Kieth Humphreys: Older White Profs Should Retire To Make Way For "Exciting, Diverse Young People"

Because fuck old white dudes amirite?

   I wonder why this doesn't go for anyone else? Like...shouldn't people who snagged cushy R1 jobs retire even earlier so that people who didn't can move up the totem pole before they retire? How about that?

   And if we're really going to get serious about mixing things up, spreading the wealth, and correcting for so-called "privilege," we should first get rid of everyone, regardless of sex or race, who grew up wealthy, had academic or professional parents, went to elite colleges... I mean, those are the real advantages. Why not tell them to get out of the way for people who pulled themselves up from lower down the socio-economic-cultural ladder? Why not say that the genuinely privileged should all teach for a couple of years and then get out of the way. Maybe willingly take less prestigious positions. If you think white dudes who go to low-tier state schools have more advantages than wealthy women who go to Ivy League schools, then you are completely out of touch with reality. 

   Among the many things that piss me off about such stuff is that people apparently sit around thinking of every possible baroque reason why white guys should be vilified, and seem to give not two seconds thought to generalizing any of these moronic suggestions beyond race and sex. 

   Look...I think it's plausible to say that, in times of academic scarcity, there are reasons to retire earlier rather than later. I'm just sick of the fashionably enthusiastic anti-white-dude nonsense. My generation of white dude academicians simultaneously (a) took flack for the sins of our forebears, (b) were shoved to the back of the dossier stack by affirmative action, and now (c) we're being told that, when that fateful time rolls around, we need to go away as soon as possible because people with more politically correct genitals and skin tones want our jobs. And for many of us that really means: get out of the way so that rich kids who have, comparatively speaking, had many things handed to them would also like to be handed our jobs. 

   I'd like to be more dispassionate about this...I really would... But I'm getting a little tired of everyone else taking as much as they can get while instructing me on how I need to take as little as I can possibly get by on. I'm actually a person naturally inclined toward avoiding advantages for myself and ceding any close call to others. But even I'm getting tired of this bullshit.