May 3, 2012 · 5:25 pm

Clicks and Cliques: Part II

As I read Michelle Moravec’s response to my “Clicks and Cliques post,” I felt something—not a thrill up my leg since she’s not Obama and I’m not Chris Matthews—but something. Dare I call it a click?

It’s different than the click that Sansell refers to. Our eyes did not meet across a faculty meeting or at a conference. In fact, we’ve never met at all. An African-American academic I follow on twitter follows her, and since Moravec describes herself as a “lover of feminism” I thought she might read my blog entry. I didn’t know if she (or anyone) would even read it, but she did, and told other people to read it too.

The “click” I felt is different, but it seems different in exactly the right way.

•  She is, to borrow her phrase, “blogging her book” and so am I. Click.

•  Her post begins by describing a particularly successful day in the archives. I know that (in)tense pleasure oh so well. Click.

•  Excellent use of metaphor. Click.

•  She appreciates and acknowledges that my thoughts about feminism and diversity in the academy lead to tough questions and she’s ready to engage. Click.

• The answer she offers to my final question has prompted me to refine my questions. Click.

To put it another way, I didn’t feel a connection because we have a shared sense of oppression; in fact, it’s entirely possible that if we continue the conversation we’ll have sharp disagreements. I am interested, feel a click because the research she describes is intriguing and she expresses a clarity about her own subject position. Most importantly, her answer to my questions reminds me that many academic feminists don’t work in academic institutions with official programs and departments.

She answers:

I know my response offers nothing by way of what to do institutionally, and I suppose that it is one of the reasons I’m attracted to my extraordinarily small college (400 students, less than 40 faculty). I really do deal with things on a case by case basis and by continuing to ask the hard questions, which for me, emerge more around interactions with students than with colleagues because I have so very few colleagues.

She also agrees with me (and, yes, that’s one reason why I felt a click) that there is a dominant power structure in the feminist academy: “I do think the ‘old girls’ club is real and that it is largely white, and that creates a climate in which homogenous expectations are established (4: This footnote links to Notes From an “Angry Woman of Color”: Academic Policing and Disciplining Women of Color in a Post (Fill in the blank) Era).”

And so I would like to expand the question by making clear that while the thoughts and questions in the original post imagined larger institutions with Women and Gender Studies programs and departments, I think the different dynamic at smaller colleges needs to be considered as well. The collection as a whole has essays by scholars of color from different kinds of institutions, and I’d like this essay to reflect a similar diversity. The stakes are different at smaller schools (higher or lower, I honestly don’t know or if that measurement even works). I’m also wondering about the generational shift Moravec’s own research reflects and what it suggests about how feminist scholars interact with one another more broadly. Years ago, when I was a very new assistant professor, my colleague, the film critic and scholar Paul Arthur, introduced me to feminist film critic Amy Taubin. The three of us had dinner, and the conversation turned to the different instances of tensions (of all kinds) among academic feminists that I’d seen, heard, and been a part of since graduate school. She summed it all up rather neatly in a way I’ve never forgotten. She proposed that it’s sometimes easier to talk to your grandmother than it is to talk to your mother. It seems an apt metaphor and a useful way to think in a more nuanced way about the state of the academic feminist union in this current moment, when we have multiple generations of feminist scholars at different levels of success in academe.

Finally, while I am happy to have Moravec’s response, I am happy to hear about bits and pieces of people’s experiences, thoughts, and ideas.

1 Comment

Filed under Gender, Race

Tagged as , , ,

May 1, 2012 · 2:00 pm

Of Clicks and Cliques: White Women, Women of Color, Diversity, and Tension

In The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present, historian Christine Sansell describes a moment of connection that occurs between women who recognize a common struggle:

…the penetrating critique of life-as-women-lived it was a point of contact between strangers and far flung-sympathizers, when other signs of affiliation were absent.  This is what Jane O’Reilly meant in 1971 when she described the “click,” feminist shorthand for the decisive moment when women’s eyes met across a room, in unspoken recognition of some outrage disguised as normal life, men’s petty dominion over women’s time, attention, labor, and self-esteem, whether expressed in monopolizing a conversation or expecting a female employee to take notes at a meeting (234)

It’s a lovely notion—the feeling that at any moment one might suddenly know with certainty that she is not alone in the face of oppressive systems.  And I think it’s a moment that feminist academics seek.  This is not necessarily because they are women, though women are undoubtedly socialized to think in terms of community, but because the success of feminist ideological, curricular and political agendas within colleges and universities are built on such connections. Perhaps more than any other discipline, Women’s and Gender Studies links activism, scholarship, pedagogy and community building.  I tease a friend of mine about how many retreats women’s studies faculty attend and joke, “you all really have to get along, don’t you?”   They do.  We do.

My question, one that must be addressed in order to have a full consideration of the main issues this collection addresses, is this: what happens when that “decisive moment,” when that “click” doesn’t happen?  What happens if the dominant group of academic feminists (middle-class white women) doesn’t share similar oppressive experiences or, perhaps more importantly, have wildly different coping mechanisms?  My sense is that instead of a click there’s a sharp separating—an almost physical, huge step backwards that leads to a sharp divide. If the phrase, “the personal is political” is one of the key tenets of late 1960s feminism, the academic is personal seems foundational to the structure of Women’s and Gender Studies.  I recognize that there are other rifts (generational and economic come to mind immediately) but I am most interested in thinking about the racial divide.

Here’s what I’m noticing.  Many white women academics collapse their struggles with the struggles that face academics of color and this leads to a kind of blindness where they simply can’t see the oppressive realities that faculty of color face and, by extension, don’t see themselves as oppressors. The language institutions use to lump groups together exacerbates the problem. Consider, for example, the phrase “women and people of color”–a designation that pairs up two different kinds of marginalized groups in ways that can lead to conflict instead of collaboration. It prompts white women academics to see themselves as natural allies with the same challenges when faculty of color are always marked as racialized and, therefore, have a different set of obstacles to overcome.   In other words, while white women and women of color share some of the burdens of gender bias, it is all too easy for white women to lose sight of their own privilege and for that blindness to result in discriminating practices that extend into the evaluative process.

I am remembering how white women in grad school were much more comfortable working with women of color in crisis or turning to them for wisdom then sitting across from them as peers.  And I’m trying to work out how that pattern of engagement influences interactions around evaluative processes.  To further complicate this tension, generally speaking, women of color respond in completely different ways to oppression than their white peers. We have needed (and developed) a different skill set to survive the academy and we have been both punished and rewarded in complicated ways for our coping mechanisms.  I think this mode of coping can feel like an indictment to those who struggle differently and in a world founded on “clicks” that relies on the notion of a common battle they can be quite threatening.  The problems are often generational and exacerbated by a white privilege that is sometimes masked by the mixed- up ideas (part myth, part reality) of a shared oppression.

We, all of us, reproduce ourselves in our personnel decisions, and when we add in the complications of Women and Gender Studies departments that rely on faculty working closely together under the umbrella of “community” things get tricky and people are evaluated not so much on their skills and accomplishments but on whether or not they “click.” My sense, taken from the countless stories I have heard over the years, is that white women in the academy forget how far they’ve actually come and, worse, they run the risk of setting up oppressive systems that don’t actually replace patriarchal hierarchies they want to challenge but simply rewrite them along feminine lines.  This plays itself out in myriad ways—namely in the expectations placed on new faculty to support Women’s and Gender Studies agendas through service.  These expectations tend to have a moral element to them since the work of Women’s and Gender Studies is so closely tied to activism and advocacy.  Pretty much everyone agrees that there has been a long-standing tension between white women and women of color in feminist movements and I count this as progress. But how does that problem play itself out in the halls of academe? In other words, is there a dominant culture of Women’s and Gender studies that is inadvertently hostile to racial diversity? If so, what can be done to fix it?  What problems have you seen?  Have you seen this issue addressed directly in your institution?

6 Comments

Filed under Gender

Tagged as , , , ,

October 31, 2011 · 3:00 pm

Lesson III: Double Diversity and Derrick Bell

It’s become fashionable to call for the end of tenure, to claim that it is costly, doesn’t actually result in “intellectual freedom” and rewards unproductive faculty who atrophy after they reach this professional milestone, hanging up their scholarly and pedagogical hats and easing into inertia.

Most of the people arguing for its abolition are white. And tenured.
Given that faculty of color are disproportionally clustered among the contingent ranks, most of the people who work without the security and benefits of tenure are not white. There’s something wrong with the math here and there is definitely something wrong with this picture.

Literally.

Just look at the pictures of the five-person panel The New York Times assembled for one of its “Room for Debate” virtual roundtables to take up the question “What if College Tenure Dies?” The debate held only passing interest to me when it was first published, but it came to mind with the recent death of the brilliant Derrick Bell.

Bell is famous for, among other things, being fired from Harvard after he protested the lack of women of color on the law faculty. At the time he was the Weld Professor of Law and could easily have rested on his laurels, but rather than bend, rather than yield he pushed back. Or, to be more precise, he refused to come back at the end of his sabbatical until Harvard addressed this deficit.

Considered a foundational voice in Critical Race Theory, Bell is the author of And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (1987) and Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (1992). Students who sat in his lectures and seminars speak of him in worshipful tones, and in the days after his death, I couldn’t look at my twitter feed, my facebook page, or my favorite blogs without seeing someone mourning his passing. I know Bell primarily for his work in Critical Race Theory, but given what I’m steeped in these days, I couldn’t help but see his passing in the context of the current debates about the role of tenure in the twenty-first century academy.

The two biggest names in the Times debate were Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Presidents and Mark C. Taylor, chairman of the department of religion at Columbia University—two men comfortably settled into the privileges of academic seniority. Nelson is an ardent supporter of tenure while Taylor argues vociferously against it. He begins his contribution to the debate: “Tenure is financially unsustainable and intellectually indefensible.”

I know we live in an age when rhetorical thunderbolts abound, but it makes me queasy to see an intellectual, especially one firmly and safely ensconced in the academy, doing the dirty work for administrators who are all too willing to use economics as a way to explain why they are doing away with tenure lines and replacing those positions with the cheap labor that is contingency faculty. It’s particularly galling to have that thunderbolt from a scholar who I am sure is costing Columbia a pretty penny. I could go on about all the ways in which Taylor is wrong—particularly when it comes to thinking about how tenure makes it possible for institutions of all kinds to meet their obligations to society—but what really sticks out in light of Bell’s passing is the kind of diversity that will be left unprotected if tenure is abolished. Bell and others like him represent an ideal kind of diversity that wise, ethical, and long-sighted academics would be wise to protect.

Bell embodies what I’m calling double diversity. It is the opposite of the diversity ethos that I fear pervades humanities departments today–simple, crude diversity that tends to reduce faculty to their race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality. It’s the approach that has a department saying something like, “we need a Hispanic person” and then putting out an ad for Latino/a studies, conflating the scholar (and the scholarship) with someone’s identity. Double Diversity doesn’t just mean hiring brown faces or teaching texts by colored folks. Instead, it acknowledges that the academy works best when different teaching models, different research questions, different interactions with the world are equally valued and preserved.

Take, for instance, Bell’s approach to explaining critical-race theory by relating legal concepts through allegory. He does this with Geneva Crenshaw, a character he created for And We Are Not Saved. The dialogue he builds between Crenshaw and the narrator allows Bell to explore multiple sides of a complex issue in a mode that made often dry legal analysis interesting and accessible. The responses to this model were mixed, but the critique that stands out most sharply comes from legal scholar and judge Richard Posner. Posner, who currently sits as a judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, is described as conservative, but his dismissal of Bell’s approach is a critique that could easily have come either from a conservative or a well meaning but wrong headed liberal. According to the Times article on Bell’s passing he dismissed Bell’s approach, claiming that it “repudiat[ed] reasoned argumentation,” and that it “reinforce[d] stereotypes about the intellectual capacities of nonwhites.” Posner’s assessment appeared in The New Republic, and the whole piece is infused with carefully masked anxiety, hitting all of the high points of conservative terror. It begins:

“The postmodern left is defined by its opposition to the values, the beliefs, and the culture of the ‘West,’ the ‘West’ being conceived as the domain of nondisabled heterosexual white males of European extraction and their east Asian and west Asian ‘imitators,’ such as the Japanese (Hitler’s ‘honorary Aryans’) and the Jews. The postmodern left is radically multiculturalist, but it is more, for the “West” that it denigrates is not historically specific; it encompasses liberalism, capitalism, individualism, the Enlightenment, logic, and science, the values associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition, the concept of personal merit, and the possibility of objective knowledge.”

Bell is among others Posner names, as “ensconced in American universities” and who even have “a foothold in the law schools.” And, he continues, it’s this postmodern left that has “demolished to its satisfaction universal values and criteria…”

QUE HORROR!

I’ve been an academic of some sort for more than fifteen years, and this terror is what guides many decisions in the humanities from admissions decisions to how job advertisements are written to hiring and retention practices. Given that those who rise to power tend to be those who subscribe to the “universal values and criteria” model of what is and isn’t “good” scholarship, it behooves the rest of us to push as hard as possible to protect scholars whose scholarship aims to stretch the academy’s rigid boundaries. The tension in the academy is often between the old and the new. So, while scholars and administrators alike claim they value new contributions to scholarship, often “new” actually only means a slight variation of what people in positions of authority view as acceptable. Anyone invested in whole new areas of scholarship or new ways of engaging with old areas of criticism needs the protection that comes with tenure.

It goes too far to say that the most diverse academics I know are people of color. That’s a generalization too broad to make, but I know what I see and I see it because I move in a world of academic/activists of color, and the truth of it is even those who may have been intellectually trained in the most traditional of methodologies always occupy two worlds, and fact of this truth means that we bring a double-view to the table. This, in turn, means that we have learned to look at whatever is in front of us from texts to statistics to students with a complexity that benefits the academy in myriad ways.

And the only way to insure that the academy doesn’t fold in under the weight of sameness is to protect us with tenure.

Tenured, I don’t think we atrophy. I know we blossom. This suggests that the problem isn’t with tenure but with those who abuse its privileges, and, cynic though I am, I believe those are more the exception than the rule.

Bell begins his popular work with the following claim:

“Black people are the magical faces at the bottom of society’s well. Even the poorest whites, those who must live their lives only a few levels above, gain their self-esteem by gazing down at us. Surely, they must know that their deliverance depends on letting down their ropes. Only by working together is escape possible. Over time, many reach out, but most simply watch, mesmerized into maintaining their unspoken commitment to keeping us where we are, at whatever cost to them or to us.”

I can’t help but think that those who seek to abandon tenure, whether they realize it or not, are pulling up rather than letting down the ropes, and I worry that if they succeed future Derrick Bells will be left at the bottom of the well.

2 Comments

Filed under Race and Tenure Op-Ed, Uncategorized

Tagged as , ,

July 27, 2011 · 8:03 am

Lesson II: Contingency Faculty

The Invisible Majority: Contingency Faculty and Diversity*

It is impossible to talk about the practices and issues related to race and tenure in any meaningful way without considering how much universities rely on contingent faculty to prop up their educational missions. Women and faculty of color are disproportionally clustered in contingent positions, and the majority of tenured faculty spend at least part of their careers in contingent positions—as adjunct or part-time faculty, visiting professors, post-doctoral fellows and, of course, as teaching assistants.  A good place to start thinking seriously about the subject is by reading the 2010 report released by the Association of American University Professors.  It offers concrete examples of ways to stabilize the tenuous situation contingent faculty regularly find themselves in; it also offers startling and troubling facts (all quoted from the original report):

•  By 2007 almost 70% of faculty working at colleges and universities were off the tenure track.

•  Non-tenure track faculty and graduate students teach the majority of classes at many institutions, commonly at shockingly low rates of pay.

•  Contingent faculty frequently pay for their own computers, phones, and office supplies, and dip into their own wallets for journal subscriptions and travel to conferences to stay current in their fields.

•  At many institutions, the proportion of faculty with tenure is below 10 percent.

For more on the issue, see Confronting Contingency: Faculty Equity and the Goals of Academic Democracy.

One of its more salient arguments about the problems with current approaches to resolving the unethical treatment of contingency faculty:

4. The debates that have raged within and about higher education over vocational versus liberal education, tenure, the “corporatization” of higher education, governmental oversight and accreditation, and funding models and sources have obscured, deferred, or overridden the need for action on the fundamental ethical and practical concerns that attend the professional and personal needs of faculty on contingent appointments. Yet, ironically, attending to those concerns—ensuring a living wage, access to health care, professional development, and the protections of academic freedom—would exercise the very values of academic democracy that these debates are really all about.

* I owe an enormous debt to Karen Cardozo for educating me on the myriad issues that face contingency faculty.  She has pointed me to important books and articles that have shaped my understanding of the issue and the essay on this subject for the book.

Leave a comment

Filed under Resources

Tagged as ,

May 24, 2011 · 12:07 pm

Vassar

*************Update:  Kiese Laymon was awarded tenure*************

Vassar: A Question of Documentation and Process

Kiese Laymon is an assistant professor at Vassar who has written a post on his blog Cold Drank about his tenure review. Colleges and universities have tenure processes developed by the administration in consultation with the faculty and, when applicable, through negotiations with the union. Each institution handles the process in slightly different ways. At Vassar, candidates are reviewed twice before a final tenure review. According to Laymon’s blog post, his department voted 15 to 1 to award him tenure. The next stage of the review with the Faculty Appointments and Salary Committee (FASC) is where things get complicated…

A few weeks ago, Vassar’s Faculty Appointments and Salary Committee (FASC) recused itself from my tenure case. As rumors of my “bullying President Hill to get FASC off of my tenure case” limp around campus, I figured I should make it clear what my responses to FASC have been.

In February, FASC (The Faculty Appointments and Salary Committee) made the unprecedented request of asking for “documentation” on one of my unredacted book contracts, though they had proof of a contract. After giving them the contract, I wrote the following email…

The details he shares are troubling, and a few things about his post set off my “unwritten” alarm. Why would the committee request additional information when a candidate has provided documented evidence that he has fulfilled all of the terms of the contract? Is this common practice? Why was the evidence that was acceptable in his fourth-year review not sufficient for his tenure review?

What happened between the fourth-year review and the moment he recounts in his blog?

I don’t want to put Laymon on trial, and no one else who is not part of his tenure process should either. I also don’t want to put Vassar on trial (as if such a thing were even possible), but my alarm bells are ringing. I’ve heard versions of the “documentation request” too many times.

To be clear, I think institutions are right to confirm the claims of faculty members, but the question I’ve been asking myself for the last two weeks is whether or not Laymon is being subject to additional scrutiny because he’s African-American and/or because he works in a field that is not yet comfortably within the academic tradition. When challenged by Laymon, the FASC recused itself from his tenure review. I’m curious to know if it is common practice for a committee comprised of faculty members to opt out of the tenure review process.

So, I’ll be following this case (I hear it may end well for him). The institution has put teeth behind it’s diversity goals by hiring a significant number of faculty of color, but, as everyone in the academy knows, hiring and tenuring are two very different things.

Leave a comment

Filed under Race, Race and Tenure Reporting, Uncategorized

May 19, 2011 · 10:14 pm

Lessons from the Collection I: The Missing Cohort

As I edit the stories and interviews for the collection and talk to people about their own experiences seeking tenure in the humanities, I’ve noticed patterns that I think we’d all be wise to pay attention to. I’ve been thinking of them as “Lessons from the Collection.”

Lesson I: The Missing Cohort

In story after story, in conversation after conversation I’ve heard some version of this sentiment: “I can’t believe how backwards my colleagues/department/school is/are about race.”

While I’m sure there are colleagues, departments, and schools that are astonishingly backwards about issues of race, I suspect the exceptionally advanced view that faculty of color have about the topic makes it difficult to judge what “backwards” really is; or, to put it another way, it’s all relative. Maddening and disturbing but relative.

Perhaps the most jarring part of the transition from graduate school to full-time employment is that we’ve left behind people (of all hues) who share, on a deep level, our attitudes about race, diversity, and ethnicity. The dry, gallows humor that bounced around conversations over drinks in graduate school as we coped with racism in all its forms can hit a false note with new colleagues who may or may not share our sensibilities about an issue that is more controversial than we realize.

Over the time it takes to finish the doctorate, we are drawn to people who “get it” and shy away from those whose colorblindness make them annoying or downright difficult. Our search for people who share our ideas and sensibilities about issues related to race often moves us outside of our departments and colleges. We develop a shorthand to talk about the realities of racism and our cultural quirks. Yes, we know that there are racial minefields to be navigated, but we have a built support group to help us step carefully and to comfort us when things blow up.

We choose our dissertation advisors and committee members. We attend conferences and share our work with largely sympathetic audiences. We narrow our world to those scholars, professors, and friends who reflect our worldview back to us.

And while we know that the academy is not some rainbow-colored love fest, we don’t always realize how much we’ve shaped the world to suit us. This is especially the case once we move out of our course work and can, generally speaking, choose who we spend our time with 90% of the time. We choose our dissertation advisors and committee members. We attend conferences and share our work with largely sympathetic audiences. We narrow our world to those scholars, professors, and friends who reflect our worldview back to us. When we encounter people who disagree with us, especially about our research, it can be jarring but there is still some common ground underneath that intellectual tension.

I don’t mean to portray this period as idyllic. Sexism, homophobia, and good old fashioned, universal jealousy are ever present. But we know who we know, who our friends are, who we should avoid, and where to turn when things go pearshaped.

All of that fades away when we join a department. Perhaps there are other people of color in the department, and, if you’re lucky, you can connect. But this isn’t always the case. And while you might find allies among white colleagues, it’s a long process to know who really gets it, and, in the common parlance, who will have your back. Every new faculty member has to make this transition, but there’s an added layer of personal vetting that goes both ways for faculty of color. When moments of casual racism occur, it’s not entirely clear whom we can turn to for comfort, guidance, or just a bit of a rant. Your colleagues are trying to figure out how you will move as a person of color in their professional world, and you are trying to suss out whom among your colleagues you can trust.

In some instances, we’re not only called upon to justify our specific research agendas but see our whole fields (especially those who work in ethnic studies) subject to skepticism. In practical terms, this can be the difference between courses that are required and courses that are considered electives.

I think that things are better now, perhaps. All of the ways we have of keeping in better touch with one another means that we don’t have to leave our grad school cohorts behind, but the hallways of a new department can be incredibly isolating and the stakes are unbelievably high.

1 Comment

Filed under Race, Race and Tenure Op-Ed, Resources

Tagged as

April 10, 2011 · 7:31 pm

DePaul: Defense of Faculty Member

Statement of Professor Tina Chanter regarding Goswami Tenure Denial

Although Dr. Goswami is a recipient of the coveted excellence in teaching award at Depaul, and has superb teaching evaluations, colleagues in the Department of Philosophy took great pains to scrutinize the intent of students who had evaluated her, going as far as to raise questions about why her student’s reactions were so positive. This is something that is not customary in the department.

Leave a comment

Filed under Race, Race and Tenure Op-Ed

Tagged as ,

April 10, 2011 · 7:24 pm

DePaul April 2011

More Tenure Troubles at DePaul

Last year at DePaul every one of 22 white faculty members who applied for tenure got it; Goswami and Shelby were among half a dozen professors of color who were denied out of the dozen who applied (one was eventually reinstated). When they cried foul, claiming bias, procedural problems, and academic freedom violations, DePaul’s own tenure appeals panels looked at the evidence and concluded they were right. Over protests from students, other members of the faculty, and the American Association of University Professors, Holtschneider chose to ignore his own appeals board’s rulings and uphold the denials.

Leave a comment

Filed under Race

March 24, 2011 · 12:04 pm

Essays and Conference Papers of Interest*

Aguirre, Adalberto Jr. “Women and Minority Faculty in the Academic Workplace: Recruitment, Retention, and Academic Culture.” Washington, D.C: ERIC Clearinghouse on Higher Education, 2000.

Allen, Walter R. et all. “The Black Academic: Faculty Status among African Americans in U.S. Higher Education.” The Journal of Negro Education 69.½ (2000): 112-127.

Antonio, Anthony Lising. “Faculty of Color Reconsidered: Reassessing Contributions to Scholarship.” The Journal of Higher Education 73.5 (2002): 582-602.

Baez, Benjamin.” Race-Related Service and Faculty of Color: Conceptualizing Critical Agency in Academe.” Higher Education 39.3 (2000): 363-391.

Beloney-Morrison, Tonetta. Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine: Exploring the Promotion and Tenure Process of African American Female Professors at Select Research Universities in the South. Diss. Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College, 2003.

Cornelius, Llewellyn J. et all. “The ABCs of Tenure: What All African-American Faculty Should Know.” Western Journal of Black Studies 21.3 (1997): 150-155.

Cross, Theodore and Bruce Slater. “A Short List of Colleges and Universities That Are Taking Measures to Increase Their Number of Black Faculty.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 36 (2002): 99-103.

Fenelon, James. “Race, Research, and Tenure: Institutional Credibility and the Incorporation of African, Latino, and American Indian Faculty. Journal of Black Studies 34.1 (2003): 87-100.

Galambos, Eva C. “Racial Composition of Faculties in Public Colleges and Universities of the South.” Atlanta, GA: Southern Regional Education Board, 1979.

Gose, Ben. “The Professoriate is Increasingly Diverse, but that Didn’t Happen by Accident.” Chronicles of Higher Education 54.5 (2007): 1.

Gregory, Sheila T. “Black Faculty Women in the Academy: History, Status, and Future.” The Journal of Negro Education 70.3 (2001):124-138.

Haag, Pamela. “Is Collegiality Code for Hating Ethnic, Racial, and Female Faculty at Tenure Time?” Education Digest: Essential Readings Condensed for Quick Review 71.1 (2005): 57-62.

Hao, Zhidong. Race and Gender Discrimination in Tenure Denial: Problems and Analysis.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. San Francisco, CA. 14 August 2004.

JBHE-Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.  “JBHE Completes Its Count of Black Students and Faculty at the Nation’s 50 Flagship State Universities.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 51 (2006): 54-59.

JBHE-Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. No Blacks in the Pipeline: The Standard Explanation for Low Percentage of Black Faculty Continues to be Much of a red Herring, The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 33 (2001): 77-78.

Johnson, Susan D., et all. “An Examination of Workload of Faculty of Color by Rank.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, November 17-19.” Philadelphia, PA, 2005.

Leap, Terry L. “Tenure, Discrimination, and African-American Faculty.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 7 (1995): 103-105.

Nettles, Michael T and Laura W Perna. “Sex and Race Differences in Faculty Salaries, Tenure, Rank, and Productivity: Why, On Average, Do Women, African Americans, and Hispanics Have Lower Salaries, Tenure, and Rank?” Association for the Study of Higher Education 20th Annual Conference. Orlando, FL. 4 November 1995.

Niemann, Yolanda Flores and John F. Dovidio. “Tenure, Race/Ethnicity and Attitudes toward Affirmative Action: A Matter of Self-Interest?” Sociological Perspectives 41.4 (1998): 783-796.

Nunpa, Chis Mato. “Native Faculty, Higher Education, Racism, and Survival.” American Indian Quarterly 27.1/2 (2003): 349-364.

Palmer, Robert T. “The Impact of Social Capital on Promoting the Success of African American Faculty.” Dilemmas of Black Faculty at U.S. Predominately White Institutions: Issues in the Post-Multicultural Era. Ed. S. E. Moore, R. Alexander, & A. J. Lemelle. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010.

Smith, Daryl G. et all. “Interrupting the Usual: Successful Strategies for Hiring Diverse Faculty.” The Journal of Higher Education 75.2 (2004): 133-160.

Stanley, Christina A. “Coloring the Academic Landscape: Faculty of Color Breaking the Silence in Predominantly White Colleges and Universities.” American Educational Research Journal 43.4 (2006): 701-736.

Trower, Cathy A. “Why So Few Minority Faculty and What to Do? Diversifying the Region’s Professoriate.” Connection: The Journal of the New England Board of Higher Education 17.2 (2002): 25-27.

Turner, Caroline Sotello Viernes. “Exploring Underrepresentation: The Case of Faculty of Color in the Midwest.” Journal of Higher Education 70.1 (1999): 27-59.

Williams, Brian N. et all. “Perceptions of African American Male Junior Faculty on Promotion and Tenure: Implications for Community Building and Social Capital.” Teachers College Record 108.2 (2006): 287-315.

*This bibliography was assembled by Liam Drislane with the support of the English Department of Montclair State University.

Leave a comment

Filed under Resources

March 18, 2011 · 5:56 pm

Race and Tenure: Perspective

“The Case Against Cultural Standardization in Tenure Decisions

But, if this is the case are these committees suggesting that Blacks on tenure track were hired as quality scholars and then after years of teaching, researching and providing service magically become mediocre?

Leave a comment

Filed under Race, Race and Tenure Op-Ed