When Faculty of Color Feel Isolated, Consortia Expand Their Networks

Julia Robinson for The Chronicle

When Alicia Moore arrived at Southwestern University, in 2001, only one of the 106 full-time faculty members at the entire central Texas college was African American like her.

Luckily, she was in the same department, and she became a mentor to Moore, helping her navigate the waters of academe at a small liberal-arts institution where most students, and most faculty members, are white.

The guidance was indispensable, said Moore, now an associate professor of education. For one thing, she learned to say no, or to strongly consider it, when inevitably approached to serve on diversity committees, and to focus instead on publishing.

Research has shown that the cards are often stacked against academics of color: They face student evaluations rife with racial bias, higher expectations of “invisible labor” like diversity and inclusion work, microaggressions, and outright discrimination. Taken together, it’s an uphill climb, especially at small, mostly white institutions.

Opportunities to expand their networks and demystify academe could make that climb easier, Moore thought.

That’s the idea behind Focus, or Faculty of Color Uniting for Success, which centers on annual summer workshops that offer direct support. Moore and her Southwestern colleagues collaborated with their counterparts at two other small, liberal-arts colleges in the South, Hendrix College and Millsaps College, to create the program, which is funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation administered by the Associated Colleges of the South.

In recent years, individual institutions have focused on recruiting racially diverse faculty members, though the numbers are still small compared with the numbers of diverse students they serve. Less thought has been given to how to support those faculty members once they’ve arrived on a campus. Solutions can move slowly. And in the meantime, brown and black faculty members leak out of the tenure-track pipeline.

Focus was meant to be a stopgap. More than anything, it’d be a place where faculty members of color could feel a sense of belonging, said Moore. “Inclusion may be inviting them into the room,” she said. “But belonging means that they felt like they should be there, and that they should have a place at the table.”

More Work, Fewer Shoulders

It is well documented that the American professoriate is whiter than its students are. As of 2017, about three-quarters of full-time faculty members at American institutions were white, compared with 56 percent of undergraduate and graduate students.

At Southwestern, Hendrix, and Millsaps, the racial imbalance between faculty members and students is even greater. More than a third of students at each of those colleges are students of color, but the faculty of color average 11 percent.

That presents a challenge to those faculty members. Students of color often seek them out for mentorship or guidance, said Julie Sievers, who directs the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship at Southwestern and helped put Focus together. At places where there aren’t many faculty members of color to begin with, she said, “that work can pile up on fewer shoulders.”

That imbalance is one of many things that Focus wanted to address, said Sievers. Moore, for example, said she has a bad habit of staying at work until 9 or 10 p.m. because those are the only times some students can meet. Focus wanted to emphasize conversations about self-care, she said, and talk honestly about how that work can be draining, physically and mentally.

When crafting the workshop schedule, Sievers said, “we were really interested in the needs of faculty of color and not on the needs of the institution.”

In preparation, they examined a workshop that had attempted something similar in the Pacific Northwest. In 2014, five liberal-arts colleges — Lewis and Clark, Reed, Whitman, Willamette University, and the University of Puget Sound — formed a consortium to increase support for faculty of color, who made up 10 to 15 percent of full-time faculty members on each campus. At the inaugural workshop, faculty members made it clear that inviting white allies was “essential,” an article published by the Association of American Colleges & Universities said.

Sievers, who is white, said the committee considered whether Focus workshops should include white allies — faculty members and administrators who share the concern about a hostile environment and want to mitigate it. But the committee decided against it, Sievers said, to make the gathering a safe space for frank conversation. Sievers said she asked permission before attending any session.

Julia Robinson for The Chronicle

‘Not Your Problem’

As awareness has spread about the hurdles faced by faculty members of color, workshops and seminars have cropped up across the country. A watershed moment was the publication, in 2012, of Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia.

The edited volume weaves together personal narratives with empirical research. Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo, a faculty member and author of a chapter in the book, describes how a white male student asked her to cancel a class session because he didn’t feel like attending and his parents paid her salary. She told him she was his professor, not his prostitute. Another faculty member, Angela Mae Kupenda, was asked by her white dean to spend the summer teaching struggling students instead of conducting research — an example of invisible labor.

Presumed Incompetent gave lots of people a language to describe what they were experiencing, said Patricia A. Matthew, an associate professor of English at Montclair State University. Matthew pays close attention to the ways that colleges bring faculty members of color to campus with no clear plan of how to help them after they arrive. At talks she’s given about diversity and inclusion at different institutions she often tells academics, particularly black and Latinx faculty members, “It’s not your job to fix your institution’s problems around race and diversity. It’s your job to get tenure.”

The world needs your publications and your research, Matthew tells them.

Often, the reaction she gets is relief. “Sometimes black women just need somebody who clearly has their best interest at heart to tell them, you know, You don’t have to put out this fire right now,” she said.

Like others in this field, Kerry L. Haynie drew from personal experience to develop what became Duke University’s Summer Institute on Tenure and Professional Advancement. One day, two years into his first job, he was walking across campus with a senior colleague who mentioned that Haynie should start thinking about his third-year review. Haynie had no idea what he meant.

Junior faculty members of color, he said, “are often excluded from networks, due mostly to benign neglect,” and so “we tend to find out important information late in the game.” But he worried that admitting his blind spot could damage his reputation, so he feigned comprehension. Then, he went home and phoned a friend, who explained the critical part of the tenure process.

Haynie, who now directs Duke’s Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Social Sciences, wanted to create an outlet for other academics of color to ask those questions and not feel ashamed. He had also noticed that after a decades-long national effort, black and brown people were pursuing graduate degrees at higher rates but were having less success finding and staying at institutions. Enhancing tenure rates was the next frontier.

So Haynie founded the summer institute. For the past five years, about 16 junior faculty members in underrepresented groups have come to Duke to learn such skills as how to effectively use social media or respond to a negative review. Each is paired with a mentor, who advises them for two years.

Junior faculty members “have some vague notion” about tenure and promotion requirements, Haynie said. But they need someone to explain “what exactly does that mean on a day-to-day basis, or a year-to-year basis.”

‘Tiptoeing Around Fragility’

The inaugural Focus workshop, held over six days in June 2018 on Southwestern’s campus, was designed to color in that outline. Faculty members attended sessions titled “Transitioning From Pre-tenure to Tenure” and “Navigating Service Expectations: Advising Students of Color/Advising Resources.”

They also discussed not just how to be a mentor, but also how to find a mentor and how to know if they were asking too little or too much. “That always felt, to me, like a secret knowledge,” said Felipe Pruneda Sentíes, who directs the Writing Center at Hendrix.

The designers of Focus wanted to ensure that scholars of color had carved out time to actually work on their scholarship, so they set aside hours during the workshop for scholarly writing.

Lamiyah Bahrainwala, an assistant professor of communication studies at Southwestern, said she liked that everyone in the room was a person of color, because that meant there was little time spent “tiptoeing around fragility.” Usually, when discussing topics like racial bias among white peers, there are some “acrobatics” to make everyone comfortable before diving into the research and strategies, Bahrainwala said.

That space allowed people to be open. Scholars could share microaggressions that had stayed with them. Moore described a faculty meeting where everyone was discussing who should attend the next Board of Trustees meetings. The past two times, men had gone. One faculty member said, Why don’t we just get an African American woman? Then he turned around and looked directly at Moore, she said.

“You feel like, now you’re at the center stage at a circus, where all of the lights are on you because you’re in the main ring.”

Being a black woman in academe can be exhausting.

For Brandy Tiernan, an assistant professor of psychology at Sewanee: The University of the South, the most revolutionary aspect of the workshop was talking about self-care. She had been skeptical of the concept, which she thought was necessary only in professions like, say, nursing, where you actually watch people get sick and die.

But at Focus, she learned to try to honor her mental health. It can be hard to find time as a mother of two with a spouse who travels. Tiernan said she tries to do little things, like listening to a good audiobook when she takes the dog for a walk.

Focus also gave Tiernan a lasting community. This semester was “really tough,” Tiernan said, and she didn’t have the structural support she needed. Colleagues she’d met at Focus reached out to her, wrote letters on her behalf, and became a community outside of the several days that they were physically together.

Now Tiernan has a network of people in the South who identify with her and who have shared some of her experiences. That’s crucial to her future, she said.

“Academe is where I want to be. I want to stay,” Tiernan said. “But it’s hard.”

A community of scholars whom she can rely on, she said, makes it a little easier.

Correction (11/6/2019, 3:25 p.m.): This article originally misstated the authorship of the book Presumed Incompetent. The book comprises chapters by separate authors and was jointly edited by four scholars. The article has been updated to reflect that.

Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.