Identity Focus on Campus Goes Back Many Decades

Commentary

When I came out of graduate school in 1988, I hoped to get a tenure-track job at a decent college, any place that offered not too heavy a teaching load and regarded English as a core discipline.

The job market for a humanities doctorate had been horrible for years. One couldn’t be choosy, and many ambitious and smart individuals with a doctorate in hand ended up as adjunct instructors picking up a freshman composition course or two at a couple of campuses in Los Angeles or nearby for not much more than minimum wage and without benefits.

All of us were nervous. To have spent seven years in grad school without a job waiting, to have used up our 20s in the library buried in 19th-century poetry and Nietzsche and literary theory, to have postponed marriage and kids—it left us in quiet desperation all the time.

That was bad enough. In 1988, and again in 1989, when I applied for 15 or so jobs in my field of American literature that were advertised in the professional association’s job list, however, I heard rumors of another factor at work, a disturbing one on top of the insufficient number of jobs available for the year’s crop of new doctoral degree holders. It was a gender issue. The word was out: The discipline needed more women, and it needed them quickly.

At the time, the many professors who had been hired in the 1950s and 1960s were still in place, although nearing retirement, and they were almost all men. Women entered the field in the 1970s and 1980s, but they were still well outnumbered. As the older, male professors stepped down, it would appear to many a continuation of a historic injustice to replace them with men, not women.

I remember hearing of the head of an English department at a school in New England who insisted in a faculty meeting that took up the matter of hiring that only female candidates would be accepted for the coming three years. I didn’t know if that was true, but it certainly matched the spirit of the age. One often heard that outcome praised in hallway conversations and at faculty soirees. It had the status of professional wisdom. If you challenged it, that put you in a reactionary camp. A banner was lifted: The Old Boy Network is over! As an insecure doctoral student whose fate depended on what your superiors decided, you knew better than to object. Feminism had momentum and righteousness. At the time, I agreed that it had justification. Policies should follow.

I was lucky to get a plum job at Emory University. Perhaps it happened because four or five females had been hired around the same time, all of them dutiful scholars and teachers. Since then, of course, the focus on group identity in the humanities has only intensified. The rising number of women on the faculty has not diminished concerns over equal representation. This is because of what the situation was before: The memory of an all-white-male professoriate lingers in people’s minds.

Older and younger professors, too, tend to see social affairs in the present through the lens of discrimination in the past. In recent weeks, in fact, I have spoken to two faculty groups, one in Atlanta and one in Chapel Hill, where I argued for a more traditional model of general education. In both cases, the immediate objection was, precisely, the remembrance of a time when women and minorities were largely kept out. What happened in 1961 was as fresh in their minds as if it had happened in 2021.

It is hard to argue against this position, to assert (as I have) that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is a practice that judges people unfairly and breeds resentment and disappointment. In truth, I have yet to encounter a DEI-infused setting that is filled with happy, relaxed individuals. With current efforts to end DEI, such as the Supreme Court decision in 2023 to end affirmative action in college admissions, the bitterness has grown.

There is a problem, however: The numbers in 2025 don’t fit the argument. In my area of the humanities and arts, when it comes to the awarding of doctorates, women outnumber men by four percentage points, 52 to 48 (see Table 1-5). In the field of education, in 2024, females earned 73 percent of all doctoral degrees, while in psychology, women collected 74 percent of the whole. If we include all fields, men do outnumber women, but only slightly, 51.4 percent to 48.6 percent—hardly a sign that discrimination is ongoing.

And yet, the memory of inequity lingers. It’s as if time has stopped, that history has been put on pause, and that advance hasn’t happened, at least not as much as it should have. This is the context in which the “identity” side of the debate should be understood.

Critics of DEI practices think that the classification of individuals by group identity violates liberal principles of equal treatment. Advocates of DEI say a principles-only approach is too narrow. The past must be considered as well. The two sides are speaking past one another. A memory of unfairness is not something to dispute. It is to be respected. Years of inequity can be fixed only with actual compensation.

The outlook still prevails in higher education. DEI may be unpopular in the general population, but it retains its authority on the quad, in the faculty lounge, and in the administration building. This contention may not go away through the deliberation of human beings, but only through the workings of time, the dissipation of memory as the years go by, and one generation passeth away.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.