Academia's "Pretendian" Problem Stems From a Few Very Obvious and Basic Realities

behavior is the product of incentives

1. Certain jobs in academia are highly prized

2. There are far more applicants than openings for those jobs and so competition for them is incredibly fierce

3. Representing yourself as a member of an underrepresented minority significantly improves your odds of getting such a job, and in certain fields representing yourself as a person of indigenous descent improves those odds dramatically

4. Indigenous identity is easy to fake and difficult to disprove, and the cost of accusing someone else of faking it, in academia, can be very high indeed

5. Most crucially of all, the social culture of academia strongly prohibits speaking frankly about these facts

Jay Caspian Kang’s new piece on the “Pretendian” crisis in academia is deeply researched and compulsively readable, and read it you should. But fundamentally everything you need to know about the problem is in the numbered list above. You’ve created a fiercely competitive process in which a segment of people are given a very large advantage, there are few if any objective markers that can disprove that someone is a member of that segment, and you’ve declared it offensive to question whether someone really is a member of that segment, outside of very specific scenarios. (When I was in academia people spoke very darkly about the concept of ever questioning someone’s indigenous identity, called it the act of a colonizer, etc etc.) The obvious question is… what did you think was going to happen? Humanities and social sciences departments have, through the conditions described above, rung the dinner bell for people pretending to have indigenous heritage. They now act shocked when such people show up. I find it disingenuous and untoward. This behavior is the product of the incentives that you yourself built. Of course it’s a stain on the integrity of the fakes. But you made it inevitable that this would happen. Reap what you sow.

I remember a faux pas that led to some social infighting between two grad students I knew. One was a Black woman, the other white. They were talking about a job that the former had applied for. The white woman made the mistake of mentioning that the Black woman would get a leg up in the search process for being a Black woman. This was taken as offensive and started one of those contretemps that are common to academia. That the search committee would in fact give a Black woman an advantage was not in dispute; it said, right in the job ad in black and white, that applicants from underrepresented minorities would get an advantage. (I have applied to hundreds of academic jobs in my life and I’m struggling to remember a single listing which did not include that kind of language.) Whether this was fair or not was also not in dispute; both the Black woman and the white explicitly supported the concept of giving underrepresented minorities an advantage in hiring. No, the woman had risked scandal not by knowing that a Black woman would get an advantage with the hiring committee for that job, certainly not by opposing such a policy, but rather by publicly acknowledging the existence of the explicitly stated policy. Everyone knows that this hiring dynamic is ubiquitous in academia. Most support it. I do myself, mostly. The prohibition against ever mentioning such policies, enforced by the very people who insist that they are necessary, is bizarre and destructive and leads to precisely the kind of toxic conditions Kang describes.

This is the house of mirrors that academia has built for itself. Of course people are exploiting that condition. What did you think would happen?