014 and so were functionally Gen X—but for everyone else, moving up in a contracting industry was nearly impossible. (“I was kind of grandfathered in during one era, and had achieved a level going into 2015–2024 where it just didn’t really affect me,” one of these superstar journalists told me.)

After surviving years of buyouts, Andrew finally made senior reporter in 2023, but by then it felt less like recognition than a consolation prize. He was coming up on 40, unmarried, with little room for forward or lateral movement. When the next round of buyouts hit, he decided it was time to leave.

Next we move on to academia. Again, we covered—over many years—some of what was happening inside the Navy’s lifelines at the U.S. Naval Academy and the Naval War College. If you’ve read those, this will all sound familiar. If you have not read them, go up the post and follow the links.

There are many stories we tell ourselves about race and gender, especially in academia. But the one thing everyone I spoke to seemed to agree on is it’s best not to talk about it, at least not in public, at least not with your name attached. “The humanities are so small,” a millennial professor nervously explained. “There’s a difference between thinking something and making common knowledge that you think it,” said another.

So it came as a bit of a shock when David Austin Walsh, a Yale postdoc and left-wing Twitter personality, decided to detonate any chance he had at a career with a single tweet.

“I’m 35 years old, I’m 4+ years post-Ph.D, and—quite frankly—I’m also a white dude,” he wrote on X. “Combine those factors together and I’m for all intents and purposes unemployable as a 20th-century American historian.”

Over the last two decades, the amount of communications I have received on background with promises not to share from faculty in Navy institutions of higher learning is broad and deep. We still need a truth and reconciliation commission on what happened.

Take a moment to read this exceptional thread from UNC’s David Decosimo. I could do an entire DivThu on it alone…and it applies in spades to what we have seen at USNA and NWC in the last decade+. The U.S. Naval Academy and Naval War College need to find its Decosimo.

The pile-on was swift and vicious. “You are all just laughable,” wrote The New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones. “Have you seen the data on professorships?” “White males are 30 percent of the U.S. population but nearly 40 percent of faculty,” tweeted a tenured professor at GWU. “Hard to make the case for systemic discrimination.”

It didn’t matter that as far back as 2012 women were more likely to be tenure-track across the humanities than men, or that a 2015 peer-reviewed study suggested that STEM hiring favored women, or even that CUPAHR, an association of academic DEI professionals, found that “assistant professors of color (35 percent) and female assistant professors (52 percent) are overrepresented in comparison to US doctoral degree recipients (32 percent and 44 percent respectively).”

The graphic at the top of this post applies.

White men may still be 55 percent of Harvard’s Arts & Sciences faculty (down from 63 percent a decade ago), but this is a legacy of Boomer and Gen-X employment patterns. For tenure-track positions—the pipeline for future faculty—white men have gone from 49 percent in 2014 to 27 percent in 2024 (in the humanities, they’ve gone from 39 percent to 21 percent).

The pipeline and the cohorts haven’t changed much—newly-minted humanities Ph.Ds have been evenly split between men and women for over a decade now, and white men outnumber other groups in most applicant pools—but who was getting hired certainly did. At Berkeley, white men were 48.2 percent of faculty applicants in the Physical Sciences—but just 26 percent of hires for assistant professor positions. Since 2018, only 14.6 percent of tenure-track assistant professors hired at Yale have been white American men. In the humanities, that number was just six out of 76 (7.9 percent).

This is why no one can deny what is happening. Institutions need to be sued into insolvency.

The white men who do get hired are often older and more established—or foreign. Several people I spoke with noticed that European white men don’t seem to face these barriers. The reason, one professor suggested, is they exist slightly outside the American culture wars. Another is an administrative sleight of hand: Federal education statistics (IPEDS) classify foreign nationals outside racial categories. In other words, a white European on a work visa doesn’t register as “white” in diversity metrics. Among new Ph.Ds with definite academic employment plans, white temporary-visa holders are nearly twice as likely as white U.S. citizens or permanent residents to secure tenure-track positions (61.0 percent versus 33.1 percent in 2023).

Diversity for thee, but not for me.

“Senior hiring still is very often white men,” Will, an Ivy League professor, told me. His humanities department had hired two higher-level white men, then conducted a search for a junior professor. There was one white man among the finalists. “On paper, he was so clearly the strongest candidate,” Will remembered. “It really kind of did feel like, well, we can’t not interview this guy. But we’re still not gonna hire him.” He had been told, “If we’re on the fence here, we should not go with the man again.”

The below strategies we have documented over the years that were used by the Navy.

There needs to be accountability. People have been damaged.

As for the olds? They’ll age out before the crocodile has a chance to eat them. Just gross moral cowardice.

Yale’s history department, with 10 white male professors over the age of 70, provides a striking illustration of the generational divide in hiring. Since 2018, they’ve hired four older white men as full professors—but among sixteen tenured or tenure-track millennials, just one is a white man. At 84, the Cold War historian John Gaddis isn’t even the oldest in the department. “The Yale history department at the time I arrived in 1997 was overwhelmingly white and male, if not yet millennial,” he told me in an email. “Some remedial action was long overdue.”

This remedial action can take many forms. Berkeley commissioned regression analyses to identify which quasi-legal strategies would produce the fewest number of white male job offers. At Dartmouth, the Mellon-to-postdoc program provided ten tenure-track positions for “new hires with a demonstrated commitment to addressing racial underrepresentation in their disciplines.” None were white men.

Cluster hiring, which began in the ’90s as a way to expand interdisciplinary research, was transformed in the 2010s as a shortcut to achieve diversity goals. Entire groups of underrepresented candidates could now be hired at once, working around the often byzantine tenure approval process.

“The way you try to demographically diversify without making it explicit is searching in areas where the areas are strongly correlated with [gender or] ethnicity,” an Ivy League professor explained to me. A cluster hire in Latinx studies will gain you several Latinx faculty. A professor of transgender studies will in all likelihood not be a straight cis man. And a white male assistant professor of black sexualities is closer to an SNL sketch than to any lived reality in 2024.

The below is heartbreaking. It is why you find people who write books or a thesis that has some woke subject spot-welded onto it, or apologizes for it. Worse, you see people hired not so much for their history, but for things such as “gendered perspectives” or an approach to military history where the military is only secondary to things such as bisexuality in the Cold War.

As these things are at the top of requirements for new hires, it automatically removes anyone right of center. No right of center person is going to write a book about the U.S. Marine Corps based on the influence of masculinity.

Yes, both of the above paragraphs are real, no kidding, new hires inside the Navy lifelines. IYKYK. I’m not going to mention the individuals by name, because they and their choice of scholarship is not the issue. It is who they were hired over and why that is the issue…and the message it sends to more serious scholars.

Hanging over it all was an invisible curriculum, the political assumptions about what should and should not be studied. James recalled a fellow graduate student he met at Yale, a white man oblivious to the latest academic orthodoxies. “He went on this long, passionate monologue about military history. He knew all sorts of details of Roman military history, he really wanted to study it. And I just thought you are hopeless, there is no way anyone is going to hire you… He almost wasn’t schooled properly. If he had been—without anyone ever needing to tell him—he would just drop all that about military history, because he’d know that’s white and European and male and dead.”

Only one person from James’s classics cohort wound up with a tenure-track offer. “He’s gay, Asian-American, exceptionally conversant in the language of critical theory,” James said. “And he got his job on the merits. He’s extremely good, but he’s into stuff that’s also very in.” James, on the other hand, applied to just a couple of tenure-track jobs in classics before he gave up. “Most people didn’t even try,” he told me. For young white men doing dead white male stuff, “it was just totally hopeless.”

I’m open to anyone finding error.

Back in 2016, Brown had pledged to double faculty diversity within six years. “There is significant work to do in the coming months and years to implement the Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan,” Provost Richard Locke, himself a white male Boomer, said at the time. A diversity representative was installed on every job search committee. The Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity reviewed all hiring advertisements as well as faculty short and long lists (in tenure-track hiring, the longlist is a collection of potential candidates, and the shortlist is a selection of the most qualified to consider for the interview phase).

This has to be actionable from a class action perspective.

To give a sense of what this meant on the ground: In 2022, there were 728 applicants to tenure-track jobs in the humanities at Brown, 55 percent of whom were men. At every stage of the process the male share was whittled down. The long list was 48 percent male, the short list 42 percent. Only 34 percent of candidates who made it to the interview round were male—and only 29 percent of the jobs were ultimately offered to men. A similar dynamic played out in the social sciences: 54 percent of the 722 applicants were men; 44 percent of the shortlist was male, and just 32 percent of job offers were tendered to men; in the physical sciences, women were 23 percent of applicants, but received 42 percent of job offers.

Ethan made it to the final interview round at Brown. After a long back-and-forth with the search committee—a sign, he believes, of internal dissension—he lost out. “They wanted everything through the prism of race,” Ethan recalled. “Unless you place [race] squarely at the center of your research, you’re vulnerable, especially if your identity doesn’t fit the desired profile.”

Of the men who managed to pass through Brown’s gender gauntlet, almost none are white. Since 2022, Brown has hired forty-five tenure track professors in the humanities and social sciences. Just three were white American men (6.7 percent).

Over the next three years, Ethan applied to dozens more positions, including at UC Berkeley and UC Irvine. As elsewhere, the UC schools required DEI statements, in which prospective faculty were asked to detail “future plans to advance diversity, equity and inclusion.” Ethan had to write dozens of these statements in the course of his job search. But the UCs took it a step further. Under an $8.5 million state program called “Advancing Faculty Diversity,” UC administrators used DEI statements as a “first cut” to winnow down applicant pools before faculty were even allowed to consider candidates.

As you can find in the DivThu archive, again, the Navy’s higher education institutions did this.

In the below, note the generational impact.

It’s taken a toll on Ethan’s personal life. He’s been with his partner for seven years, but they’ve spent much of that time treading water. They want kids, but without the financial security of a tenure-track position, it’s daunting. “That decision is on hold and may never happen,” he said. He’s always anxious the grant money might dry up. “I don’t feel like my career path is leading anywhere. It feels like a dead end.” Occasionally he surrenders to anger and bitterness. “There’s a huge group of talented white men who can’t get tenure-track jobs,” he told me. “For a set of institutions so obsessed with bias, they’re completely blind to their own.”

As for Richard Locke, the provost who spearheaded Brown’s Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan? In 2022, Locke left to accept a sinecure as dean of Apple University, Apple’s in-house personnel training facility. “In all searches, there has been consistent attention to diversity and inclusion,” he bragged in a valedictory interview. His replacement at Brown was—who else?—another 60-year-old white man.

There will be pushback by the Cultural Marxist bitter-enders. I’ve already seen some of it. The usual childish swipes. Yawn.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my one critique of Jacob’s article, he pulls his punches at the end. I’ll let you read it yourself, but it seems he has some variation of Battered Woman Syndrome.

Jacob seems to feel as if he is at fault, or the red-in-tooth-and-claw discrimination was a force of nature.

No.

People and institutions with names were responsible. There is someone to blame. The people and politicians who decided that it was in their interest to stop what, by then end of the first decade of this century, seemed to be a fading of sectarian strife based on immutable characteristics. They had careers, paychecks, and power that required sectarian strife.

There is blame to be put on those who knew better, but allowed themselves to be threatened into submission. There were institutions that were led by either cowards, useful idiots, true believers, or bad actors. The useful idiots we can feel sorry for, the other groups deserve accountability.

Jacob has a few more steps to take. More contemplation. I hope the overwhelming response to his article will help him.

He deserves better. We all do.