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- [00:00]
A
You know, I think millennials, at least for the most part, we were like really believed this sort of racial, gender based equality. We were all going to be given equal chances. We understood some people had legs up, some people didn't. But overall, I think we really believed it in a way that I'm not sure previous generations did. And I think what the DEI stuff did was disabuse us of that in a way that has been ultimately pretty poisonous for our politics.
- [00:29]
B
And now the good fight with Jasia Monk. For the last 10 years, there has been an immense amount of talk about diversity, about dei, and it's sometimes hard to know what the impact of that has actually been. Has there been real changes in the way in which American institutions recruit talent and the way in which they're run? When you look at the top echelons is it sometimes feels as though the change hasn't been as big as it might seem. Well, my guest today has written a couple of viral articles saying that there has been a huge change in the last decade, but that it was concentrated among a particular generation of white men called the Lost Generation. In Compact magazine, Jacob makes an argument with a lot of detail showing to what extent the percentage of white men who were admitted to writers rooms in major Hollywood shows, who got tenure track appointments in academia, who were hired in entry level positions across virtually every cultural institutions, has plummeted. In this conversation, we talked about about whether or not that is really the case, how reliable and robust those numbers are. We try to understand how durable the change in American institutions is likely to prove, whether the election of Donald Trump has already led to a vibe ship that's going to put an end to all of these practices and what the impact of some of these practices has been on American politics. Well, that's one of the reasons why a lot of younger people have shifted their allegiance towards Donald Trump, at least in the last election. Finally, in the last part of this conversation, we talk about what it would take to reach a better equilibrium in American politics. The majority of Americans want equal opportunity, want to make sure that the forms of discrimination that undoubtedly existed against minority groups in the past don't recur. But we also want all hiring to turn into a question of unofficial but basically rigid quotas. Nor do they want our politics to turn into a zero sum competition between different ethnic blocs. Is there some way forward from this? We also talk about how Jacob feels about all of this personally. He was an inspiring screenwriter. He was part of a generation of people who had a lot fewer opportunities on the basis of a demographic group. How is he balancing the disappointment in the life he didn't get to lead with a determination not to be bitter about the way that his life turned out? Listen to those parts of the conversation. To support the podcast and all the work we do here, please go to writing.jashamunk.com Listen. That'll allow you to set up a premium feed with all free full episode. That's writing.deashamonk.com Listen. Jacob Savage, welcome to the good fight.
- [03:47]
A
Thanks for having me. This is a podcast I actually listen to.
- [03:50]
B
Oh, amazing. All right, well, I'm honored. Listen. So I think it's really hard to know what to make of what met Iglesias a number of years ago called the Great Awokening. While we were living through felt at times as though the foundations of American culture were changing in a pretty fundamental way in a very rapid manner. We were embracing institutional practices, language norms that were just very, very different from what the country had looked like 15 or 20 years earlier. And a lot of mainstream institutions just got on board with a whole set of ideas without examining them very deeply. And it felt as though there was a permanent change. There's something weird that's happened, I think, recently, where there was a vibe shift and then Donald Trump was elected. And not only are progressives much less ascendant in American politics than they seemed to be a few years ago, but a lot of the people who had sort of paid lip service to these ideas now suddenly have disowned them or even claimed that they never believed any of those things. When there's like a political scandal where Zoran Mamdami appoints somebody who had these crazy things that they said on Twitter a few years ago, it just feels like that language is out of a different world because it's just sort of disappeared a little bit from the public, or at least from the more mainstream parts of it. So it would be tempting to say this is all a kind of slightly surreal dream. We've woken up, it's over, and there's no lingering effect. But I take it that you would disagree with that. You would say that at least there is a particular generation of young white men who has been deeply impacted, whose careers have been deeply impacted by some of those institutional practices, particularly in the more artistic professions and so on. Tell us about why you think that this really was actually a profound moment that had a transformative impact.
- [05:55]
A
I mean, I don't think it was limited to the Great Awokening. And I think you can kind of see the roots of the Great Awokening going back to 2013, 2014. But I think there's a tendency for people to think that this was just sort of cultural overreach that had no material effects on anyone in any way. And I think what drove me in part to write the article is to say this wasn't like just a vibe shift one way and a vibe shift the other way. And people were annoyed over pronouns or the way that people talked about America. There were actual material effects in the real world on actual people that these policies had. And I think that that has largely gone ignored by the institutions that basically there was a real change in the ability of younger white men to ascend in various fields. And I don't think those fields are necessarily limited to. I wrote specifically about academia, media and Hollywood. Those were some of the worst of it. And some of the fields that documented most in depth what they were doing, but it wasn't sort of exclusive to those fields. And I think that beyond the vibe shift of it all, there really are material effects that need to be grappled with in some way. Like diversity was billed as sort of a win, win, win, win, win. And there is a loser in it. And it was younger white men sort of. There's no way around that.
- [07:35]
B
So talk us a little bit through this. I mean, the way it's sold, as you were saying, is as a win, win. There's this cartoon which a number of people have written about very well, advocating equity. And what you see in the cartoon is sort of the baseball game going on in the background. And there's a very young child, I guess, very short child, and then a child that sort of is of medium height men, an adult, but are trying to watch this baseball game over the fence. And there's equality and there's equity. There's two panels in equality. There's boxes of the height for everybody. And so the adult who could already see over the fence can now see over the fence even more. The two children can't see over the fence at all. And then there's this other world, the world of equity, the good world, where there's the biggest box for the youngest child and he's just able to see the game and the medium box for the medium child, and they're able to see the game and no box for the adult because the adult already is seeing the game. So there's no need. Right, but leave alone the fact that, you know, you could make as an economist, arguments that like, you know, perhaps actually the baseball team needs Ticket revenue in order to sustain itself. And even this picture of equity is not as costless as it appears. You know, leave that to one side. You know, you might say, well, actually that sort of indicates a world in which we can just expand the pie, in which now everybody's able to see the baseball game where previously they were not able to. But a lot of things are rival in the world, right, in order to get into college, because colleges really haven't expanded their enrollment very much for a very, very long time, is either this kid or that kid. And so it's rival in a very different kind of way. And of course, the rhetoric of universities and a lot of these other institutions has always been, we're leaving this talent out there because we don't have the right recruitment pipelines because there's been prejudice against them historically. And so all that these diversity initiatives are doing is to find highly qualified candidates that previously we had overlooked to make sure that the most meritorious actually are now able to access these institutions. What is wrong with that kind of famous cartoon of equity as a picture for what happened? Or those claims that colleges and other people made that all they were doing is to go and find real talent that had previously been overlooked?
- [10:01]
A
Well, I would say for one that that cartoon of equity, if you're sort of using it as a full analogy, is incredibly racist. It's saying that like, the, you know, non white man is like, you know, is incapable of seeing the field without, you know, an incredible amount of help. And I think that that's infantilizing and wrong. You know, we don't live in the segregated south as a country anymore. You know, this is not the situation that it is. So I think just fundamentally that cartoon sort of implies that anyone who isn't, say, a white man is so beleaguered and belabored and can't possibly see the field if they don't have all these extra steps. And I just don't think that that's the world that, you know, the actually existing world that we grew up in.
- [10:49]
B
Well, so tell us a little bit about the actual stats here. Right? Like, if a lot of these institutions were saying, look, historically we've discriminated, which is certainly true of many of these institutions. Right. If they're saying that now, perhaps if you're a business, there's recruitment pipelines, the easiest way to find new employees is to ask existing employees for recommendations. And so that's going to run within certain kind of communities that have been privileged for a longer time. And so all that we're doing is to expand opportunity.
- [11:18]
A
I think that, I think, for instance, in the Hollywood context, there were obviously there was an old boys network going in as late as the 2000s. There were fellowship programs that were designed to get around that, to give people who didn't have access to someone's uncle or brother in law a way in. And I don't think anyone really objected to those programs at the time. But what ended up happening is those programs stuck around after the hiring became exclusively non white men at the lower levels. So you had instead of sort of a way to get people in from the side, the people were being let in the front door and there was still like a side entrance and then there was just no room for anyone else. So I think that I don't think anyone really had a problem. I mean, some people obviously had a problem with it, but I think my sense is that our generation did not have a problem with these sort of minor rectification ideas of, okay, there's like a bit of a pipeline problem. We should try our best to expand the pipeline. It was the fact that like once those actions had all been going on for a while before, you know, 2015, and not only did they continue, but then they just shut down the pipeline for everyone else.
- [12:46]
B
So one way that these debates tend to go is that people say this never happened. And also actually it was good that it happened. Address the this never happened piece. I mean, when you're saying that a lot of these younger white men just weren't being hired at all in your compact article, you really go through these numbers in pretty impressive detail. This is, I think, from an earlier article, but one of the really striking facts is that I believe that there's not a single white man who's published fiction in the New Yorker who was born after perhaps 1984.
- [13:18]
A
It was 1984, and there has recently been one after the article was published. But yeah, I mean, basically things became next to impossible in a lot of fields for the old objective metrics of success to come. And I think this was interestingly sort of both a top down and bottom up cultural thing where from the top you had sort of these vague mandates, but from the bottom you had the people reading the stories or the people in hr. People wanted to sort of spontaneously do the right thing, so to speak. And so they ended. There was never like a quota, but from both ends you were sort of seeing these preferences. And what I'll say is like, if, you know, if you roll, a career is made up of many sort of like yes or no decisions. Do you get that job? Does that job lead to the next job? Does that job lead to the next job? If the dice are weighted against you pretty severely in every one of those decisions, eventually the outcomes are going to start looking sort of the way that they do. And I think you can only really see that after time, in the moment, any individual decision seems, well, maybe it was me, maybe it wasn' in the system. But when you sort of look at it in the space of 10 years, you can see that really these did have this culture change, had very material effects.
- [14:47]
B
And again, for those who might be skeptical about what he's saying and who haven't had a chance to read the article, go read the article. It's really interesting. But tell us about some of those numbers. Right? Like that stat about the New Yorker is striking, but that's one magazine or one section of a magazine, right? What are some of the numbers that are gonna at least move some of a way towards convincing somebody who's skeptical? That was as big an effect as you're saying. But this is a real thing that happened.
- [15:12]
A
When I moved to Los Angeles to try to be a screenwriter in 2011, the number of lower level writers on TV who were white men was, I think the stat is like 48 or 49%. Last year, the number of lower level white male writers was 11%. And I spoke actually to a showrunner, an anonymous showrunner has contacted me and he told me that the 11% number isn't even real. That's the number of pure Nepo hires that get sent down by the network or someone's some star's child. So basically that 11% is. I mean, sure, they're still white men, but they are the sort of ultra connected ones who never quite deserve the job to begin with. And then you go from 48% to 11%. Without the pipeline changing that much, without the population changing that much, it seems fairly obvious what the cause of all that was.
- [16:19]
B
And part of the background here is that 48% may be slightly overrepresented as a share of the overall population. Obviously, there's other background factors about who gets the kind of education that probably makes you better at screenwriting, etc. But when you look at purely demographic terms, 48% of men is overrepresented, but 11% of men is definitely underrepresentative relative to what share white men make of those age cohorts in the United States,
- [16:44]
A
the age cohort is probably around 30%. So you're going from basically one and a half percent over representation, which I would partially argue is a question of what the pipeline was at the time to, you know, a third underrepresented. I think women of color are now 36% of lower level staff writers. So I mean, the preferences are very, very clear in that context. I think in academia too, you can see some of those numbers.
- [17:13]
B
Yeah. So I know that we're sort of only establishing basics right now, but I think that's an important part of a conversation. Tell me about some of those numbers in academia and in other fields beyond Hollywood as well.
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A
Academia. It sort of goes college by college and it's tough to sort of have an entire sense of just how bad things were. But even 10 years ago, the cohorts who graduated from graduate school and got PhDs versus the cohort that got tenure track offers was already sort of not favoring white men. So I don't know, something like 50% of PhD holders were white men. They were only 30 something percent of tenure track offers. You go further, and if you especially you can't look at every college, but you look at the elite colleges and you just see between 2015 and 2024, this drop off that is sort of insane, where humanities departments hire 60 people as assistant professors and three of them are white men, even though the sort of graduate school cohort is 30 to 40%. And you see that pretty much across the board. There is an interesting corollary to that which I found, which is it seems that this did not apply as much to non American white men for, I think, several reasons. One was that they kind of exist outside of the American culture war and seem a little less threatening if you're on a tenure committee. That's what a couple academics told me. But also that the federal government does not classify foreign academics on a work visa as having a race. So a school that was eager to sort of trumpet that its new hires were X diverse, this would not count against them. And I think you see a lot of the people who did get jobs who were white men actually ended up being European or Canadian or Australian.
- [19:24]
B
There's an interesting corollary to that, by the way, which is that non white people who are not born and raised US citizens often did not count for purposes of diversity either. And so I know a number of stories where highly qualified non white candidates were passed over. And often they were told very openly, if not perhaps officially, that the dean wouldn't let us hire you because you wouldn't count towards the diversity quota. So there's something sort of strange where non Americans existed sort of outside of this system. Now, one of the arguments you make is that some of the effects of this was hidden because of the generational effect. And one obvious counter argument to everything you're saying is to say, well, but look at the university presidents, look at the head of the studios, look at the showrunners, look at a lot of the people at the top of these fields, and a lot of them do continue to be white men, right? So explain your argument for why it is that this affected one generation so strongly. But if you sort of had your foot in the door by 2013, 2014, if you're already part of the system, then perhaps it didn't affect you in quite the same way.
- [20:39]
A
I think that, I mean, it seems fairly obvious, but I guess this was my central insight that hadn't been sort of talked about before is that this diversity stuff was, I wouldn't say entirely costless, but mostly costless to older white men who had already existed within these institutions. Most institutions aren't trying to hire full professors or deans without experience. You're not going to suddenly get a pipeline that's much different than exists for people who are 55, 60, 65 years old. That's the pipeline that exists. You're going to hire pretty much out of that pipeline. What you're doing is a lot of hiring at the lower levels, and that's where the bulk of the preferences end up going. So it doesn't, you know, you're not suddenly, you know, the fact that Martin Scorsese is still working does not get me a job in Hollywood. It also doesn't even make me feel seen. He's, you know, almost 90 years old, but no one's gonna tell him to stop making movies because he's a white man. So, you know, for that just takes that spot is just another way of people saying, well, look at all the white men who are still at the top. And they are still at the top. It was not something that evenly affected cohorts. You can only really see the details of who it affected when you really dig into the sort of younger, more hireable people.
- [22:09]
B
And that's what's fascinating about some of the numbers you present. I mean, one of the weird upshots of that is that each group can sort of find reasons to feel aggrieved. I'm not saying that means that each group has equally good reason to feel aggrieved. Right? But. But young white men can say, look, I'm being systematically disfavored in a lot of these job applications. I can see, you know, perhaps if it's just me, then I would have doubts about how good I am at this. Right. But if I see that, you know, none of my, you know, white cohort members in this fellowship program or this PhD program or this kind of incubator for an arts job are getting jobs and all of the other ones are getting jobs, well, you know, perhaps there's this very strong set of preferences going on here. And of course, you know, the people who want to say that there continues to be this extreme discrimination against minority groups and so on, say, well, look at the people who are at the top. You know, this is all made up. And so one of the strange things which I think helps to explain some of the racial polarization over the last 10 years and just some of the deep rancor, you know, in our society is that everybody can run to a narrative where they're the aggrieved person. And the downstream effect of these schemes is just that everything turns from individual merit based decisions into these kind of group based claims at having been disfavored. And the sense that the only way to get a fair shake is to organize around the level of your group in order to fight for better treatment for members of your group.
- [23:51]
A
I mean, I think that's definitely fair. And I think the thing is, people do look at these institutions and they do still see a lot of white male faces. And I don't know the way around that. Sort of like guillotine in a revolution. So, you know, you're left with the situation where you can say, okay, we're going to stop discriminating now. We're going to do our best to just be fair, knowing full well that can only ever be imperfect at best. But we should try. Or you're left saying, you know what, we should just continue this cycle ad infinitum forever. And just. And I obviously come down on like, we should just try. You know, I think millennials, at least for the most part, we were like really believed this sort of racial, gender based equality. We were all going to be given equal chances. We understood some people had legs up, some people didn't. But overall, I think we really believed it in a way that I'm not sure previous generations did. And I think what the DEI stuff did was disabuse us of that in a way that has been ultimately pretty poisonous for our politics.
- [25:04]
B
What do you think has happened to the people who were impacted by that? I assume that obviously there's going to be a huge range of responses, depending on personality, on political predilection, perhaps on other factors in people's lives. But you could imagine this going all the way from sort of denial and the sense that you have to keep being a good ally and up to the kind of, if I need to be sacrificed for the sake of a broader good, then so be it. Two people who presumably have turned pretty strongly to the right because they feel that, hey, I was up for creating equal opportunities, I was up for giving up any unhealthy advantages. But. But if this is turning into outright discrimination against me and I actually just don't stand a fair chance anymore, I'm going to grab onto anybody who promises to give me a fair shake. How do you think this has influenced the kind of politics of a younger generation?
- [26:10]
A
I think it certainly has affected the politics of younger white men. I think you can see that in the polling. You can see that in, you know, if you look at, like, who the, you know, the alt right anons were all. Were. They were all disaffected academics who couldn't get jobs. You know, like, if you had given Bronze Age pervert a chair at the University of Chicago, I don't think he'd be writing what he's writing. I mean, that's sort of the most extreme example. But, you know, just in terms of my friends, most of whom honestly are still sort of, you know, reluctant Democrats, like, there's no more. No one believes in it anymore. No one is sort of in. In. I don't know any white men my age who are into politics in the way that Maybe we were 10 or 20 years ago. There's no idealism left in it. There's, okay, maybe I will reluctantly vote for this party that promises to disadvantage me, or I'll reluctantly vote for the other guy who won't. But I don't. I just see, like, a complete vibe shift in the way formerly liberal white men, like, interact with the political world.
- [27:24]
B
Yeah. And what's interesting, by the way, is that that vibe shift really is broader in the younger generation, and I think it's obviously particularly strong for a particular reason among white men. A lot of white men you're talking about are probably in the 30s or early 40s. The people who were hopeful to break into those professions and now perhaps have recognized that they're unlikely to and that figuring out how to deal with that disappointment and with the resentment that also might come with that. I teach a lot of younger students and the very, very diverse bunch And I'm finding in the classroom that this sort of we used to have this term that has fallen out of use and out of favor. And part of it is that it sort of started to sound a little bit like you're an angry uncle sort of shouting at Thanksgiving table. But part of it is that I think the actual underlying phenomenon has gone away. And that's the social justice warrior. Right. I think there was a moment when there was a cohort of young people who fought themselves as warriors in the cause of social justice. This was their cause. They were revolutionaries of sorts. They wanted to impose this on society. You always felt when you were teaching, there was a couple of students, at least many students were lovely, but there was a couple of students who were there as social justice warriors. And you're going to say something that broke the ethos of that they were going to try and make life difficult for you. And I'm just struck by the extent to which I feel that that has evaporated over the last few years, to which for a lot of young students, I see now a lot of these ideas are like what the elementary school teachers taught them and what the middle school teachers taught them and what the high school teachers taught them and what they kind of knew they were supposed to parrot a little bit on the college application, but it's not the thing that they own. And they have a kind of, you know, cynicism about it, the way that students tend to have cynicism about the thing they're taught. Which doesn't mean, by the way, that they don't believe it. Right. It doesn't mean that they have, like, a fundamental systemic critique of it. Some of them do, but many of them don't. But it just feels like, yeah, yeah, these are the talking points. These are the stuff we're supposed to say. And it's sort of gone away more broadly. So do you think that sort of like a larger cultural shift, I mean, I guess like the downstream effect of the much cited vibe shift, or does it have a different, you know, timbre for the white men in the 30s and 40s that humors you're writing about in this article and this broader generation of young people who just don't share the fervor of a great awakening anymore?
- [29:51]
A
I would say that I can't speak to what sort of Gen Z or younger really think. I don't interact with them that much, but I think there still are among millennials, plenty of true believers in this stuff. And I think that there's still people who every time it's like, white man bad kind of stuff. I remember just being at a party in Los Angeles shortly after the fires, and I was talking with, like a couple of gay men about how terrible Karen Bass had been. And this like, white woman our age just starts shouting at us that, like, you know, how dare we attack the black woman? And, you know, it did feel like she was fighting this sort of insane rear guard action from 2020, but it's still there. You know, this is. It's still ambiently in the atmosphere, I think. I don't think it's over, especially among. I think millennials are kind of bifurcating in terms of how they think about these things.
- [30:55]
B
So you're saying it's still there. What about the actual institutions? Right. So. Some woman shouting at the party is still a true believer. Institutions both are slow to change. I mean, once something has become a kind of ingrained set of practices and there's particular vehicles for this, particular fellowship programs that either implicitly or quite explicitly are reserved for particular groups and so on and so forth. But as we've seen over the last 10 years, when the wind shift, American elites are also pretty fast in changing the sale. I was struck by the fact that I just happened to glance a few weeks ago at the New York Times list of best books of 2025, and eyeballing it like four or five of the 10 books were written by white men, I'm pretty sure I haven't done the exercise. You probably have, Jacob, or perhaps you have. I'm pretty sure you can go through the last 10 years of lists of the New York Times and you wouldn't have that high a share of white men as you did now. I don't think that it's a coincidence that that was after the victory of Donald Trump, even though the New York Times is not like Donald Trump, I bet that nobody involved in this decision has liking of Donald Trump, and yet his election somehow changed quite plausibly, I think who was on that list and made it possible to put people on that list that previously perhaps people would have said, well, we can have one or two, but four seems a little bit much. Why don't we drop a couple of those things? Is that indication of change or do you think that change is not really happening?
- [32:37]
A
I think there is some vibe, shifty change. And, you know, for instance, the showrunner I spoke to basically said Hollywood is more or less pretending the last 10 years didn't happen. The policy now is sort of back to 2012 rules which is, you know, hire who you want, don't make it an all white mail room and embarrass us. But other than that, like fine, whatever you want. I think in media, a friend who has a friend at the New York Times told me that the sense is that they went too hard on the wokeness stuff and are dialing it back and are ready to hire say white men again, that they're not obsessed with their diversity statistics. I think that they will soon return to some form of more meritocratic hiring. I think media also has been self correcting in a way because a lot of people have, who haven't gotten jobs, have started their own things and are able to move on and create new things. The one sort of holdout that I think will be very difficult to dislodge and that I still get getting sent job ads all the time for academia. I think academia might completely be lost. There are still job ads. In 2026, someone sent me an ad from Mount Holyoke that was basically three paragraphs all to say white men need not apply in using all of the traditional. We want diverse candidates who have experience teaching diversity. Ideally you're teaching literature, you'll have experience with Latinx literature or women's literature, just a bunch of ways. They're hiring an adjunct professor to teach creative writing, but they clearly do not want it to be a white man and are advertising it. And I think that, that I think academia is full of at this point, given the people who did get tenure over the last 10 years is full of true believers. And I think it will be very difficult to sort of reinstall some sort of normal pipeline there. The other industries I think are slowly going to try to pretend nothing happened while inching back towards normalcy.
- [34:59]
B
So a couple of thoughts on academia, which is obviously the field that I know the best in, you know, in, in this conversation. The first is that, you know, undoubtedly there was illegal hiring processes over the last 10 or 15 years. I've never been involved in one, thankfully, and I've never been involved in the hiring process where I had to fight against doing illegal things. But I have heard things mentioned casually by friends and colleagues at other institutions that make that very, very clear. And these were not just legal, you know, on the, you know, terms that apply after the recent Supreme Court ruling about affirmative action. These were, you know, would have been illegal at any point in, in American history in the last 50 years. Right. You know, just straight out saying we're not going to consider white candidates and so on. You know, as well as in some fields, gender, other preferences. You know, I. I guess I would argue that in academia it really depends what institutions you're looking at and what fields you're looking at. You know, a humanities department in a liberal arts college, and this is implicitly what you were talking about, creative writing at Mount Holyoke. I'm very willing to believe that you're right both about the fact that this is continuing to be ongoing and that the people who were in those positions are such true believers that it's going to be very, very hard to course correct. I guess my hunch would be that in a lot of the hard sciences, people went along to get along, and certainly there was also probably illegal hiring processes. But the moment that the imperative went away, a lot of people think, thank God, now we can go back to hiring the most competent engineer in the social sciences, which I know the best. There's a few true believers, but I think the disciplinary standards, especially at the research universities, have actually held and I could imagine there being some real improvement there as well. The other thing I'll just say, which is a broader point I've been thinking about, is that it's really good to have a market. This is an obvious thing, but one of the problems with, say, an academic journal when there's really strong ideological pressure, is there's no end customer that can force a course correction. It's all one community. Your tenure depends on being able to publish in these journals. It's a small community of people who do peer review. It's a small number of editors. They all elect each other in complicated mechanisms. And so once it goes off the rails, there's really no forcing it. Back with the New York Times, I was very critical of the New York Times for a number of years. I still have my regular complaints about it, but I think there has been a real course correction. I'm much more comfortable with sort of trusting the New York Times to convey, at least on most things, a basically factually correct view of the world and a little bit of a variety of opinion about how to think about the world today than three or four years ago. I mean, not that it's everything perfect today, but it's a difference of night and day. And I think a lot of that is that the New York Times has readers. And every time that they open an article up for comment, the predominant view of a commentators of the New York Times, kind of center left liberal. They hate Trump, but they also hate the woke stuff. And you see that in a lot of things Right. And I think they started to realize that when they went too far on the woke stuff, they were losing customers, they were losing subscribers, people tuned out. And so there's just like a course correction mechanism in an industry like media that is absent in some other fields, which I think are going to sort of be impacted by this for longer.
- [38:50]
A
I think that's fair. I think academia also has become a monoculture, obviously, in other ways in a lot of fields. And until that breaks, I'm not sure that sort of any of the rest of it can. So academia has a lot of very tough problems, I think ahead for it, you know, and I think one of the things that I've just been. I was thinking about is, you know, obviously immigration, migration is a big issue. I don't think I couldn't until there's like an academic class taught at Harvard, Yale, Princeton about the pros and cons of immigration that treat, say, Christopher Caldwell with respect as, like some. As something to be grappled with. I don't think academia or the soft, you know, say the soft sciences will be past whatever they are right now.
- [39:42]
B
I mean, I guess so. I mean, I haven't taught that class, but I've taught a class in populism in which I certainly assign readings that both argue against current immigration regimes and forms of immigration and that, for example, make the argument that the gap of cultural representation between popular views and what political leads want is one of the big reasons for Y verse one. And I've been struck by the fact, a certainly that none of my colleagues have sort of made trouble for me for that. Some students agree, many students disagree, but that it didn't feel like, oh, I'm going out in a limb here teaching this. They respectfully engaged it. And I teach a variety of text and a variety of minutes in the classroom. And I always hope that some people are going to agree with the text and some people are going to disagree with a text. And this is true of this text as much as of anyone any other text.
- [40:37]
A
No, I mean, that's great. Hopefully things keep looking up there.
- [40:49]
B
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. In the rest of this conversation, we talk about how to get out of this mess. Is there some set of institutions, is there some set of ideas, some set of shared ideals that would allow us to get America to roughly where I think a majority of Americans want us to be, in a place in which we don't discriminate against members of minority groups, but we also don't turn every hiring process into a question of obeying implicit quotas, or turn our politics as a whole into the zero sum conflict between different identitarian blocs? I also asked Jakob a little bit about his personal feelings about this. How is he balancing the disappointment he feels in the career that he didn't get to have with a determination not to devote his life to bitterness? To listen to those parts of the conversation, to support this podcast, to make it possible for us to do the work we do here, please go to writing Yashamonk. Listen writing.yashamuk.com Listen.