What is the situation like for professors of color at major universities, particularly the ones teaching the story of ethnic diversity?
Just ask Scott Kurashige and his wife, Emily Lawsin, who found the office politics of academia rise to the level of lawsuit.
As reported last week, Kurashige, a former fully tenured professor at the University of Michigan, and Lawsin, a senior lecturer at the university, have filed a suit against the school based on violations of the state’s civil rights laws.
The school denies their allegations and has stated it will vigorously defend against the suit.
In an exclusive interview on my podcast, Emil Amok’s Takeout, to be published later this week on iTunes, and on www.aaldef.org/blog, the two professors spoke publicly about their case and why it was important to hold Michigan accountable for its hypocritical stand on diversity.
Kurashige, who also the director of Michigan’s Asian Pacific Islander American Studies program until 2013, said it began with his published research that showed his unit in American studies lost 20 faculty of color from 1997 to 2016.
“Some of them, including myself, were fired, pushed away or even left academia because of the hostile climate of that place. And I think what really gets people is the hypocrisy,” Kurashige said in the podcast interview. “At other places, people get denied tenured, they contest it, the either win or lose. At Michigan, though, there’s always this insistence that no matter what their practice is, their rhetoric never changes, they’re so committed, they’re the national leaders in the pursuit of diversity and equity.”
