The Stress of Being a Minority Faculty Member

U. of Maryland

A new book argues that progress in minority hiring has stagnated, that many of the supposed gains are illusory, and that minority faculty members’ health suffers as a result. Even sympathetic white faculty members can make academe a stressful place for underrepresented-minority faculty members and students.

So writes Ruth Enid Zambrana in Toxic Ivory Towers: The Consequences of Work Stress on Underrepresented Minority Faculty (Rutgers University Press).

A professor of women’s studies at the University of Maryland at College Park and an adjunct professor of family medicine at the University of Maryland at Baltimore’s School of Medicine, Zambrana reviewed a vast body of studies. She also surveyed and interviewed minority faculty members, listening, she says, to “voices that have been silenced for so long.”

She wanted to find out why, for example, African-American, Hispanic, and other historically excluded minority populations remain far less represented on college faculties, particularly prestigious ones, than they are in the general population, and what effect that has on those who do make it.

This is research, she says, that she first thought to undertake some 20 years ago. She noticed that an inordinate number of her fellow minority colleagues were exhibiting signs of stress and even dying young. Rather than view such cases as isolated, “my medical-sociologist mind went to the institutional level,” she says. She decided to look for larger, structural factors.

Stress is hardly a surprising outcome of minority experiences in historically white American academe, she suggests. Persistent “historically exclusionary practices” created a second tier of institutions — among them historically black and tribal colleges — where nonwhite faculty members tend to be disproportionately consigned.

At research institutions, minority faculty members are frequently burdened by the “racial/ethnic/cultural taxation"of excessive service demands, and they may suspect that they are “institutional mascots.”

Zambrana’s research subjects told her that large and small “unpleasant peer interactions and excessive institutional demands” isolated them academically and socially. So did a lack of mentoring and such forms of institutional withholding as obscured tenure-and-promotion expectations.

Ironically, language deployed by academics and administrators of good will — terms like “diversity” and “inclusion” — can slow progress, Zambrana writes: “We may not be witnessing much progress at all but rather experiencing the power that language has to create illusions of progress.”

And things seem to be getting worse. As states slash higher-education funding, elite institutions in particular have increasingly looked overseas for students and faculty members. With that, she says, American minority faculty members remain a neglected “valuable domestic talent pool.”

What can be done? Zambrana remains upbeat. Just as institutional policies can harm minority-faculty success, better practices can support it, she says — for example, mentoring of the sort she experienced early in her academic career, as the daughter of rural, barely educated Puerto Rican parents.

Institutional leaders also need to introduce more policies that are informed by minority faculty members and their cultural and research perspectives, she says.

In America, where hopes like hers have been expressed for decades, “groups with power really want to believe that we are a country of progress,” she says. “In believing something so deeply, that blinds you to points of regression or stagnation.”