When Jennifer R. Warren was denied tenure last year by Rutgers University at New Brunswick, she believed she had ample grounds to protest the decision. Ms. Warren, an assistant professor of communications who is black, said her school had discouraged her from writing a book and had pushed her to change her teaching style, causing her student evaluations to drop. Her annual reviews, she said, had offered no indication that she wasn’t on the right track.
Student activists saw a force underlying those issues: institutional racism. “By denying her tenure, Rutgers University says that they do not care about black lives,” read an online petition posted in February by the university’s Black Lives Matter chapter.
Ms. Warren told The Chronicle that proving actual racial discrimination in individual tenure cases is nearly impossible. But she agreed to join forces with the student activists and the Rutgers faculty union by framing the problem “more at the institutional level — a systemic racism.”
Students made a strong case on the professor’s behalf, complementing the work of the union, which was helping her file a grievance. They publicized the petition on social media with the hashtag #RU4BlackTenure and held a rally on the campus last month, imploring the university to reconsider Ms. Warren’s bid. (Laurie K. Lewis, chair of the communications department, referred an interview request to a spokesman, who declined to comment on personnel matters.)
Several days after the students’ rally, Ms. Warren received good news: She had won her grievance hearing and would have another shot at tenure, in the spring of 2017.
For decades students have lobbied to reverse tenure-and-promotion decisions that go against popular professors — often by writing letters to college leaders, and more recently by circulating online petitions and waging social-media campaigns. But many of last fall’s campus protests linked the lack of tenured minority professors directly to a poor racial climate. As a result, the role of race in the tenure process has been brought into sharper focus for many student activists.
As racial unrest escalated at Ithaca College and Oberlin College, students on both campuses demanded that certain minority professors be granted immediate tenure; Oberlin students also wanted “guaranteed tenure upon review” for a handful of other scholars. At Stanford University, a student-led coalition called Who’s Teaching Us? presented 25 demands to university leaders in March, hoping to push them to further diversify the faculty and to make its tenure process more transparent. Among the group’s demands: that “all departments publicly release disaggregated tenure data.”
Who’s Teaching Us? was formed in 2014 after Stephen Hong Sohn, an assistant professor at Stanford, was denied tenure. Coalition members believed that Mr. Sohn’s background — he is an Asian-American who identifies as queer — and his research, which is focused on race and sexuality, contributed to the denial. (Mr. Sohn is now an assistant professor of English at the University of California at Riverside.)
‘Amorphous’ and ‘Vague’
Tenure is a relatively new issue for minority-student activists, says Taqwa Brookins, now a junior at Rutgers and chairwoman of the university’s Black Lives Matter chapter. That’s partly because both the tenure process and data on faculty diversity are so obscure, she says.
When it comes to faculty diversity, ‘how are you supposed to protest an issue you don’t know about?’
Calling attention to a scarcity of minority students on a campus is generally easy, Ms. Brookins says, because colleges publish such data on their websites. But when it comes to faculty diversity, she asks, “How are you supposed to protest an issue you don’t know about?”
Sammie Ablaza Wills, a Stanford senior and member of Who’s Teaching Us?, says the coalition noticed a similar murkiness: “The tenure-track criteria are really amorphous and extremely vague, especially across different schools.”
The coalition also took issue with what they saw as Stanford’s inordinate emphasis on research rather than teaching and service. “Faculty of color are likely to be mentoring more students, just by the nature of those students’ wanting to go to professors who look like them and understand their lived experience,” says Wills, who identifies with nonbinary gender pronouns. Concerns over additional mentorship and service responsibilities are familiar to many minority faculty members.
A handful of Rutgers faculty members told Ms. Brookins and fellow student activists about Ms. Warren’s case and the lack of diversity in the communications department. Students started looking through Ms. Warren’s tenure packet and the reasons stated for her denial, and they weren’t convinced.
Ms. Brookins says she doesn’t think student evaluations should be weighted heavily in a tenure decision. Such evaluations have long been criticized for potential bias against women and minorities. (According to Mark R. Killingsworth, a professor of economics and chair of Rutgers’s Faculty Council, “There is widespread agreement among the members of the Faculty Council that Rutgers’s current system of teaching evaluation does a very poor job of evaluating teaching.” Faculty leaders are setting up a task force to recommend reforms, he adds.)
Ms. Brookins believes that Ms. Warren’s research, which is interdisciplinary and focused on the black community and health communication, also hurt her tenure case.
Senior faculty members, who dominate tenure-granting committees and tend to be white, might be skeptical of scholarship that doesn’t toe the line of an established canon, says Felicia L. Teter, a Dartmouth College senior who is among a number of student activists pushing for greater faculty diversity there.
“When you’re dealing with institutions that are traditionally white and traditionally male, most of the tenured faculty are white and male,” she says. “They are coming up and getting to say whether these professors of color are worthy of tenure when they don’t really understand what the professors do.”
Rutgers faculty-union leaders didn’t coordinate with the activists when working to secure Ms. Warren a grievance hearing. But “students are right to express concerns about this,” says David M. Hughes, a professor of anthropology who is president of the Rutgers union. “Students are driven to involvement in a sense of desperation because they’re seeing that percentage go down in a microcosm. What they see in Jennifer Warren’s case is the black-faculty percentage falling instead of rising.”
Ms. Warren emphasizes that she doesn’t want to change the rigor of the tenure process. But she hopes that the university will support — and not silence — faculty members who speak out in support of colleagues who have been denied tenure.
A ‘Struggle to Get Heard’
Can student activism on race and tenure make a difference? Ms. Warren believes that, in her case, it already has.
“If that protest didn’t happen, and we hadn’t been able to out things about what the department was doing, I don’t think I would’ve gotten my hearing,” she says.
Still, she argues, student activists will usually face uphill battles with administrators and faculty members when tenure is on the line. And minority students — who often “struggle to get heard,” she says — might have to coordinate with predominantly white student groups and faculty unions to exert a significant influence, Ms. Warren says.
Not all students are willing to spend months grasping the nitty-gritty details of tenure as the Rutgers and Stanford activists did, says Takiyah N. Amin, an assistant professor of dance at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who signed the petition supporting Ms. Warren. “When a student is coming and going in four years, devoting time to learning about the tenure process isn’t realistic,” she says.
Students might have the most success, Ms. Amin says, by expressing concerns about the value of teaching evaluations and raising broader questions about students’ role in tenure cases.
At Stanford, members of Who’s Teaching Us? have met with administrators a handful of times over the past two years to share their concerns about faculty diversity and tenure, says Sammie Ablaza Wills. “We’ve pretty explicitly been told that the tenure process is immovable, but as a student activist, I think it’s almost my duty to refute those claims, to not believe that the tenure process can’t be changed.”
The Stanford coalition wants faculty members who go up for tenure to be more clearly informed upfront about what’s expected of them and to receive more-regular feedback throughout their early careers. The student says Who’s Teaching Us? is also calling for the university to have minority scholars evaluated by colleagues “who truly understand their academic interests and the context and historical background surrounding their research.”
Rutgers activists are “definitely not going to let this tenure issue die,” Ms. Brookins says. Her Black Lives Matter chapter plans to reach out to other students, as well as faculty and staff members, and build a campaign around its concerns with the tenure process. One of Ms. Brookins’s priorities is to push the university to publicize data on department-by-department diversity among tenured faculty members.
In the meantime, the student group is not done advocating for Ms. Warren. Once the professor goes back up for tenure next spring, “we’ll be waiting,” Ms. Brookins says. “We’re still going to be here.”
Sammie Ablaza Wills says the Stanford coalition would consider advocating for a minority professor if members believed that the faculty member had been denied tenure unfairly. But it would do so cautiously: “Whenever you make one professor kind of a martyr, it takes a lot away from them.”
In Mr. Sohn’s case, “it became this thing where he isn’t just regarded as an amazing scholar or academic,” the Stanford senior says. “When you Google his name, his tenure fight comes up.”
Clarification (5/9/2016, 6:02 p.m.): This article has been updated to reflect the fact that a source, Sammie Ablaza Wills, prefers a nonbinary gender identity.
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.
