As we start another fall, for a number of us young, underrepresented, minority faculty we wrestle with one decision: do I go up or not? Like many other disciplines, higher education has its own lexicon. The phrase “going up” is a crossdisciplinary term specific to the faculty side of academe. A number of us this month will have submitted our letters indicating our decision to go up or not. We will have decided to subject ourselves to the review of our peers, to thereby run the gantlet and see if we can be deemed worthy and of value to our respective universities.
In a time period when the landscape of higher education has called for more color through diverse faces, one would think our high-achieving and underrepresented minorities would be invited to run the gantlet with strict supervision and mentorship to better prepare them. Such is not the case. Evidence can be seen in the most recent incident with Dr. Aimee Bangh’s tenure denial at Dartmouth last spring.
Forty years ago, Menges and Exum cited the institutionalized barriers to tenure for women and minority faculty. A generation later, Fenelon presented research that suggested tenure and promotion committees were used as vehicles to maintain dominant ideologies that perpetuated institutionally racist outcomes.
Perna, just 10 years ago, shed light on the disparagingly different rates of tenure for female faculty with families. Just this summer, Louis, Rawls, et al., illustrated trends like minority (specifically Black) faculty serving their universities in more mentoring, advising, and service roles on “committees that address minority issues and diversity initiatives.”
Labeled as cultural taxation by Padilla, these roles are recognized as a hindrance to our ability to focus on scholarship productivity, and that service not being valued by other faculty. As if not enough, NCES empirical data statistically support that, for every 10 early career underrepresented minority faculty joining academe, nine will not make it to full professor. We are embarking on nearly half a century of research that speaks to the microaggressively institutionalized practices that contribute to the lack of equitably tenured and promoted underrepresented minorities in academe.
While we have been able to address discriminatory hiring practices through the EEOC, we have not been fully able to remove them from the sacredly protected peer validation of tenure.
Even for institutions with less obscure probationary employment guidelines for tenure and promotion policies, there exists a double standard for underrepresented minorities. This double standard exists where the middle-(wo)men in our educational hierarchy are emboldened with the ability to circumvent policies with subjective perceptions on the quality of the contributions of young, underrepresented minority faculty.
