Hydrologic and thermal geologic disposal modeling. Civic education in a charter-school network. Evolution of coastlines and response to sea-level rise. Economic inequality and global securities. Those were just a handful of research topics from a group of doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows I met in March at the Building Future Faculty Program, held annually at North Carolina State University.
The program is aimed at helping underrepresented (by virtue of their race or gender) graduate students and Ph.D.’s to enter the profession. In three days of career workshops and networking, we built various forms of capital that we hope to parlay into full-time, tenure-track jobs. As a member of this group, I was surrounded by some of the most intelligent, engaging, motivated, and accomplished young scholars from some of the world’s most elite universities.
And yet I was shocked by how poorly many of us seemed to understand the faculty career. As underrepresented minorities in our fields, we brought surprisingly disparate levels of socialization to the future-faculty program.
In my cohort were people who did not know about the different types of faculty positions in academe. Some participants had little understanding of university organizational structures, while others had next to no knowledge about the tenure-and-promotion process. Ignorance of those things is no fault of our own, but rather of a doctoral-education system that was not built to support us. We look around our departments and see so few people who look like us. As one participant noted: “My mother is a professor in the business school, but I had never met an African-American woman in my field [statistics] until this program.”
Our lack of socialization on facets of academic work and life that are vitally important to success in academe speaks loudly and negatively to the future of knowledge production in our country — both the types of knowledge produced and who is able to produce them. As an aspiring researcher who examines diversity and equity in graduate education, attending this program was both a professional learning experience for me and a “meta-case study” related to my research interests. This essay is intended as a call for faculty and administrators to assess how they and their programs are (or are not) supporting underrepresented students.
A cyclical, negatively reinforcing pattern seems to persist in doctoral education. One the one hand, faculty demographics do not reflect the increasingly diversified undergraduate population. Minority students may not pursue a Ph.D. because they see a lack of mentors, a lack of financial support, and a lack of “fit.” Some undergraduates don’t even realize that graduate study is an option; their potential success in a Ph.D. program is dependent on them hearing about it, often by chance.
Even when these students are admitted and successful in a doctoral programs — as my colleagues in the future-faculty program were — low or disparate levels of socialization may mean they never actually make it to the tenure track. And so they are unable to diversify the faculty and become role models for prospective graduate students. And the cycle continues.
I write all of this to say that, even though access to graduate education is a continued concern, the narratives of my peers at this gathering revealed a continuing concern beyond admissions and program success. To create a diverse faculty, diverse Ph.D.’s have to be socialized to succeed in the profession.
Throughout our weeklong meeting, we were constantly assured that we could become extremely successful faculty members. But what of the hundreds of other graduate students and postdocs who applied to the future-faculty program but didn’t get a spot? There was room for only 34 people. The participants at this meeting are pursuing research that is potentially life-changing for all of society, and so are many other graduate students from underrepresented groups. What will be lost if many of those people do not make it into the profession?
The future-faculty program opened some eyes. “I learned that I have a lot of work to do to prepare for the market, and I was reminded that being a person of color is not going to give me a leg up,” said one participant. She had applied to the program specifically to seek mentoring “geared toward students and women of color because I want to be in an environment that is honest about the barriers that we face and provides specific advice on how to surmount these barriers.”
Another student glumly summed up the atmosphere of her home campus: “The BFF program focuses on investing the time, money, and faculty resources in training us now because they recognize the value we bring to the table as future faculty even if our home institution doesn’t.”
Scholars have written extensively about student success in doctoral programs. Others have explored the career experiences of faculty members once they find jobs in academe. But not as much research exists regarding how minority doctoral students are socialized to take the next step after graduate school: securing a faculty position and making the transition to faculty life.
In their 2013 book, Increasing Diversity in Doctoral Education, Karri A. Holley and Joretta Joseph wrote that “the doctorate holds a key role in the country’s scientific ambition, future economic security, and knowledge production.” And yet there is a risk that, without proper socialization, knowledge may be lost or unrealized.
To avoid that and to foster diversity in the Ph.D. pool, professors in our home departments need to have more conversations with us about both the job-search process and academic life generally. Contract negotiation, public speaking, publication and dissemination of scholarship, campus politics, and hostile work environments are all subjects on which critical conversations must occur — more frequently and consistently.
Professors need to see us not just as research assistants, but as people who bring individual identities and experiences to academe. They need to talk with us about how those identities may affect our experiences in higher education. Connect us with other faculty members in our fields who may share identities, experiences, or resources.
Campuses can coordinate programs like Building Future Faculty as one option. As a black female participant at this year’s conference said: “Through programs like this we have more professional tools at our disposal to help us find the right institution that is willing to commit to our success, … and not just bring us in as a token faculty member to provide an illusion of diversity on a university campus.”
Each year the future-faculty program receives hundreds of applications. There is a visible need for it to exist. And students are eager to learn. They want the knowledge, and are extending a hand for support. As one participant put it, “I didn’t realize how much I didn’t know.”
The socialization of underrepresented doctoral students is but one component of a larger campus and societal system that marginalizes certain students and privileges others. As it stands, colleges and universities will be engaged in the praxis of diversity for many years to come. But socializing the next generation of faculty is one sure step in the right direction.
