The pandemic lockdown has turned me into a podcast listener. One of my favorites is GLOP Culture, with Jonah Goldberg, Rob Long, and John Podhoretz. In a recent conversation about woke bullying at the New York Times and Slate, Long made an interesting observation. There are too many wannabe journalists chasing too few jobs. What if wokeness is simply an expression of careerism, the young finding a way to make room for themselves by pushing out the old? A recent wokey article in Architect magazine, the official journal of the AIA, approvingly describes the dean of the Princeton school of architecture characterizing professional licensure as “a gargantuan roadblock to a racially and otherwise diverse and equitable field.” Since architecture is a zero-sum game—if you get the job then I don’t—I’m not sure what “equitable” means. In any case, the architectural profession needs more roadblocks, not fewer. I once asked a colleague at the Wharton School why his MBA grads earned two or three times more than my architecture students who had actually spent a year longer in graduate school. “Your guys actually like what they do, so why should people pay them for it,” he said jokingly. More seriously, he pointed out that there were simply too many architects. When I graduated there were 6 Canadian schools of architecture; today there are 12. In the United States there are 121 accredited programs; more than 5,000 graduates every year. Too many architects; too little work.
