Academics of Color: A Situation of Frustrating Stagnation

Last week I mentioned The Graduate Employees and Students Organization at Yale, GESO, and their important report “The (Un)Changing Face of the Ivy League."

In addition to reporting on the minimal advances of women faculty in the Ivies, GESO’s publication highlights the discouraging lack of representation of minorities among the ranks of tenured and tenure-track Ivy League professors.

A powerful New York Times article by Karen Arenson on March 1rst covered many of the depressing issues raised by the GESO report. Here are some quotes from her article’s highlights. (Actually, I’d call them the “lowlights:”)

• "In 2003, Ivy League campuses hired 433 new professors into tenure-track jobs, but only 14 were black and 8 were Hispanic."

• "From 1993 to 2003, the percentage of tenured black professors on the Ivy faculties remained essentially flat at 2 percent."

• "There was also little change in the tenure-track positions, the entry-level jobs that give professors a chance to earn permanent positions. In 2003, black professors had no more than 4 percent of the tenure-track positions at any Ivy university."

• "Hispanic professors accounted for 1 percent of tenured professors in the Ivies in both 1993 and 2003, a period in which tenured positions grew by 9 percent, to nearly 6,000 jobs. In 2003, they held 3 percent of 3,560 Ivy League tenure-track jobs, up from 2 percent of 3,230 such jobs in 1993."

• "(U)nder-represented minorities earned only 6.5 percent of all Ph.D.'s granted from 1989 to 1993, and … the percentages in the arts and sciences and engineering were even lower. More than 40 percent of the doctorates earned by blacks were in education."

These facts and figures are certainly discouraging.

Why is the situation still so bleak?

The academics of color I work with have given me some sense of the challenges they face: both a general idea of the stereotypical roadblocks they encounter and very specific, individually nuanced examples of racism and discrimination.

Here are some of the general issues I’ve heard, especially from African-American and Latina women who are faculty members.

Progress is difficult because:

• It is difficult to find mentors. There are few minority faculty at a senior level available to provide guidance and support.

• Minorities, especially women of color, are asked to be on more committees and panels than white, male colleagues. It is almost automatically assumed that they will serve when issues of race and ethnicity are related to the committee topic. These additional service requirements cut into time for research.

• Students of color understandably seek out minority faculty members as mentors and role models. Thus professors end up burdened by heavy advising responsibilities. The faculty of color I work with face a difficult internal conflict: they are committed to providing the mentoring they’ve lacked, yet know that their own careers will be hurt if they spend too much time helping students.

• White colleagues sometimes have the attitude that faculty of color “have it easier”, are under-qualified, or less intellectually talented. People make it clear that they believe the minority faculty member has gotten the job because of their race or ethnicity.

• If the minority faculty member conducts research related to minority issues it is frequently seen as less important or legitimate than “mainstream” scholarly interests.

• Being a “token member” of a department is isolating and the lack of social support provides ongoing emotional and social stress. All minorities in our society face daily reminders that they are seen in stereotyped, negative ways.

• Minority faculty must struggle with subtle, sometimes unconscious, internalized self-doubt and insecurity that are a natural result of growing up in a racist culture.

What do you think? What can we do?
Please let me know about your reactions, impressions and suggestions.

Until next week,

An example of internalized self-doubt: I was struck by the perniciousness of unconscious expectations while reading the book “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell. He describes a study by social psychologists Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson of black college students and their performance on twenty questions taken from the GRE. “When the students were asked to identify their race on a pretest questionnaire,” writes Gladwell, “that simple act was sufficient to prime them with all the negative stereotypes associated with African Americans and academic achievement – and the number of items they got right was cut in half.” (p.56)

Mary McKinney, Ph.D.
Clinical Psychologist
Academic Coach
www.SuccessfulAcademic.com

© 2005 Mary McKinney, All rights reserved. You are free to use material from the Successful Academic Newsletter, in whole or in part, as long as you include complete attribution, including my live web site link. Please also notify me where the material will appear.
Attribution should read: By Mary McKinney, Ph.D. of “Successful Academic Coaching”. Please visit Mary's web site at http://www.successfulacademic.com for additional tenure track tips and dissertation writing strategies.”

This ezine was sent by request to <$name$> at <$email$> on <$today$>. If you wish to cancel your subscription or change your email address, use the links at the bottom of this issue.

If you prefer to receive this ezine in plain text, send a blank email to mckinney-96667@autocontactor.com