Research or Mission? Professors of Color Face Tough Choices on Where to Work

Sarah Lawrence College

Noel M. Voltz was thrilled to get an offer to become an assistant professor of African-American history at the University of Utah. But she still had what she described as a “cry fest” after deciding to accept it.

Ms. Voltz had been teaching at Trinity Washington University, a Roman Catholic women’s institution in the nation’s capital. It was the first job she took after earning her Ph.D. at Ohio State University in 2014, and she loved it.

“The opportunity to teach African-American history, which is my speciality, to that student body — I didn’t want to pass that up,” said Ms. Voltz, who is African-American. Trinity focuses primarily on serving students who face financial disadvantages, and 66 percent of its students in 2015 were African-American, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

As an undergraduate at Ohio State, Ms. Voltz had found it empowering to have mentors and professors of color. She wanted to play that role in other people’s lives. At Trinity, she served as a mentor to many students, advising them on a broad range of matters — where they should go to graduate school, for example, or how to address psychological problems.

Though it was rewarding, the job came with some drawbacks.

“I wanted to write my book,” Ms. Voltz said, and she didn’t think she would get the time or funding to do that at Trinity. Institutions with profiles similar to Trinity’s count activities such as student service toward tenure, she said, but “they can’t afford to give you time off to allow you to do research” to the extent that a place like the University of Utah would. Utah is an R1 university, meaning it is marked by the Carnegie Classification as having the “highest research activity.”

Many professors have had to choose between research prestige and an institutional mission that is focused on teaching. But for professors of color, the pull of serving underrepresented students can be especially strong, making for hard decisions like Ms. Voltz faced.

In January, Ms. Voltz participated on a panel at an American Historical Association conference that confronted this dilemma. The panel aimed to answer the question: “What do ‘R1’ women of color historians sign up for and give up on when they accept faculty positions at ‘other’ colleges and universities?”

“People who struggle with questions of equity really struggle with career decisions,” said Mary Dillard, director of the graduate program in women’s history at Sarah Lawrence College. “Is it more important to do scholarship on equity or spend time with the student in your office who can’t call home for advice?”

Ms. Dillard, who participated on the panel, said it can be a painful choice.

“It’s kind of seen as though we’ve employed ourselves down,” said C. Cymone Fourshey, an associate professor of history and international relations at Bucknell University, who also participated on the panel. “Certainly there’s always going to be less research funding in those institutions, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not on the cutting edge.”

Signs of Elitism

For Ms. Fourshey, the trade-off is worth it. In an honors program as an undergraduate at the University of California at Los Angeles, she learned the value of a smaller, more intimate academic environment. After earning her Ph.D. at UCLA, she sought out a liberal-arts college.

Bucknell, which is in rural Lewisburg, Pa., about three hours from Philadelphia, fit the bill. The college is becoming more diverse, but its student body was 76 percent white in 2015.

“I have students who are minorities, whether they’re from a different country or they’re racial minorities, who I feel I am really serving, because they need to see more than just white men in front of them, or white women in front of them,” Ms. Fourshey, who is African-American, said.

She appreciates her role as the first person of color some of her students meet.

“They’re getting into pretty important jobs and high positions,” she said. “I can influence them, or give them a chance to see a different perspective.”

Ms. Fourshey feels she has more flexibility in the kind of research she’s able to do at Bucknell than she would at an R1 university. She’s a historian, but her research does not always happen in an archive. This summer, for example, she and Rhonda M. Gonzales, an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at San Antonio, will go to Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo on a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to study women, family, and social organizing.

Ms. Gonzales, who organized the panel discussion with Ms. Fourshey, said she has been able to get the resources she needs to do research at San Antonio. But she said she’s noticed a subtle elitism on the part of editors and publishers. For example, an editor might favor criticism from a peer reviewer over Ms. Gonzales’s defense of her work if that reviewer came from an R1 university.

“These are subtle things that tell big stories,” Ms. Gonzales said.

Still, the frustrations of working at a university with a smaller research profile weren’t enough to override the appeal of the institution’s mission. In 2006, Ms. Gonzales said, she was offered a position at Texas A&M University, an R1 university. She turned it down because she wanted to continue to serve the students at San Antonio, almost half of whom are first generation college-goers, and to help develop the 48-year-old university.

Last year Ms. Gonzales helped the university earn a $3.5-million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to fund programs for transfer and first-generation students and to improve diversity in the STEM fields. A Latina and first-generation college student herself, Ms. Gonzales now serves as director of the program at San Antonio that oversees the use of the grant.

“I thought I had the ability to get some people to listen to my ideas here,” she said, referring to leadership opportunities she’s had. She is also associate vice provost for strategic initiatives.

‘Small Colleges Can’t Do That’

Graduate students who are about to enter the job market often don’t fully grasp how an institution’s mission and business model can impact the professional lives of the faculty members. It’s up to their professors and advisers to give them a better understanding of that, said Jennifer Summit, interim provost and vice president for academic affairs at San Francisco State University.

She would know. Ms. Summit, who is white, left Stanford University, where she was an English professor, for the state university in 2014. Though she’s quick to point out that her move into administration is not the same as leaving the faculty of one institution to join the faculty of another, she cited similar considerations when describing her move.

Ms. Summit loved working at Stanford, but colleges that rely on tuition “must admit larger numbers of full-fee-paying students even if they want to subsidize a handful of low-income students,” she said. “That’s going to bake in the kind of income inequality that a lot of us went into higher education thinking that we were going to rightsize.”

When Ms. Summit made her move, she sensed that her colleagues wondered why she would leave Stanford, a comfortable place where the resources can feel endless.

“The food is very good,” Ms. Summit conceded. “It’s very, very good. How could anyone leave that? But frankly, what I gained is so much bigger and better than what I left.”

Before leaving for Utah, Ms. Voltz sought advice from Susan Farnsworth, chair of the history program at Trinity: Should she prioritize research or institutional mission? The chair’s answer was surprisingly candid. “When she detailed the particulars of what larger universities can provide in terms of support for research, there’s no contest at all,” Ms. Farnsworth said in an interview. “Small colleges can’t do that.”

At Utah, Ms. Voltz said, the resources stress has been alleviated. She’s working to turn her dissertation into a book about how free women of color used sex “as a tool of negotiation” in New Orleans after the Civil War.

She felt guilty leaving her students at Trinity, she said, but asked herself a question: If they were in her shoes and came to her seeking advice, what would she want them to do?

“I would want them to go,” she said. So she went.

Nell Gluckman is a daily-news reporter. Follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.