Hazing is the dark side of campus life. Desperate to be accepted
into an exclusive club, bright young people will tolerate long periods
of psychological abuse, often being forced to perform onerous tasks
which established members consider below their dignity.
One of the paradoxes of higher education is that the most
psychologically brutal initiation rites don’t take place in fraternity
houses but in academic departments. Those rites are called “coming up
for tenure.”
And as bad as coming up for tenure is for young White males, it is worse if you’re not.
“For faculty of color, [enure is torture,” says Dr. Alice
Brown-Collins, an African American social psychologist who – along with
Dr. Phyllis Bronstein, a tenured professor at the University of Vermont
– is conducting a qualitative research study analyzing the lives and
careers of thirty scholars who have focused their research on feminist
and multicultural issues.
“Whether they receive tenure or not, a very large percentage of
Black and female academics find the tenure process bitter and
traumatic,” Brown-Collins says. “Because even if you get tenure, unless
every vote was unanimous it means’ that now you get to spend the rest
of your life with some people who thought you weren’t good enough to be
there.”
In the past year or so, the subject of tenure has been widely
debated – not only in academic journals, but on National Public Radio
and in the pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post and other
major publications. Many of the stories focus on proposals to change or
eliminate tenure, and they mostly cast the issue as one that pits
academic freedom against the efficiency needs of administrators.
But the fact that tenure is almost universally torturous to women
and faculty members of color has been largely ignored, thus missing a
window of opportunity to look into some of the reasons higher education
as a whole is questioning the system of tenure as it now exists.
