In Diversity Efforts, An Invisible Labor Falls on Faculty of Color

Dr. Mangala SubramaniamIn the ongoing, often fraught march toward diversifying both the student body and the faculty of colleges and universities, professors of color have reported being saddled with added responsibilities that are less of a concern for most white faculty. The COVID-19 pandemic made the weight of those added duties even more glaring, some observers say, and clarified just how much more difficult it can be for faculty of color to successfully proceed toward earning tenure — under the longstanding rules about what constitutes scholarship that merits tenure.

“There is this invisible labor that, to a great extent, falls on faculty of color and on women and on women of color, especially,” says Dr. Mangala Subramaniam, a few weeks after lending her expertise to an August 2022 webinar, “Making the Case: Preparing Your Dossier for Promotion to Full Professor.” The webinar, hosted by Worcester Polytechnic Institute, signified the kind of extra lifting that Subramaniam has done throughout her career in higher education.

Subramaniam is a sociologist and former director of the Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence at Purdue University. She says the ongoing pandemic has renewed and, in some ways, sharpened discussion about how the wide array of work some faculty undertake should be measured, valued, and recognized as part of an official portfolio of those seeking tenure.

“After the summer of 2020,” Subramaniam says, “ ... students of color were relying on faculty of color during those times. The emotional work involved in that is tremendous, it’s exhausting. I know. Personally, I have done it. I’ve listened to that trauma, then needed to step back and take thirty minutes to regroup in my own head — before reaching out again to those individuals who were falling apart and didn’t know where else to go. I can’t even quantify the invisible and emotional labor that I have done through the pandemic.

“In some ways women and women of color, especially, have been doing it for a long time,” she continues. “It’s in the scholarship. But we’ve not grappled with how we incorporate and regard this work as substantial, meaningful.”

The COVID-19 effect

For those neophyte faculty, the situation may be even worse, according to Dr. Lydia Contreras, vice provost for faculty diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of Texas at Austin.