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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29463 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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It’s kind of funny to imagine some very average white man STEM PhD marrying a black woman STEM PhD and then when she gets offered a bounty in tenure-track associate professor roles, she can demand that if Stanford wants the diversity cred of a black woman physics professor (they do have one, but I’m sure they would like more), they have to hire her mediocre husband who would be unfathomably lucky to get a tenure-track position at a small, unheard of state school.

I wonder if they’d take that deal.

There are actually a few cases in which a white man might be hypergamous by default (as opposed to because of the specifics of the person in question) in marrying a black woman. One example is government supplier contracting, where it’s already very common to put one’s construction business in one’s wife’s name.

I imagine that in such a case they would offer the husband a teaching-focused non-tenure track role like lecturer (I realize that lecturer means something different in the UK).

If the candidate has a choice between MIT and Stanford tenure track and she says that she really wants hubby to have an academic role with a long-term future, maybe they do?

My guess is that they still wouldn't, though it would depend on exactly how mediocre the husband was. But if he really would be lucky to get a tenure-track position at a small, unheard-of state school (as you said) then I would be pretty surprised if Stanford would really be willing to hire him to a tenure-track research position.

The funniest part is that if we look at the actual talent levels in purely physics the white husband might actually be the better one in this scenario. Affirmative action reaches truly obscene proportions at the top level like stanford physics professors (this makes sense, the father right you go on the bell curve the more a 1 SD difference in means affects the availability ratio)

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