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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 DEI. 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 like 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 PhD from UC Santa Barbara, did a postdoc at Penn State, won a top NSF 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 non-white 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, carefully curated lists of favored identities: Black or African American; Hispanic or Latino; American Indian or Alaska Native; Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander; Indigenous peoples; other “people of color”; individuals with disabilities; women; members of “gender minorities”; and those identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or two-spirit.
These postings devoted lots of energy and pixels to signaling inclusivity. Yet, they could have saved everyone time by stating plainly the only group that was conspicuously excluded from these lists: able-bodied, straight, white men. Competition for a limited number of academic positions is notoriously fierce, and it’s impossible to favor particular groups without actively disfavoring others. One group’s positive discrimination is, unavoidably, another group’s negative discrimination.
During this time, I witnessed a black female biologist, who had only one peer-reviewed publication in an obscure journal, receive a tenure-track job offer from an Ivy League university within minutes of defending her PhD. In earlier years, this would have been unthinkable, as these positions are reserved for well-established scholars at the top of their fields with long and influential publication records.
I also saw multiple departmental job searches scrapped and declared “failures,” not because strong candidates hadn’t applied, but because the strongest applicants were white men. Rather than hire a highly qualified white candidate, departments would cancel the search entirely and try again the following year.
Such actions were not rare or isolated occurrences. They were rampant across academia.
Add to this the fact that I could not bring myself to write the kind of DEI statements that had become a mandatory component of academic job applications, statements that functioned as ideological loyalty tests, and landing a tenure-track position began to feel impossible. To call the experience demoralizing doesn’t come close to capturing it.
I wasn’t alone. I watched many brilliant white male undergraduates give up on academic science altogether. They saw the writing on the wall and chose careers where success still depended on competence rather than identity. This quiet exit didn’t make headlines, but it nonetheless drained talent from universities.
The most maddening part of all this was the gaslighting. When we pointed out what was clearly systemic racial discrimination, the very thing self-described “antiracists” claimed to oppose, we were mocked or labeled racist ourselves.
I’m not bitter because things went badly for me. They didn’t. I built a successful and fulfilling career outside of academia. Nor is this about special pleading for white men. My overarching concern is about what happens to society when merit ceases to be the guiding principle in science and medicine.
These fields depend on public trust to function. People rely on the competence of scientists and doctors to follow the evidence wherever it leads, and to make decisions uninfluenced by politics. When decisions in hiring and promotion are openly shaped by race or sex, standards slip. As standards slip, the quality of research, medical training, and professional judgment declines. That decline fuels public skepticism, which in turn makes it harder for scientific and medical institutions to effectively carry out their missions, whether that’s advancing knowledge, improving health, or guiding public policy.
Fortunately, recent political developments have countered this trend. President Donald Trump has issued executive orders aimed at eliminating DEI policies from federal agencies and publicly funded institutions, and that course correction is desperately needed. But executive orders are, by their nature, fragile. What can be enacted with the stroke of a pen can just as easily be undone by a future administration. If the opposition party wins the presidency in 2028, many of these policies will revert almost immediately. That risk is exceptionally high because the underlying cultural support for race-based hiring has only strengthened.
This is not speculation. According to 2024 data from the Skeptic Research Center, roughly half of black Gen Z and millennial respondents, half of Hispanic Gen Z respondents, and fully a quarter of white Gen Z and millennial respondents agree that “Companies should always prioritize hiring racial minorities before hiring white people.” In other words, the very cohorts now entering the workforce, and soon to occupy positions of institutional power, are more supportive of explicit racial discrimination than any generation before them.
The only lasting solution is legal accountability. When institutions are forced to defend race-based hiring in court and lose, it changes behavior in a way no executive order ever could. Encouragingly, the current administration appears to recognize this. In response to the widespread attention generated by Savage’s essay, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas took to X to reaffirm that “The EEOC is committed to identifying, attacking, and eliminating ALL race and sex discrimination, including against white male employees and applicants.” He urged those who believe they have been discriminated against to come forward.
That is precisely what I did last July. Several months after I applied for a faculty position at Cornell University, the university quietly launched a separate, secret search for an evolutionary biologist, my exact field, designed to recruit a predetermined “diversity hire” without open competition. Unearthed internal emails made clear that qualified candidates like me were intentionally excluded on the basis of race, in violation of federal civil-rights law. By filing a complaint with the EEOC, I am challenging racial discrimination through the legal process to reaffirm the basic expectation that everyone should be treated equally under the law without regard to race or sex.
But one case is not enough. If DEI-driven discrimination is going to be stopped and kept from returning, legal challenges must be brought at scale. Institutions embraced these practices because they carried little risk. That only changes when illegal discrimination has consequences.
Finally, I feel I must end with a warning for those who think the “woke” era is on its way out. A decade of DEI policies did not merely change the racial composition of universities; it changed their ideological composition as well. DEI statements functioned as ideological litmus tests, filtering out candidates who did not affirm a particular political worldview.
As Savage notes, many older faculty members largely held on to their positions during this period. The real transformation occurred in the hiring pipeline. Assistant professors hired in 2020 and the years that followed are now approaching tenure, while older professors will soon retire. As that turnover happens, institutional power will shift decisively to a younger and less white cohort that’s more ideologically uniform and more supportive of anti-white hiring practices. If you think academia’s ideological skew was bad before and worse today, brace for far greater extremes ahead.