The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:
In March of 2020, shortly after my final interview for a tenure-track position in creative nonfiction at Mississippi State University, I received a note of welcome from the department chair — an affable man named Dan, with whom I’d been in consistent contact throughout the process
Things changed:
two weeks later, the search was upended by a complaint of reverse racial discrimination
Why?
Over the course of interviewing at Mississippi State, as I peeked down the rabbit hole of blog posts and Reddit threads devoted to the higher-education job market (including my favorite, the retrospective of those who earned a job the previous year), I became aware that I was an unconventional candidate — a walk-on to a team of aspiring professors who had been training for this moment their entire academic lives. Though I had published widely, I did not yet have a book under contract. I held an M.F.A. from a well-respected program, but for the years prior, I was a union-card-holding public-school teacher with unrelenting stacks of student papers and an alarm that buzzed at 5:30 a.m.
An article worth you time.
