What I’m Reading: ‘Black Faculty in the Academy’

After three and a half years as director of a teaching-and-learning center at a historically black university, where I focused on training teachers to be more effective in the classroom, I recently chose to switch lanes. In the fall, I will begin teaching on the tenure track at a predominantly white institution. So I felt it was important for me to build a reading list that would prepare me for that transition. Over the years I have read the seminal work of Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Tracey Laszloffy, The Black Academic’s Guide to Winning Tenure — Without Losing Your Soul and other scholarship, like Sandra Jackson and Richard Greggory Johnson III’s The Black Professoriat: Negotiating a Habitable Space in the Academy.

A new book, Black Faculty in the Academy, edited by Fred A. Bonner II and colleagues, provides a valuable contribution to the literature regarding the success of black faculty in predominantly white institutions. I approached this book looking for concrete examples regarding how to navigate a new professional and social environment as a black professor. This book does that and more by discussing how gender and sexual orientation may inform the ways in which black scholars understand racial microaggressions, and by providing strategies to counteract and deal with those issues. This is a must read for anyone like me who is looking for a handbook to help them become successful in the black professoriate.

Sydney Freeman Jr. is a new associate professor of higher education at the University of Idaho and editor in chief of the Journal for the Study of Postsecondary and Tertiary Education.