Tenure Denials Set Off Alarm Bells, and a Book, About Obstacles for Minority Faculty

When Patricia A. Matthew first went up for tenure at Montclair State University, she received enthusiastic assessments from her tenure committee, the English department chair, the interim dean of the college, and three senior colleagues in her field. But the provost denied her bid.

The problem, he told her, was that several of her essays and a special issue of a journal she’d co-edited hadn’t yet been printed. Ms. Matthew, who is black, was shocked. No one had ever told her that “in print” was the standard to receive tenure.

Several colleagues wrote to the provost and said they had received tenure, promotions, and awards based on work that, like hers, hadn’t been published yet. But the provost, who has since retired, denied Ms. Matthew’s bid again after she appealed. (Susan A. Cole, the university’s president, reversed that decision.)

Around the same time, Ms. Matthew learned about “the Michigan women,” as she calls them. Four female minority scholars at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, who were joint appointments in the same program, had been denied tenure that year. One of them had “Nobel Peace Prize nominee” on her curriculum vitae. “It was so strange to me that nobody at that institution in a leadership position thought, Wait a minute, we have a problem,” Ms. Matthew says. For her, on the other hand, “every alarm bell went off.”

Those experiences inspired Ms. Matthew, now an associate professor of English at Montclair State University whose specialties include British Romanticism and the history of the novel, to take on a project chronicling the experiences of minority academics on the tenure track. Her work turned into an anthology, Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure, coming next month from the University of North Carolina Press. The volume features essays written by scholars from underrepresented groups about how they navigated the tenure process, as well as interviews.

Many of the chapters touch on commonly made arguments about the way tenure candidates are evaluated. Some of the contributors talk about how many senior faculty members don’t have the expertise to assess the interdisciplinary research that minority scholars often focus on. Others note that the tenure process usually doesn’t account for the extra service and mentoring work that professors from minority groups shoulder.

A theme runs throughout the scholars’ stories: Predominantly white institutions hired me in part because of my diverse background, but I often faced setbacks on the tenure track for not being like everyone else.

Ms. Matthew spoke with The Chronicle on Tuesday about her book and how colleges might make the tenure process more equitable for minority scholars. The following transcript of that conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. Can you talk about the meaning of the anthology’s title, Written/Unwritten?

A. We all know this in some way: If you’re in a situation where you’re being evaluated, there are things they tell you. You have to turn in this paper or this document at this time, you have to present this evidence and this material. But there are just all of these practices that are hidden.

It’s not so much somebody saying, “I’m not going to tell this to a person of color.” It’s just that there are these practices, and habits, and assumptions made about how one goes through a tenure process. And people don’t always make sure faculty of color have that information.

The other thing — often, it’s about faculty of color not dotting the I’s in the way that people think they’re supposed to dot the I’s. It’s really about if you fit. And how do you fit into an institution if you’re not like your colleagues? It could be as subtle and simple as the way you ask questions in a department meeting, or the way you respond to student concerns.

Q. Who do you see as the target audience for this book?

A. The reason I did it initially was to make sure that faculty of color and graduate students could see stories that reflect their experiences and that could also offer them coping mechanisms without sort of empty bromide. I didn’t want to give them, “How to get tenure.” So my initial audience was other faculty of color.

That very quickly shifted as I started talking to people. The book is also for administrators, department chairs, deans, and provosts, who really need to understand that these are the experiences of faculty who want to succeed.

Q. What do you think your anthology does that’s different from the previously published books and anthologies that touch on faculty diversity?

A. One thing that Written/Unwritten does is that it’s not organized around race, class, gender, and sexuality. It’s organized thematically. I really want people to think beyond the neat categories. Many people of color don’t want to identify as one thing — they want to say, I’m black and I’m a woman.

I like that there’s diversity within diversity in the book; there’s not a single black person, or a single Asian-American person, or a single queer person.

Q. You say in your introduction that colleges today are happy to hire minority scholars and to tout their commitments to diversity, but they’re still hostile to the idea of awarding them tenure. What do you think these essays say about that dynamic?

A. One of the things that the essays show is that, so often — from what I’m seeing, and what I’m hearing — the goal is “let’s hire a person of color and bring them in to ‘diversify’” without a real understanding of what that means and how to value it.

Not every person of color is going to come in and start a black-studies program, or work with students of color, or organize panels, or speak on Ferguson. But if you ask for that work, you really have to value it. And it has to count in the tenure process.

Q. On that note, have you gained any ideas about what might be done to improve the evaluation process for minority tenure candidates?

A. It’s going to happen in stages. The first thing institutions have got to do is talk to faculty of color who have made it through to find out what they struggled with. If you have people of color who have tenure, they have stories about what could’ve made their lives easier. I don’t mean that they work less, but that they can actually get their work done.

Faculty who are evaluating tenure files should probably have — “training” is too broad a word, but there should be more of a conversation along the way between the scholar and the department about the work that the scholar thinks she’s doing, and the work her department thinks she’s doing.

If you’re an institution that relies heavily on external letters for assessing tenure files, and you’re assessing people who work in ethnic studies, you have to be cognizant of the fact that it’s a very small field. Most institutions require five to seven letters, and I know of an institution that wants twice as many.

That’s a system that’s not intentionally exclusionary. But it doesn’t allow for the fact that, when you only have a certain number of faculty of color who are tenured, who are eligible, who the institution trusts, you might be making it difficult for your faculty of color.

Q. This is an anthology of anecdotes, primarily. How do you see this anthology informing your future research, and perhaps the research of others, about diversity in higher education?

A. I keep thinking about pedagogy and diversity in a different way than I did when I started the project. I’m really interested in the work that we do now as a result of Ferguson. For the academy to be at its best, it has to promote research and pedagogy that makes clear the value of different disciplines.

This book is about people struggling on the tenure track, and I think the next book can answer the question, What does an intellectually diverse community look like? And it can’t just be right wing versus left wing.

Q. Many of the changes you and others in this anthology call for will require white faculty members and administrators to take the initiative. What can they do to become allies for faculty of color?

A. The first responsibility is being very conversant in the myths and realities about faculty of color so that they can talk to people in their departments who are actually hostile to notions of diversity. There are people who hear “diversity” and still think “lowering the standards.” They still think it’s either diversity or excellence; they don’t see them as going hand in hand. There has to be a core group of faculty in every department who can push back against that with credibility.

So many white faculty think, “Well, I’m a good person. So if this was a problem, I would have figured it out and I would have done something about it.” You have to understand that the experience of faculty of color on the tenure track can be an unwritten problem — a problem that’s not so clear.

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.