Sex- and Race-Based Discrimination at SOUTH COLLEGE

Mick McGrath  August 22, 2024

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In the General Education department at South College in Knoxville, TN, women and People of Color (POC) enjoy preferential hiring. I should know. I taught there for nearly three years.

 

In my final year at South College, I applied for three promotions, and each time, I lost the promotion to a woman—two white women, one Woman of Color (WOC). I told myself not to raise hell, but didn’t I have 13 years of teaching experience in higher education; a terminal degree from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; and a lengthy list of publications, which includes a novel? And had my female counterparts published, or even written, a book? Does South College leadership know how difficult writing a book is, never mind publishing one? Need I remind leadership that a novel evinces hard work, determination, perseverance, etc.? And, while I’m at it, didn’t I have 18 months of leadership experience? And had my female competitors been volunteering in the park every Tuesday, feeding Knoxville’s homeless? And were my female counterparts as beloved by South College students as I was? And hadn’t I received praise from leadership regularly?

I was incurably suspicious.

I then discovered a 2020 podcast featuring Dr. Margaret Crowe saying, “We actively try to create other opportunities for women.” Dr. Crowe is South College’s Director of Faculty Development, and in a 2023 podcast, she talks about helping women into leadership roles, especially Women of Color (WOC). At one point, she tells her viewers to, “Sponsor one woman we know we need to move into these leadership positions.”

One day, when I texted Dr. Crowe, telling her how demotivated I was feeling, having lost another promotion despite all my hard work—most recently, I’d lost a promotion to Professor Jeela Taylor, a WOC—Dr. Crowe responded, saying someone at South College had been trying to get Professor Jeela Taylor into a leadership role for some time now. I couldn’t believe Dr. Crowe would divulge this, but there it was—apparently, someone in South College’s management structure had abandoned meritocratic hiring and was simply appointing women (one woman, anyway) to positions of power.

In another podcast, Dr. Crowe talks about capturing institutions and changing their hiring processes, no doubt so they can install more women and People of Color (POC) into positions of power, artificially narrowing the income gap between men and women, whites and blacks—gaps that can be explained innocently, according to writers like Christina Hoff Sommers and Thomas Sowell. Dr. Crowe mentions “covert action” twice during the podcast. At one point, she even worries that executives might be listening. She says this is going to be a multi-generational plan. “We’re coming,” Dr. Crowe says, a la the Students for a Democratic Society of the 1960s. 

Dr. Crowe is an activist, not an academic.

Nor is Dr. Holly Paul, former Dean of General Education, a true academic.

Academics, lest we forget, are supposed to value the truth-seeking enterprise, which requires looking at multiple perspectives. But try explaining that to Dr. Paul, who once said during a professional development event, “If you disagree with equity, South College isn’t the place for you.”

That sentiment is unbefitting of the academic—far from welcoming multiple perspectives in the spirit of disinterested truth seeking, Dr. Paul effectively told faculty, Agree with me, or you're fired.

Dr. Paul knows I despise DEI. It should come as no surprise, then, that she once told my supervisor, Mr. Taylor Wars, that if I was ever selected for a leadership position, she would intervene.

That’s why I was stagnant at South College—in addition to being white and male, I am unapologetically opposed to DEI.

All those years of hotplates… All those years of space heaters and Ramen noodles and tabletop dishwashers… All those years of cutting my own hair for a lack of money… I remember one year I lived in a 300-square-foot efficiency and slept on a futon that hurt my back so bad I had to “trank” myself every night just to get some sleep. All those years of keeping my head up, of promising myself I’d get somewhere if I just kept at it. All those years of telling myself it was hard now but the future would be beautiful, that it was a long road but when I finally got there, I’d make a good living and I’d be able to do it ‘til I croaked, since teaching is hardly manual labor. All those years I struggled. Only to be told now, in 2024, I can’t make my way in academia because I'm white and I'm male and I'm conservative—never mind that academia is supposed to be a free marketplace of ideas.

Surely, there are others like me. In fact, I know there are. The American Enterprise Institute says nearly half of young men now feel they face discrimination, and recently, an organization called Faculty, Alumni & Students Opposed to Racial Preferences (FASORP) filed a lawsuit accusing Northwestern University of discriminating against white men.

But, despite all of this, it seems white men are still afraid to speak up. And who could blame them, actually? When I raised concerns about preferential hiring at South College, I was fired. "Punish one to deter a hundred!" said Chairman Mao. 

 

Of course, leadership will claim they fired me for not going up the chain of command with my concerns about preferential hiring. There’s just one problem with this—I did.

In late 2023, after losing two promotions for which I felt I was more than qualified—one to Professor Jeela Taylor and another to Professor Crystal Ellwood, who’d been with the company for a whopping six weeks—I met with my immediate supervisor, Mr. Taylor Wars, and his immediate supervisor, Dr. Shane Stricker, in a conference room in the library. I told them I thought I was being treated unfairly, given my experience, my education, and my accomplishments. While I did not emphasize race or sex at that time, it is disingenuous for leadership to claim I did not go up with the chain of command with my concerns. 

 

Leadership will also claim they fired me because of my “Open to Work” status on LinkedIn. That’s strange. Because at the time, Professor Jeela Taylor was also “Open to Work” on LinkedIn. And Angela Charles, a professor of sociology, is "Open to Work" even now as I write this. And, no, last I checked, these women have not been fired.   

Young men who know, as I do, that they are victims of sex- and race-based discrimination should be emboldened, not apprehensive, since the law is on their side. They should find each other in the workplace and, if need be, take their concerns to the top of the pyramid. They cannot fire all of us.