Making the decision to walk away from the career path that I had always thought was for me was not an easy choice. At the beginning of this academic year, the country and world was still smoldering from the aftermath of the BLM and Antifa riots. During a regular weekly meeting for my university job, we were instructed on how to be anti-racist and that the new definition of racism that we were to accept as truth entailed that all white people are and always will be racist. I will not recount the entire story, as I have chronicled the events of that excruciating hour of my life in another post that you can read at your leisure.
I saw the writing on the wall, and I made the decision then and there to jump ship. Academia was no longer safe for me, and I was not about to throw my integrity and morals in the trash in order to propagate and participate in such rhetoric. When I told this story to other people, including academics in other parts of the country, I was met with statements like, “This will never take root,” or “People will see this for the sham it is”. They scolded me for denying what seemed to be my purpose in life over something they deemed to be silly and trivial. Needless to say, I was not swayed by there condemnation. As time has passed and events have unfolded, it has become clear that Critical Race Theory had its roots in academia for longer than we have realized, and it has spread in record time. Two personal anecdotes over the past week have made it clear that I was right to be worried and that I made the right decision to leave academia.
First, I received an email from the graduate school of my university alerting me to a new scholarship opportunity. Normally, I do not pay attention to emails that come from the graduate school, as they are constantly spamming us with useless information about events I do not care to participate in. But this time, the subject line caught my eye. It read “New Scholarship Opportunity for Critical Race Theory Scholars”. While I have done research on Critical Race Theory and know that its origins go back several decades, it was still regarded as radical and fringe “research” until extremely recently. The fact that a state run university will now be offering money to students for the expressed purpose that they study, advance, and propagate this divisive and damaging theory that is rooted in historical conjecture is astounding. This is the first step to the creation of a new Critical Race Theory department or inter-departmental program complete with its own degree title, specified professors, and accompanying coursework.
The second, and perhaps more alarming, anecdote centers around the income and job holdings of student employees. With university registration down in a COVID and hopefully soon-to-be post-COVID world, the university has seen vast decreases in revenue. They must then pass on that shortfall to the departments and programs by cutting their budgets. On top of this, the blue state in which I currently reside recently passed a minimum wage increase. That means that student employees’ wages must go up at the same time the program’s budget has unprecedentedly shrunk, which you can guess does not bode well for the job security of employees. All of this was conveyed during our weekly meeting through a haphazardly assembled PowerPoint presentation simply entitled “Budget”– almost as if they didn’t want to spoil the coming plot-twist. In an overly dramatic scene of emotions, the head of the program for which I work fought back tears as she delivered the news to the undergraduate employees that many of them would be losing their jobs next semester. The blows to the students did not stop there. As she changed slides in this inocuous-turned-grim presentation, the two most important words from the woke-ist manifesto were emblazoned on the screen: “equity” and “inclusion”. The lesbian Latina boss, an intersectionalist’s wet dream, informed us all that the students who would be able to keep their jobs were to be chosen in a manner that was both equitable and inclusive.
I should have unmuted my microphone and told all of the white student employees to start job hunting now. They might as well have just been fired. However, as the heartless frigid bitch that I am, I literally started laughing out loud. I’ve gotten to know these students as I have worked with them. I see their Marxist values. I hear their victimhood mentalities. They champion and push for things like substantial minimum wage increases and Critical Race Theory implementation. Now that they have the things they thought were right and virtuous, the rug has been pulled out from under them. They unleashed the beast; they can’t be surprised it devoured them. I can say it is a damn shame, but I cannot say that I feel one iota of sympathy for them. You reap what you sow, and I am steadfast and elated with my choice not to be a worker in that field anymore.