Sean Blyth

I experienced all of this firsthand, having entered graduate school in 2013. By 2020, I watched non-white colleagues with CVs a tiny fraction as strong as mine absolutely swamped with interview requests and job offers, while I couldn't even secure a preliminary phone interview. I saw a non-white, female biologists with zero peer-reviewed publications receive a tenure-track job offer from an Ivy League university within minutes of defending her PhD thesis. This would have been utterly incomprehensible in years prior, as such positions are typically only given to well-established academics with a long and very high impact publication record. To call this demoralizing would be a dramatic understatement. Combine my sex and race with the fact that I refused to write the woke DEI statements that most universities had begun requiring, due to my strong moral opposition to DEI ideology, and landing a tenure-track position at a respectable university began to feel like a pipe dream. I also watched many exceptionally smart and talented white male undergraduates abandon their aspirations of becoming academic scientists. They understood what was happening and chose career paths where success would still be tied to competence rather than sex and race.

Isn’t it ironic how Elon’s Starlink wants to drop free, unlimited, super-fast internet into 5,000 rural South African schools, but SA’s bureaucracy insists on saying no. I think the 2.4 million kids in SA without proper access would benefit immensely. Starlink is even putting R500 million (about $29.4 million USD) on the table themselves, no cost to the government or the schools. All they’re asking? A normal licence to operate in SA. Here’s the crazy part: because of the 30% black-ownership rule (B-BBEE), ICASA keeps saying “nope.” Starlink says, “Cool, we won’t sell shares, but we’ll just give you this giant school project instead,” using the same Equity Equivalent programme that Microsoft, Amazon and IBM already got approved with. The Communications Minister is literally begging ICASA to accept it. Neighbours like Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique are already connected and loving it. Yet here we are, end of 2025, and those satellites are just flying over South Africa doing nothing while kids in the bundus still can’t pursue their dreams. Come on, South Africa, don’t be the only country turning down free internet for millions of learners. The irony, to me, is that Elon was born in South Africa, the very place that is telling him no to such a generopus offer!