Yale Professors’ Protest Casts Doubt on a Big Faculty-Diversity Initiative

Updated (4/1/2019, 10:38 p.m.) with reaction and analysis.

When 13 professors at Yale University said on Friday they would cut ties with the institution’s ethnicity, race, and migration program, they said their decision was rooted in a history of inequity.

The professors, all senior-level scholars, said the program had been stuck in a vulnerable position for years, without the hiring authority, resources, or stability that departments and other programs have. And despite promises from senior administrators, the faculty members, many of whom are scholars of color, said nothing had changed.

So they resigned from the program en masse, in hopes of sending a message that the model — a “formula of borrowed labor,” one professor called it — was unsustainable.

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Peter Salovey, Yale’s president, said in a written statement that university officials “remain hopeful that an agreement can be reached” with the program’s professors. Salovey pointed to two new senior-faculty hires as a sign of the university’s investment in the program, and said there are plans to hire two more this year. He also said a $50-million faculty-diversity effort, announced with fanfare in 2015, had allowed Yale to bring in more than 60 new faculty members in three years across the university.

But the professors involved in the protest said there had been little transparency surrounding how that money has been spent.

Eighty-seven students are currently majoring in ethnicity, race, and migration. The professors plan to remain with the program through 2020, they said, to ensure that juniors and seniors can finish their degrees. After that, no tenured professors will be officially affiliated with the program, and the major would effectively have to close.

The issues at play might stem from a specific academic program at Yale. But the professors’ protest is occurring against the backdrop of the $50-million effort. And their reasons hint at broader challenges that faculty of color face on many campuses — and may signal how far Yale has to go to improve faculty diversity.

Lack of Stability

When colleges make efforts to hire more faculty of color, some will probably be specialists in ethnic studies or a similar field. Yet many of the ethnic-studies units at colleges are programs, not departments.

That lower stature can limit their influence and resources, and they are often first in line when budgets are cut. “A program can be dismantled immediately,” said Patricia A. Matthew, an associate professor of English at Montclair State University and editor of Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure (University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

Yale’s ethnicity, race, and migration program follows a model common for ethnic-studies units, where teaching and advising labor is essentially borrowed from other departments, said Daniel Martinez HoSang, an associate professor of American studies and one of the professors who intends to leave the program.

“In some ways it allows institutions to feel somewhat responsive to student interest in these areas,” he said, “without making the kinds of investments that really sustain programs.”

The program’s faculty members also have obligations in the traditional disciplinary areas where they are appointed, such as history or sociology, Martinez HoSang said. That means the program’s course offerings vary widely from semester to semester, depending on which professors can make time, he said.

Alicia Schmidt Camacho, a professor of American studies and the program’s chair, said she believes administrators have mostly made investments in the program in response to student demands.

Tenure and Invisible Labor

When scholars of color go up for tenure, the extra time they spend serving on committees and mentoring students may not be accounted for. That’s often referred to as their “invisible labor.”

Minority scholars in interdisciplinary fields also may have their tenure files evaluated by faculty members who aren’t as familiar with that interdisciplinary work, said Estela Mara Bensimon, a professor of higher education at the University of Southern California.

That’s the reality facing many professors in the Yale program. When professors go up for tenure at the university, their department chair helps present the case to Yale’s tenure and promotion committee, Martinez HoSang said.

But the chair of the ethnicity, race, and migration program “doesn’t have the standing to do that,” he said. That means the person advocating for the program’s faculty members — their traditional-discipline department chair — doesn’t necessarily have a deep understanding of their work in the program.

On top of that, the program’s teaching and advising demands have grown with increased student interest, Camacho said, but the university hasn’t compensated for that with more resources, or by relieving faculty members’ workload elsewhere on the campus.

Retention Problems

Many elite universities have started spending big to try to diversify their faculties. But bringing scholars of color to a campus doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll stay there for long, if other cultural and structural changes aren’t made.

Since the ethnicity, race, and migration program was created, in 1997, 41 affiliated professors have left, Camacho said.

Martinez HoSang said he had been hired for a faculty position that Yale advertised as ethnicity, race, and migration. He came to Yale because he was excited about being part of an ethnic-studies unit at an elite institution that had a broader, global focus, and because he assumed there was a commitment to expanding the program.

Instead, Martinez HoSang said, he discovered that internal university documents don’t even list him, or any of his colleagues, as having appointments in the program. That kind of precariousness, he continued, can make it difficult to retain people who are burned out.

Camacho described the problem as “a real discrepancy between the hiring documents and the actual appointing structure.”

That might seem like a minor bureaucratic issue. But the result, Camacho said, is a program that is the intellectual home of many scholars of color, yet does not empower them to become leaders or enable them to flourish. “In every substantive way,” she said, “regular process, regular authority over hiring and review and promotion has been denied to us.”

Here’s the professors’ announcement:

Correction (4/2/2019, 9:50 a.m.) This ariticle originally stated that Martinez HoSang had been hired for a faculty position that Yale advertised as 50 percent American studies. It was advertised only as in ethnicity, race, and migration. The article has been updated to reflect that.

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.