The steady flurry of statements issued by colleges and universities in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd and other unarmed Blacks, has sickened Dr. Donna Y. Ford.
“They post these hollow anti-racist statements that make me want to vomit,” Ford, a distinguished professor of education at The Ohio State University quipped during a Diverse webcast that I moderated last week. Too often, these statements are “so superficial, so contradictory to their previous actions,” said Ford, that “it’s like they’re just jumping on the bandwagon.”
University of Virginia issued their own statement. And on last Friday, Dr. Robert C. Pianta, the dean of the Curry School of Education and Human Development went a step further and sent a note to his faculty, students and staff announcing a new search for an associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion and a full-time program director, despite a university-wide hiring freeze that has been in place as a result of COVID-19.
“Over the past several months, in considering upcoming priorities for the school, I have reflected on our inclusion and equity work within the School,” Pianta wrote in a letter to his faculty colleagues and students. “I think it’s fair to say that although we have strong and effective work taking place in some areas, the current status is uneven and in too many ways (e.g. hiring) not making enough progress. I take full responsibility for these gaps and lack of progress. It is abundantly clear that we not only need to advance and expand our current efforts, we need more and new ways of working on social justice, equity, and inclusion particularly as our focus on this work has to increase.”
Sounds like a mea culpa and a pledge to right some serious wrongs, right?
But if Pianta is indeed serious about hiring and retaining a diverse faculty, he should immediately endorse the tenure application of Dr. Paul C. Harris, a rising star, whose tenure denial has some of the nation’s most prominent education scholars like Ford scratching her head.
His case is rightly receiving national attention, in part because the Promotion and Tenure Committee’s evaluation of his scholarship—which focuses on the career readiness of underrepresented students and the identity development of Black male student-athletes—smacks of outright bias. The committee even falsely claimed that the Journal of African American Males in Education which Harris has published in, appeared to be “self-published” although the periodical is peer-reviewed and widely respected, particularly among scholars of color.
