13 Yale Professors Threatened to Resign From Ethnic Studies. The University Listened.

Coalition for Ethnic Studies at Yale

A group of senior professors say they will no longer cut ties with Yale University’s ethnicity, race, and migration program, citing a new commitment of support from administrators.

The 13 faculty members announced in March that they would resign from the program in protest. They said the program, which was established in 1997, had been stuck in a vulnerable position for years and didn’t have the hiring authority and stability of other academic units.

The program includes many scholars of color, and their complaints had cast doubt on whether Yale’s vast $50-million faculty-diversity initiative, announced in 2015, was succeeding.

But Yale officials have granted the program “new institutional status and permanence,” according to a statement from Alicia Schmidt Camacho, a professor of American studies and ethnicity, race, and migration, and the program’s chair.

“On behalf of my colleagues, I thank the Yale administration for affirming ER&M’s importance as a program that requires resources and standing on par with other academic units,” Camacho wrote.

A faculty committee on Thursday formally allocated five faculty positions to ethnicity, race, and migration, which means that the program will now have the authority to hire five new professors according to the Yale Daily News. Previously, the program had faculty slots granted only on an “ad hoc basis,” the student newspaper reported.

Ethnicity, race, and migration is one of Yale’s fastest-growing majors, with nearly 90 students enrolled. But over the program’s 22-year life span, 41 affiliated professors have left, Camacho told The Chronicle.

During their protest, the professors zeroed in on the structure of the ethnicity, race, and migration program. Its faculty members all had primary appointments in other disciplines, like history and sociology, adding to their obligations and creating a model where teaching and advising were essentially borrowed from other departments.

Moreover, when those scholars went up for tenure, the program’s chair didn’t have the standing to plead their case to Yale’s tenure-and-promotion committee.

They also said that university documents didn’t even list any of them as having formal appointments in the program. That came as a shock to some scholars who had been recruited to Yale for jobs that were specifically advertised as faculty positions in ethnicity, race, and migration.

The concerns prompted discussion among faculty members nationwide about the challenges that scholars of color continue to face in academe and the lack of institutional support for disciplines of which they’re often a part.

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.