University of Texas-Austin

Faculty at University of Texas-Austin are alarmed by the number of faculty of color denied tenure this year

Key points from the article (all quoted from the original):

Thirty-two professors in the College of Liberal Arts expressed alarm regarding the large number of professors of color denied tenure across multiple departments this year.

The tenure committee denied six of 14 assistant liberal arts professors who applied for tenure awards in 2012, said Gail A. Davis, the College of Liberal Arts’ director of human resources. Because of privacy concerns, the racial background of assistant professors who are denied tenure cannot be disclosed, Davis said.

In the Center for Asian American Studies, 23 of 36 teaching faculty are not tenure-track.

This last point is particularly alarming. Without tenured faculty, this program could disappear in just a few years.

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Macalester College

Wang Ping is suing Macalester College for claiming that they discriminated against her when she applied for promotion.

Court documents note that a white, male colleague in the same department also applied for promotion around both times Wang applied, and was granted the promotions on both occasions, despite the fact he had fewer published works and less service to the community. There were also documented procedural violations in the promotion process.

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Diversity from the Margins

I’ll be writing more about this gem from bell hooks’ Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics for a brick and mortar publication. She offers a mindset worth holding tight to, regardless of where you are in your academic career. We get tugged in so many directions, by advice that, in myriad ways, tells us to somehow be different than who and what we are, just so we can become part of institutions that were designed to exclude us.

Don’t do too much service. Publish here not there. Specialize in this but also do this other new thing over here so you can get a job. Blend in but don’t sell out. Fit in but don’t compromise. Always professionalize. Be a role model but transcend whatever subject position makes those around you the most uneasy.  And that’s nothing compared to the demands we place on one another. Be Colored like this. Feminist like that. GLBandT in this particular space. Sign up; don’t sell out.

No wonder so many of us are making ourselves sick.

And maybe this advice comes from a good place, but mostly I think it comes from well-meaning folks trying to replicate themselves or validate their own experiences. Worse, it seems to want to make the people change instead of their institutions. It seems to start from the premise that being on the outside, on the margins is always bad.

bell hooks begs to differ:

Marginality [is] much more than a site of deprivation; in fact…it is also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance. It was this marginality that I was naming as a central location for the production of counter-hegemonic discourse that is not just found in words but in habits of being and the way one lives. As such, I was not speaking of marginality one wishes to lose—to give up or surrender as part of moving into the center—but rather of a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist. It offers to one the possibility of radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds.

Put more lyrically, Lucille Clifton asks in her poem “won’t you celebrate with me”

“what did i see to be except myself?”

The work, of course, is to know who that “self” actually is absent the destructive anxieties that plague all ambitious academics, but particularly academics of color.  What I see in hooks’ argument is a call for those of us on the margins to be funambulists, to be tightrope walkers who stay above the trials of marginalization, to work and write from that place and to embrace it.

*hooks is quoted in “Balancing the Passion for Activism with the Demands of Tenure: One Professional’s Story from Three Perspectives.” Few, et al. Feminist Formations 19 (3: 2007) 47-66.

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Lessons from the Collection; or, My 2013 Diversity To Do List

I don’t go in much for New Year’s resolutions (who does anymore?), but I do love making “To Do” lists. I read once that we are more likely to finish tasks if we write them down, and so here is my 2013 Diversity To Do List.

I’ve culled it from the conversations I had in 2012 with faculty and administrators from different parts of the country about diversity and tenure.   These discussions move beyond the challenges (and successes) in the personal narratives collected in the anthology and towards possible strategies and solutions.  They usually started with an invitation to give a talk about diversity and higher education and then meandered a bit as we discussed what such a talk might offer in practical terms (I want do more than preach to the choir or offer trite platitudes).

So, from time to time in the coming year, I’ll be taking up the issues listed below in this space.  I hope they will offer thoughts and suggestions along the lines of this post I wrote about double-diversity and Derrick Bell last year.  I certainly don’t have all of the answers (especially about geographic obstacles to diversity), but I list them now with the hopes that those with more experience and expertise will make recommendations about how to approach these topics, suggest relevant readings, or comment on my thoughts and suggestions:

• Improving the Post-Doc Diversity Fellowship

• How to prepare a search committee to (actually) hire for diversity

• What faculty of color want and need from their white colleagues

• Geographic obstacles—how to build diversity outside of cities where faculty of color tendcluster

• Most common mistakes departments make when hiring faculty of color

• What does good mentoring look like? Or, more specifically, what do junior faculty of color need?

• Diversity through curricular revision; or, the yeoman’s work of bringing in a specialist in ethnic studies (of any kind)

• How to use social media to bolster diversity (does Digital Humanities as a discipline offer a useful model to adapt?)

• How to start a conversation about diversity in your department

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Diversty Round-up: The 2012 List of Books on Diversity

I’ll confess that I always feel a little pit in my stomach when I see that a new book about diversity in higher education goes to print.  I started this project several years ago, and it was slow, difficult work getting it all together, and now it is making the slow journey to publication. It’s difficult to hurry up and wait.  I worry that the narratives I’ve compiled will seem like old news.

Then I remember that an issue as complex and deeply entrenched as this one requires multiple essays, articles, anthologies, and special journal issues.  The goal isn’t to be first but to expand and extend the discussion (it should probably be this in all areas of research but this is especially the case when it comes to diversity).   And I remind myself that more than professional advancement or ego boosts, we need as broad a community as possible to be as informed as possible about this issue.

This is not only a list books that came out this year (Presumed Incompetent) but of books that are important to this conversation that I returned to this year as I finished writing the introduction to the collection.  These are books I looked to as I planned the anthology, and they are books that I think everyone should read—especially white academics who want to do more than just say that they value diversity (or offer the earnest head nod whenever the issue comes up).    And I should say that I am very glad that colleagues in my home department are reading some of these books with me and doing the work to develop and maintain meaningful diversity.

If you know of more good books on the subject, please send the titles my way

(NB: Descriptions are from websites about the books where available).

If you’re going to start anywhere, start with: Deborah Gray White, ed. Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower.  Gender and American Culture Series. (U of North Caroline, P.,  2008).

Engagingly written, Telling Histories should appeal to multiple audiences. Taken together, these stories underscore the firm hold of racism, sexism, and classism within American society in general and the academy and history departments specifically. While presenting and often resolving theoretical and methodological questions, the book not only is valuable for graduate students but is also a significant contribution to the field and should facilitate bringing down barriers, both within and outside the academy, that constrain the professorial ranks, stifle voices, and preclude diverse academicians and scholars from writing and teaching without restraint. The contributors’ content is largely descriptive but it also provides analysis about the progression of scholarly trends and instruction in historiography to historians at all professional stages.

Gabriella Gutierrez y Muhs, et al, eds.
Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia (Utah State UP, 2012)

Presumed Incompetent is a pathbreaking account of the intersecting roles of race, gender, and class in the working lives of women faculty of color. Through personal narratives and qualitative empirical studies, more than 40 authors expose the daunting challenges faced by academic women of color as they navigate the often hostile terrain of higher education, including hiring, promotion, tenure, and relations with students, colleagues, and administrators. The narratives are filled with wit, wisdom, and concrete recommendations, and provide a window into the struggles of professional women in a racially stratified but increasingly multicultural America.

Evans, Stephanie.
Black Women in the Ivory Tower: 1850-1954
(UP Florida 2007).

Evans chronicles the stories of African American women who struggled for and won access to formal education, beginning in 1850, when Lucy Stanton, a student at Oberlin College, earned the first college diploma conferred on an African American woman. In the century between the Civil War and the civil rights movement, a critical increase in black women’s educational attainment mirrored unprecedented national growth in American education. Evans reveals how black women demanded space as students and asserted their voices as educators–despite such barriers as violence, discrimination, and oppressive campus policies–contributing in significant ways to higher education in the United States. She argues that their experiences, ideas, and practices can inspire contemporary educators to create an intellectual democracy in which all people have a voice.

Janis Fay, et al, eds.
Racism in the Academy: The New Millennium.  American Anthropological Association. (2012)

The starting point for this study was through the auspices of our professional scholarly society, the American Anthropological Association. In 2007, then-president Alan Goodman appointed a commission charged with two primary responsibilities:
“(1) to collect information in order to better expose how privilege has been maintained in anthropology and the AAA, including but not limited to departments and the academic pipeline and

(2) to develop a comprehensive plan for the Association and for the field of anthropology to increase the ethnic, racial, gender and class diversity of the discipline and organization.”

Baez, Benjamin. 
Affirmative Action, Hate Speech, and Tenure: Narratives About Race and Law in the Academy
. Benjamin Baez (Routledge Falmer 2002).

I like everything that Baez has written on race in higher education. Everything.

Geok-Lin Lim, Shirley et al, eds.
Power, Race, and Gender in  Academe: Strangers in the Tower.  New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1991)

My favorite chapter from this collection is Gunning, Sandra. “Now That They Have Us, What’s the Point?” The Challenge of Hiring to Create Diversity.”

Matthew, Patricia A., ed. 
Written/Unwritten: Tenure and Race in the Humanities (not yet, but I couldn’t resist…)

 

 

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CFP: Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the Americas

Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the Americas

In her landmark study of race and American literature, Playing in the Dark (1992), Toni Morrison argued that literary history has taken for granted a certain set of assumptions, including the understanding that “American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then African Americans in the United States” and that “this presence […] had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture’s literature” (4-5). Morrison’s work provides a thoughtful and insightful study of race in American narrative and has inspired a generation of scholars to continue the study of race and ethnicity in American literature. However, much of this work (but certainly not all, as evidenced by Frederick Luis Aldama’s recent collection Analyzing World Fiction: New Horizons in Narrative Theory [Texas, 2011]) tends to fall outside the scope of formal narrative studies. And just as Susan Lanser’s 1986 ground-breaking article “Toward a Feminist Narratology” has inspired scholars to explore the fruitful possibilities of a feminist narrative theory that engages an intersectional approach to issues related (but not limited to) gender, the editors hope to compile a collection of essays that similarly engages the study of race, ethnicity, and narrative in the Americas, a cultural-geo-political area that we conceive of broadly that is not simply bounded by the nation-state of the U.S. Following Aldama’s collection, we hope to provide a work that encompasses a diversity of voices, subjects, and approaches to the study of narrative, race, and ethnicity.

To that end, we invite proposals for a collection of essays that will examine the intersections of race, ethnicity, and narrative focused on texts produced by authors with cultural ties to the Americas, a region that has seen the widespread sale of African slaves, the decimation of indigenous peoples in the wake of European colonialism, the hybridization of settler-colonials with roots in Spain, and the systematic mistreatment of Asian immigrants, as well as a cultural history that has needed to be ever-mindful of that heritage. It is the belief of the editors that “the Americas” share a unified cultural history, particularly with respect to issues of race and ethnic identity, and that narratives produced by artists in many American nations reflect that shared history. As such, the editors would like this volume to include as many diverse voices, backgrounds, and identities as possible.

We seek proposals for essays that will address the various ways that the formal study of narrative intersects productively with methodologies of critical race studies, post-colonial theory, and general ethnic studies. In other words, following the example set forth by Lanser, how can issues of identity help us better understand the workings of narrative, and how can a formal study of narrative assist us in the study of narrative forms? We seek essays that engage the diversity of possible theoretical approaches, as well as works that explore a multiplicity of ethnic voices and audiences. We do not wish to define what it means to study narrative, race, and ethnicity in the Americas; rather, we hope to provide a starting point for the variety of directions such a study can take.

Proposals for essays should be between 750 and 1000 words and should clearly articulate their theoretical position and identify the narratives to be analyzed. Completed abstracts are due by March 31, 2013 and can be sent to James J. Donahue (donahujj@potsdam.edu), Jennifer Ho (jho@email.unc.edu), or Shaun Morgan (dmorgan@twcnet.edu). We welcome questions or inquiries about this volume prior to this date, as well. Submitters will be notified about the status of their proposals by May 31, 2013 and final essays of 5,000-6,000 words will be due on January 31, 2014.

Although we do not have a formal agreement with a press just yet, an editor for the Ohio State University Press Series on the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative has expressed strong interest in reviewing this collection.

Possible topics (though others are welcome as well) include:
— the interconnections of Critical Race Theory and Narrative Theor(ies)
— the impact of Civil Rights, the American Indian Movement, or other civil rights movements on the production, consumption, or study of narrative(s)
— the intersections of Post-Colonial Theory (as it pertains to literature of the Americas) and the study of narrative
— the use, limitations, or necessary expansions to formalist approaches to the study of narrative(s) produced by People of Color (are concepts such as narrator, implied author, etc. race/ethnicity neutral?)
— are narrative approaches grounded in the study of race and ethnicity methodologically different from narrative approaches grounded in the study of gender or class; and if so, how?
— the necessary additions/revisions/etc. to cognitive and ethical approaches to the study of narrative that considerations of race engender
–the ways in which a study of narrative and race can be useful as a form of anti-racist praxis

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Problem, Plan, Proposal (not necessarily related)

I described twitter to a former graduate student as the place I go to keep up with politics, see what black faculty from around the country are up to, and to keep track of whatever bad shit happens to black folks on any given day.  It’s also one of the best ways to keep up with the latest conversations about diversity and higher education.  There is never time enough to respond to it, especially during the semester, but a few essays, articles, and blog posts have made it to my bookmarks and are worth noting.

A Problem
At heart I’m a numbers girl.  They impress me. Statistics make me feel safe and secure. It doesn’t matter that we can make them say whatever we want them to say; I trust that, in the end, they will bear the truth out.  And so while I planned an anthology that would focus on personal narratives rather than numbers, I’ve been secretly hoping that a study like the one that Julia Jordan-Zachary posted on twitter would pop up.    It’s not news to me or anyone who is paying attention that faculty of color are tenured at a lower rate than their white counterparts, but it’s nice to have numbers.  This study out of USC does a rare thing—offers hard numbers on the tenure status of faculty of color.  While it’s relatively easy to track the demographics of the professoriate, finding numbers about individual institutions’ retentions rates are trickier.

Mai’a K. Davis Cross worked with Jane Junn, a political scientist, to bolster her discrimination suit against the University of Southern California through the magic of data collection and math. Here is what she and her colleague in political science found. From 1998 to 2012:

92 % of white men in the social sciences and humanities were awarded tenure
55% of women and faculty of color* were awarded tenure
81% of white junior faculty (this includes men and women) were awarded tenure
48% of faculty of color promoted to associate professor
66.7% of white women were awarded tenure compared to 40% of Asian-American women

For now, I’ll let the numbers stand for themselves, especially since Cross and Junn were careful to exclude those faculty members who left before coming up for tenure and because Cross’s tenure case sounds like Jane Iwamura’s tenure case. For some, the natural question will be to ask what’s wrong with the faculty of color at USC. In response I’d say that this is exactly the wrong question. The disparity is a clear sign that the problem is not with the faculty but with USC’s review process.

And speaking of allure of numbers and stastics…
It might be a coincidence that a week or so after I asked Jordan-Zachary if there were any hard facts about women in publishing, she posted a link to study that shows how much (or how little) women publish in various fields.

A Plan
Powerhouse Tressie McMillan Cottom edited a heartbreaking collection of stories by African-American women about health in the academy for the Feminist Wire. The essay that intrigued me most was the idea of The Frenemy Project. I’m not crazy about the name, but it does capture the tension that can poison the very necessary relationships between and among academics of color. In some academic utopia black women are natural allies with those who have a lot helping out those who have a little. Absent that, deliberate community building is a necessary and practical truth. I’m lucky to have a small circle of women I trust and rely on, readers who I can show my work to when it’s in its roughest form and sounding boards that keep me mostly balanced. We offer unvarnished critiques of each other’s writing without tearing one another down (even in that subtle way that so many women have mastered oh so well). We fell together in a way that’s possible in Brooklyn and a few other enclaves, where you can’t throw a rock without hitting some smart somebody. It’s tricky in other areas where writers and academics find themselves mostly alone or far from peers and allies. And while this is not a problem that is unique to black women, or women, or academics, or writers, or even people, the stakes are much higher given how poorly women of color are treated in the academy. What I like most about this idea is that women can support one another primarily through a shared interest in their research and teaching. I much prefer this model to the myth of some warm-fuzzy community that requires us all to be friends and “sisters” (or, god forbid, “sistahs”).

A Proposal
Over at the SIUE blog a post considers an interesting question: “The Ta-Nehisi Coats Model; or, What if Universities & Companies had Diversity Plans like The Atlantic?” I don’t know if Coates’ position at The Atlantic is the result of a systematic attempt to diversify the magazine, but it’s important that, as SIUE points out, Coates’ is not only the only black senior editor at the magazine but the only one who doesn’t hail from an elite institution (though they rightly note that he is a product of Howard University’s best traditions):

When elite or high profile universities and companies seek to diversify or practice some form of affirmative action, they often seek out elite people of color to join them.

Some years ago when a leading administrator at a major university was criticized for not hiring any senior black professors in African American literature, the official became defensive and said “No, but we really tried to get Henry Louis Gates, Jr. He was just unwilling to leave Harvard.” The official seemed oblivious to the facts that Gates was hardly the only senior black professor in the country and that searches for black faculty could extend beyond Harvard. Unfortunately, institutions too often compete for only a select group of students and employees with elite credentials.

There’s a whole conversation to be had about the different ways writers are culturally and institutionally credentialed , and hiring someone to teach writing is different than hiring someone to teach history. But the idea that institutions need to broaden where they look for the best and the brightest just makes good sense. It might even lead to lasting diversity if a professor’s training was an actual fit with the hiring department. There’s no use bringing in someone trained for a Research I into a department with a mission that focuses on undergraduate teaching.

Part of the problem is that often institutions are only looking for diversity in the narrowest sense. To put it bluntly, they are looking for colored versions of what they already have. This can certainly lead to diversity of a kind, but it would seem that any organization committed to rigorous intellectual discourse would want as many smart voices at the table as possible and that the definition of “smart” would be flexible and that those voices wouldn’t only come from the Ivies and the Big Tens.

The USC stats are depressing, the need for the Frenemy Project points to a serious problem in the academy, and the truth of it is that few institutions are willing to do the work it takes to find the next big Coates, but what I’m struck by is how, especially in the USC study, the critiques of the academy are coming from within its ranks, using tools learned in its classrooms and tested in its peer-reviewed venues to show its shortcomings. It’s not as exciting or sexy as making revolutionary statements, but it will probably do more to dismantle some persistent barriers.

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In which I panic

I was put the finishing touches on the introduction to the collection when I saw an article in the June 1st New York Times that gave me chills.  It’s about how the already financially beleaguered university systems in California (University of California, California State University, and the community colleges) are facing even more budget cuts if the governor’s tax plan is not passed by voters.

In response to the idiotic screed the Chronicle of Higher Education let Naomi Schaefer Riley post on their website, I had written a sentence that felt a bit strident and panicked:

“I predict that the increased scrutiny on how higher education spends it resources will dovetail with the increasing backlash against ethnic studies and put such programs at risk as institutions determine that they can no longer afford diversity.”

More than being upset by her rant (she has virtually no institutional power and I figured she’d be held to sharp account for being careless and unthinking), I viewed it as an id-ridden version of more muted resistances to ethnic studies.  It seemed to me an expression of the attitudes that threaten the stability of ethnic studies and, by extension, a pretty large swath of faculty of color by people who do have institutional power: faculty who vote on what kind of specialists to hire, personnel committees, deans, provosts, etc.

I was deciding whether or not to leave the strident sentence in when I read The NYTimes piece and, in particular, this sentence:

Jon Coupal, the president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, which strongly opposes the proposed tax increase, said the colleges should do more to show they are cutting spending, like reducing pay for top administrators or closing programs that do not directly benefit the state.

“We’ve had the luxury in prior years of heavily subsidizing colleges,” Mr. Coupal said. “But like anything in California, the delivery of higher education is not performance based. They’ve created new campuses and programs based on politics and not need.”

Almost everything about the statement is anxiety producing.

First Jon Coupal is listed as, “the principal drafter of Proposition 218.”  Here’s a summary of its goals:

Proposition 218 is a major measure with significant implications for local governments, property owners, businesses, and California residents.

The measure would restrict local government’s ability to raise most forms of revenue. This restriction would result in lower payments by individuals and businesses to local government–and less spending for local public services.

Proposition 218’s (1) requirement that many existing fees, assessments and taxes be recalculated and submitted to a vote, (2) expansion of the initiative powers, and (3) shift of burden of proof in lawsuits challenging fee and assessment amounts all serve to increase local residents’ direct control over local government finances, but decrease the certainty in local government finance.

“Public services” include public schools and universities.  Coupal talks about the “luxury” of subsidizing higher education and then he gets to the heart of it: “They’ve created new campuses and programs based on politics and not need.”

That statement should make anyone who cares about diversity in higher education–in the composition of the faculty and in its curriculum very nervous.  “Directly benefit the state” is the kind of language that all humanities professor should be nervous about.  It’s the kind of language that led to the dismantling of several humanities departments at the State University of New York, Albany.

“Programs based on politics” is usually code for ethnic studies, women’s and gender studies, and GLBT studies.

It was particularly unnerving to read the article as read Nathan I. Huggins essay in Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States (A 25th Anniversary Retrospective of Ford Foundation Grant Making 1982-2007). In it he explains how a focus on higher education primarily as training for professions threatened the stability of humanities curriculum:

Public institutions, most having land-grant origins, from the beginning had appealed to their legislatures for funds by citing their immediate contribution to agriculture, mining, and business.  They had always found it easy to design undergraduate curricula that allowed students to avoid “useless” courses in the humanities.  In the postwar period, however, even prestigious universities tolerated an erosion of the liberal arts core.” (21)

He is describing the late 60s and early 70s, a time that marks the rise of Black Studies.  This notion of utility is cropping up again, and this time the protests will happen in the voting booth, at a time when the country is particularly anxious about anything that reflects, represents, or refers to race.

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Bits and Pieces

If you get a chance, be sure to read Christine A. Stanley’s excellent essay “Coloring the Academic Landscape: Faculty of Color Breaking the Silence in Predominately White Colleges and Universities” (American Educational Research Journal. 43:4 (Winter 2006): 701-736). It’s an impressive, wide-ranging report based on a more comprehensive authoethnographic qualitative research project. It’s affirming for those who fear they alone might be facing hostility as faculty of color and useful for those who want concrete suggestions about how to develop and maintain diversity at their home institutions.

So read the whole thing. But click (in your own way), if you resemble these remarks:

I wonder if I were a White male tenured faculty member, would I have been approached like this? (African American associate professor, health and kinesiology)

As do all institutions of higher education, the university I joined reflects the majority culture. Historically excluded from the academy, minority faculty have been admitted as guests within the majority culture’s house…expected to honor their hosts’ customs without question…keep out of certain rooms…and…always be on their best behavior.(American Indian associate professor, educational leadership and policy analysis).

Told to a candidate during an interview:

“While we’d like to diversify the department, we will make an appointment on merit, and will look for the best candidate.” (African [South African] assistant professor, psychology)

While walking with another colleague of color to a faculty meeting, a colleague said in jest, “This side of the hallway sure is looking darker lately.” My colleague and I exchange[d] glances with each other. This same colleague observe[d] the noticeable exchange and trie[d] to make light of the comment. “You ladies know I was just kidding, don’t you?” (Black associate professor, higher education administration)

I remember when doing my psychology internship at a major New York hospital that my natural impulse was to talk about my being from India, and to refer to myself as an Indian….Instead, I was met with a wall of silence as if I had broken an unspoken taboo of never calling attention to your own or other people’s difference” (Indian associate professor, psychology)

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A Different Kind of “O”ther: University of Kansas

Although the collection focuses on the experiences of faculty of color, this tenure case seems to center around the sexual orientation of the candidate. Dr. Albert Romkes is openly gay, and he was denied tenure by the University of Kansas based on the application of a rule that, according to the website developed in his defense, has never been formerly approved or used in any other tenure cases in the university’s 145-year history.

Don’t let yourself be distracted by the formatting and colors for the website. This is a compelling, troubling case.

Local reporting is available here

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