A New Front of Activism

The assistant professor is up for tenure next year, and he’s concerned. His course evaluations were low, and he knows that he needs to show students not only that he’s an effective teacher but also that he cares.

And those aren’t the only issues.

He is one of only two black male law professors at his university — just the second ever to go up for tenure — and to him the bar for promotion appears higher than for his white peers. He believes he has more to prove, more barriers to overcome.

Students have reported being afraid of him. A black female friend who teaches law at another institution advised him to hire a white teaching assistant “who has credibility, to be your cheerleader.” He did, and the assistant’s presence helped to reassure students that the class was demanding but fair, and that the assistant professor was knowledgeable, says the law professor. She also showed students how to be successful in his class.

He also decided to engage in “customer service,” as he puts it. A couple of times a week, he strolls through the law school, wandering by study carrels, the library, the cafe, looking for students.

“How was your weekend?” he asks. “Did you go to happy hour?”

The new strategies seem to be helping: The professor’s student evaluations have climbed from near the bottom of the scale to closer to the top.

“The students feel like I care now,” says the assistant professor, who works at a private university in the South and asked to remain anonymous because his colleagues will vote next summer on his tenure bid. “I’m not the big, black, scary bogeyman anymore.”

With their student populations growing more diverse and activists pressing colleges to do more, departments have sought to hire more minority faculty members. But many scholars say the efforts aren’t enough. The real sticking point, they say, is at tenure time. While many colleges are starting to bring in more minority faculty members, they don’t always seem to want to keep them around — or at least they don’t focus much attention on promoting them.

Minority professors say they have to do more than meet the usual standards for high-quality teaching and scholarship. They have to work to fit in, they say, to seem more approachable and less threatening. White faculty members and administrators, they say, often grow uncomfortable with the very qualities that made a minority hire attractive in the first place: A different perspective on a discipline, political engagement with off-campus issues that affect minority groups, and work that doesn’t always fit within the confines of a single field.

“There is all of this exciting fanfare behind hiring faculty of color,” says Cynthia Wu, an associate professor of transnational studies at the University at Buffalo, who has helped mentor graduate students and junior faculty members in Asian-American studies. “But when it comes to retaining them, there is very little if no effort.”

The gap between hiring and promotion has led to a new front of activism, with students and professors calling attention to individual cases of minority professors’ being denied tenure. Those stories, say higher-education scholars and minority professors, are evidence of how far colleges have to go to build a lasting community of diverse scholars.

Few of the minority scholars who were denied tenure and spoke with The Chronicle for this article say they’ve experienced overt racism. Most, instead, describe an implicit bias in the ways they and other minority scholars are judged.

They say they feel isolated and lack strong advocates, not only within their own departments but also among high-level administrators who are responsible for approving tenure decisions.

Of all full-time faculty members in degree-granting institutions in the fall of 2013, 79 percent were white, 6 percent were black, 5 percent were Hispanic, and 10 percent were Asian or Pacific Islander. American Indian professors made up less than 1 percent of the full-time professoriate, according to a report by the National Center for Education Statistics.

There are no national data comparing the tenure rates of minority professors with those of white professors. But some scholars have collected data on their own campuses.

A few years ago, an assistant professor who had been denied tenure at the University of Southern California looked at about 15 years of data on tenure rates of USC professors in the humanities and social sciences. From 1998 to 2012, 81 percent of white faculty members were awarded tenure, she found, compared with just 48 percent of minority professors.

The data were compiled by Mai’a K. Davis Cross, an assistant professor of international relations who used the numbers in a 2012 complaint she filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over her tenure denial. USC responded by saying it had studied tenure rates on campus and had not found evidence of discrimination against any group. The EEOC eventually concluded that there was nothing further to investigate and closed the case. Ms. Cross later left and secured a tenured position in political science at Northeastern University.

Tenure denials of minority scholars are part of a “systemic problem,” she says, in which white male professors tend to more aggressively promote their work than either women or minorities do, and are subsequently invited to more conferences and cited more frequently than are minority scholars. As a result, when it comes time for a university to send out the tenure dossier of a white male scholar for review, his work is likely to be more well-known — more recognized and accepted — than that of a minority scholar.

“If a minority female were to present her work in that same aggressive manner, people would be turned off by it,” says Ms. Cross. “But it’s encouraged on the part of white men. And then once they start getting citations, those snowball. So it becomes a built-in advantage.”

This summer, Vilna Bashi Treitler brought new attention to these issues in an article published on The Feminist Wire.

She named several female minority scholars who had been denied tenure, including some, like herself, who’d eventually gone on to earn it elsewhere. Ms. Treitler, who in 1997 earned a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, wasn’t awarded tenure until 14 years later, having been turned down at Rutgers University before eventually winning it at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York.

Throughout her career, she says, she was slowed down by students’ complaints that she wasn’t in class during a medical leave, by a couple of negative letters about her work from outside scholars, and by questions over when one of her books was due to be published, even though it was nearly out. None of that, she believed, would have slowed down a white scholar.

It wasn’t until she became head of the department of black and Hispanic studies at Baruch that Ms. Treitler began to see subtle reasons that minority faculty members so often lose out at tenure time.

“White scholars speak about white candidates really sympathetically: Oh, yeah. She was having a hard time,” she says. But often, she adds, no one in the room offers the same kind of support for minority scholars.

Ms. Treitler, who left Baruch this year to lead the department of black studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, says minority scholars must often fly under the radar if they want to be awarded tenure.

“Universities often hire a minority person because they get a new line,” she says. “But if that minority person doesn’t listen, doesn’t keep their head down, if that person sees something racist or sexist and feels they need to speak up — all of a sudden, you don’t fit anymore.”

That’s what Jennifer R. Warren — whose name appears in Ms. Treitler’s article — says happened to her. “I don’t bite my tongue,” says Ms. Warren, an assistant professor of health communication at Rutgers whose tenure denial last year prompted a protest by the campus chapter of Black Lives Matter.

“The university hired me knowing I was a bit radical,” says Ms. Warren, who describes her research as “deep community-engagement work” to secure better housing for poor residents in Trenton, N.J. “They knew that I did progressive pedagogy, but then they couldn’t take it. I didn’t fit.”

In a prepared response, Rutgers said: “The university has been very successful in attracting and retaining a diverse student body, and strives for equally positive results in the hiring and retention of a diverse faculty.”

Ms. Warren’s colleagues, she says, offered many reasons for the department’s turning her down: She didn’t publish in important journals, she was a bad teacher, her letters of evaluation from outside scholars were insufficiently supportive.

She says her department highlighted the negatives in her tenure file and ignored the positives. She won an appeal, and her tenure bid was on track to be reconsidered this academic year. Then, in September, she quit.

“I just couldn’t deal with it anymore,” she says. The fight was affecting her family and her own health. Now she is looking for jobs outside academe.

Elsewhere, two tenure denials at Dartmouth College have become a focal point of concern about the dearth of minority professors on the Ivy League campus.

Aimee Bahng, an assistant professor of English, was denied tenure this spring despite having won the support of her department. A collegewide advisory committee that reports to the president made the final decision.

Her case followed that of Derrick E. White, a visiting associate professor of African-American history, who last year also was supported for tenure by his department and then turned down by the collegewide committee.

Professors and students protested the decisions, including through Twitter campaigns like #fight4facultyofcolor and #dontdoDartmouth, which discourages students from attending the university.

Ms. Bahng says being both different and outspoken when she arrived as a junior professor may have been part of the problem.

“This is a story about somebody who is considered a political activist being punished for that involvement,” says Ms. Bahng, who was hired after students and professors fought for a program in Asian-American studies. “Everyone here knows who I am.”

Mr. White, who notes that Dartmouth has only one full professor who is African-American, says minority faculty members don’t feel that they have strong advocates at the upper levels of the college.

“Those are the people who write letters of support for you and ask for outside letters for you,” he says. “When you have no African-Americans in that pipeline, it allows for bias at best, and at worst blatant racism.”

Dartmouth wouldn’t talk about the specifics of the tenure cases of Mr. White and Ms. Bahng. The college announced a plan two years ago to increase the percentage of underrepresented tenure-track faculty members to 25 percent by 2020, up from 16 percent now. Denise Anthony, vice provost for academic affairs, agrees that colleges must change if they are going to hang onto the diverse faculty members they hire.

“Everybody talks about wanting the innovative, the challenging, the new perspectives,” she says. “And yet all institutions and professions and disciplines can be quite traditional in what they want to hold onto. This is an ongoing challenge, and there is clearly the need for culture change.”

Dartmouth is expanding its annual reviews of junior professors to give credit for some of the less traditional things that minority professors are more likely to devote time to than their white peers are. “We are having files take into account not just publications,” Ms. Anthony says, “but mentoring or work related to diversity and inclusion, whether that’s with undergrads, out in the field, or with grad students.”

At the same time, she says, senior professors also will help junior professors determine the kind of balance they need in their work. “They might say, You’re putting a lot of time into that. How is that matching up with the other work you need to be doing?”

Professors of all kinds need more help navigating the tenure process, and more mentoring could improve success rates, other academics agree. The Association for Asian American Studies started an annual daylong workshop a couple of years ago to coach tenure candidates on both the large and the fine points of assembling a tenure file.

“You can do everything right and still be denied tenure,” says Linda Trinh Vo, a professor of Asian-American studies at the University of California at Irvine who helped start the workshop. “But we want to make sure they know tenure is not just about producing good scholarship. It’s about building networks on campus, knowing the politics, knowing your administrators and how to position yourself.”

In the program, assistant professors spend a day before the association’s annual meeting starts with senior professors, focusing on writing, talking about what it takes to get tenure, and learning about the politics of the process.

The senior professors continue to follow their junior colleagues through the tenure proceedings, offering to write recommendation letters and to read drafts of their writing along the way.

And if one of them gets a negative tenure vote, Ms. Vo says, the senior mentors are likely to start petitions, rally, or write letters of support.

At Lafayette College, Juan J. Rojo staged a six-day hunger strike in September after faculty members approved his tenure bid but the president denied it. In a memo to the college community, Lafayette’s president said she didn’t believe that his teaching met the college’s standard of “distinction.”

Mr. Rojo, an assistant professor of Spanish, acknowledges that his first year at Lafayette, his teaching was “abysmal.”

“I hadn’t adjusted to teaching upper-level courses, some of the material was new to me, and I don’t think I was presenting it with enough clarity,” he says. “The evaluations reflected that.”

But he took several steps to improve, including making his courses more organized, allowing students more time to prepare for graded assignments, and following their requests for more small-group discussions. His departmental colleagues recognized those improvements, he says, and his student evaluations improved significantly.

In her memo, Alison Byerly, the president, says she wasn’t persuaded that Mr. Rojo had met “the elements of quality teaching outlined in the Faculty Handbook.”

“I also realize that many find this outcome particularly challenging,” she added, “at a time when we are embarking on significant initiatives to improve the diversity of the faculty.”

Ms. Byerly’s decision roiled the faculty at Lafayette, which wrote letters asking the college’s governing board to overturn the president’s decision. Professors said she had overstepped her bounds by disregarding their determination that Mr. Rojo deserved tenure. Some suggested that his negative teaching evaluations were prompted by racial bias.

“The students said I was intimidating, unfair, and pushing my politics onto them,” Mr. Rojo says. “This fits into the stereotype of the angry Latino male.”

He says his colleagues had expressed concern about his health during the hunger strike, so he ended it just before the board made a decision in his case. It refused to reconsider the tenure decision.

Working to overcome stereotypes can be exhausting, several minority professors say.

A black female assistant professor of sociology, who asked not to be named because she believes that her tenure case is teetering on the edge, says she’s been told by colleagues and administrators that white students aren’t “comfortable” with her. In their evaluations, she says, students complained that she taught too much about race — even though her course was about race relations.

She, like the law professor strolling the library, feels compelled to engage in a form of customer service. Among her efforts to win students over, she has started bringing pizza and candy to class.

Her colleagues aren’t comfortable with her, either, says the assistant professor, who teaches at a Midwestern University. Brought into the university as a special minority hire, she’s the first African-American professor in her department. She wears dreadlocks and African head scarves.

“If you come from a different perspective based on your racial and ethnic identity, you just don’t see things the way other folks see them,” she says. “And if you voice that, they don’t know how to handle that.”

Robin Wilson writes about campus culture, including sexual assault and sexual harassment. Contact her at robin.wilson@chronicle.com.