faculty identity

This book presents readers with eleven compelling autoethnographies that combine critical theory and scholars’ lived experiences. Each contributor deserves its own recognition for the courageous act of opening up private spaces for public discussion, utilizing their own experiences as data. Described as a “nontraditional way of knowing,” autoethnography, as a form, “challenges the criticism of traditional positivist epistemologies regarding ‘objectivity, absolute truth, and ‘validity’’” (13, 7). The text’s editors, Felicia M. Briscoe and Muhammad A. Khalifa, remark that they choose critical autoethnography as a genre because it “allows us to represent knowledge outside a traditional European framework” (13).

Western academe is itself a culture – one historically dictated by White middle-class male norms. Autoenthographies produced by those belonging to marginalized and often silenced groups counter and disrupt narratives of the dominant academic discourse. Each of these scholars tells their own story and documents their experience of ‘becoming critical’ when they recognized the oppressive power of relationships at work in their worlds, reacted to them, and in the end, endeavored to steer society towards “greater social, political, and economic equity” each in their own way (10). These autoethnographies are, in short, counter-narratives for social justice within higher education.

Drawing from such disparate sources as Comedy Central’s Chapelle’s Show to renowned theorists such as Patricia Hill Collins, Paulo Freire, and Pierre Bourdieu, these texts pull from a diverse range of mediums. While the experiences are varied and multifaceted, much of the theory drawn upon overlaps. Many of the authors use a Foucauldian understanding of the power/knowledge relationship (splendidly illustrated in Briscoe’s chapter) which suggests that power is not totally in the hands of one person. As Briscoe states, “people cannot be neatly divided into oppressors and the oppressed... we are oppressors in other ways” (120-121). Other common theories pervade the series, such as CRT (Critical Race Theory) which highlights the endemic nature of racism in American society. Many of the authors give a cursory nod to Judith Bulter’s concept of one’s identity as performative. However, Miguel De Oliver’s “We’re All Half-Breeds Now…in a Not so Ivory Tower” describes how, for the “racially ambiguous,” the space that one occupies becomes the “key to presumptions of identity” (228). In his experience, he need only occupy a particular space to be ascribed a specific identity (foreigner, Latino, “White,” Navajo, “Black athlete,” and so forth) (225-241).

Whether the chapter is about a Gusii woman (Damaris Moraa Choti) living in a world of male domination, experiencing cultural pressures (from primarily women relatives) to undergo clitoridectomy, who finds solace in her family’s Christian faith and love of education or a Black, male, Muslim’s (Muhammad A. Khalifa’s) encounter of being automatically singled out in class to respond to a Boyz N the Hood trailer because in the “White imaginative” Black males are expected to identify with the gangster nature, readers will be challenged by the worlds presented and drawn into the experiences described. Sadly, there are no easy answers and speaking out against institutional injustices often has very real material consequences (as noted in the chapter “Too Black, Yet Not Black Enough: Challenging White Supremacy in U.S. Teacher Education and the Making of Two Radical Social Misfits” by Brenda G. Juarez and Cleveland Hayes).

The case studies are divvied up by the contributor’s experience based on race and gender but perhaps the most instructive section focuses on the case studies documenting scholars’ intersecting dimensions of identity (race, gender, ethnicity, class, religious, and so forth). The autoethnographies in this section track how the authors embody multiple (sometimes conflicting) identities, occupy a myriad of roles, and negotiate their personal and professional identities amid the confines of higher education. In the chapter, “Working the Hyphens: Ethnographic Snapshots in Becoming Critical-Female-Black-Scholars,” El-Amin, Henry, and Laura fight the notion that there is “no room for real PhDs to take seriously scholarship that is politically, historically, and personally rooted in multiple identities” (208). These scholars’ stories – in fact, their very existence – explode the myth of the monolithic scholarly experience.

As the American university becomes exponentially diverse, college professors and administrators will need to be well-versed in critical theory as well as actively engaged in dialogues on difference. This book exposes the reader to both. Readers need not be educational professionals or “theory heads” to benefit from the stories presented here; anyone invested in social justice and educational equity will be rewarded by hearing these voices.

This book is dedicated to a full-orbed challenge to discrimination – and promotion of multiculturalism – in higher education, from the classroom to “changes in the cultures, structures, and policies of the institution” (194). It will benefit faculty and administrators seeking to better understand, promote, and implement solutions regarding various diversities in university contexts. While Christian educators may question certain philosophical and religious presuppositions being advocated, many descriptive, reflective, and practical insights can be critically embraced for pedagogy and classroom, course development, broader curricular intentions, and governing cultures and mechanisms.

Perhaps centrally beneficial to faculty are the narratives of diverse women and men faculty – white and of color, representing both natural science and social science disciplines – responding to a face-to-face interview protocol of open-ended and broad questions: queries seeking responses to eight topical areas primarily focused on teaching and diversity, race and gendered experiences, general diversity issues in higher education, and agential roles in supporting or bringing change involving diversity and multiculturalism (26-28).

This work’s broad purpose is to explore how university faculty members of various races, ethnicities, and genders – awarded for undergraduate teaching effectiveness in diverse classroom environments – engage demands and expectations from students, from higher education as a social institution, and from themselves, in racially and ethnically diverse classrooms: especially toward improving the teaching-learning process (viii-ix).

The book comprises four parts: background and context, difference and diversity in classroom interactions, identity role examination, and larger contexts and change. Each part contains three chapters. References are extensive and effectively utilized and the index is well-designed.

The opening chapter argues that white male dominance in university settings significantly affects white women and faculty of color, as well as students, especially of non-majority groups. Negatively, this includes exclusion and discrimination via traditions that focus on individualistic value orientation and norms that “diminish the importance of teamwork and skills in interactions among the faculty,” leading to a sense of isolation and lack of community (3). In the classroom the individual achievement emphasis, combined with presumed universalistic norms related to tests or criteria as indicators of merit, entail pedagogical approaches that minimize students’ cultural and socioeconomic identities, backgrounds, and relationships, undermining collaborative learning. Nevertheless, all faculty are responsible for personal and organizational change, whether white faculty especially using their authority to adopt practices that challenge the commonplace habitus, or underrepresented faculty utilizing the margin for building communities of marginalized faculty and links to communities and groups outside academia (19).

Chapter 2 outlines the project/study design and purpose, “to explore the ways in which faculty members’ social identities impact their experience in the university, especially but not solely in the classroom” (21), while Chapter 3 describes and elaborates “five major constitutive elements of conflict in the educational setting” – the instructor, the student, the pedagogical approach, the classroom space, and the course material – that help readers decipher “how varied forms of conflict emerge given the different ways in which these elements converge” (39). Each element is expounded in later chapters.

It seems appropriate to conclude this review with a primary thesis of the book: “ultimately, whatever the causes of perceived challenges to authority and expertise, the key pedagogical dilemma for faculty is to work at ensuring and preserving the authority that has a place in relationships with students while also maintaining an inquiring, empowering, and vibrant educational climate” (63).

A powerful account of the experience of discrimination against married women and mothers in academia, this book documents many realities I have lamented alongside female colleagues and graduate students during my years in the profession. As a married woman with three children and tenure, I am on the other side of many of the acute struggles, but reading about the experience of other women academics made me put down the book more times than I can count feeling a sort of survivor’s guilt and anger. Some of the common experiences of women that the book identifies are things I have experienced firsthand, from the suspicion that letting my doctoral advisor know I was pregnant would signal that I was not really a serious academic, to trying to schedule on-campus interviews while nursing an infant, to disdain from other faculty when pushing to create a tenure-clock stoppage policy for new faculty parents at my own institution. Other accounts in the book had personal resonance for me because of experiences of colleagues who were not able to secure positions in the academy. This book documents critical justice issues that demand our attention and creative response.

The book is divided into sections corresponding to the timetable of an academic career: graduate school, getting into the game, tenure-track positions, and life after tenure, including retirement. Each section explores data regarding the discriminatory structures and practices in that stage of an academic career, and offers policy and practices that will improve conditions. The book uses two primary data sources: the Survey of Doctorate Recipients and a series of surveys about quality of life for students from nine of the ten schools within the University of California system. The first study includes data from over 160,000 recipients of doctorates in the social sciences, sciences, and humanities, and provides much of the quantitative data for the book (which draws on data from 1981-2003). Because this study follows both those who enter the professorate and those who enter other jobs, it provides comparative data for the population with a doctorate not working in the academy. The series of surveys in the University of California schools include both quantitative and qualitative data and were designed to explore work/family issues among the professorate, administered between 2003 and 2009. The resulting book is rich with data and analysis, any section of which is worth further exploration for those involved in training doctoral students, participating in faculty hiring processes, and designing human resource policies for faculty. Although much of the data and conversation focuses specifically on the status of women in STEM fields, there is much to ponder for those of us in the humanities as well, especially as the humanities job market continues to shrink and more positions are term-contract or contingent in nature.

One of the key observations of the text is that, although women continue to face general sexist discrimination in the academic labor force, the greatest level of structural sexism is exhibited against married women and mothers. For instance: “Compared with her childless female counterpart, a woman with a child under six is 21 percent less likely to land a tenure-track position” (28). The study uncovers interesting trends, such as the global gender penalty causing women to be 7 percent less likely to get tenure-track positions than their male counterparts disappears when researchers account for the effects of marriage and children. The additional marriage and child penalty makes women, whose childbearing years often coincide with graduate school and hiring processes, especially vulnerable in navigating an academic career and establishing a personal life. In the disciplines of religion and theology, the many schools that do not hire women faculty due to religious understandings of their limited gender roles likely make these numbers even starker.

As with women in other careers, years spent caring for small children leave difficult gaps in a curriculum vitae, which creates a double bind. If a mother of young children volunteers information about what she was doing during the gap, she may be seen as less committed, but if she fails to offer an explanation, she may be perceived as covering up more concerning reasons for the gap in employment. Because interviews for academic positions often include socializing over meals, casual (though illegal) questions about marriage and family status often come up, creating problems for women who know that having young children is often not considered desirable for faculty colleagues. Additionally, the research documents that spouses who need employment are often considered more problematic for women academics than for men, whose wives are often assumed to be more moveable than the husbands of women faculty (whether or not this is true). Although the report shows more favorable conditions for women with older children and those who make it through the tenure process, the book still demonstrates that women disproportionately spend time in service to the institution through midlevel administrative roles and student advising hours, which often delays their promotion to full professor and causes lower salaries upon retirement.
 
The book also offers suggestions for practices to create a more family-friendly professorate, including subsidized childcare (including amazing but necessary services such as access to emergency care for sick children and grants for child care to allow for travel to academic conferences), tenure-clock stoppage for new parents, and job placement for spouses of new hires. The book also notes that merely creating such policies and services are not enough, citing a study in the University of California system that found that less than half of women and only ten percent of men were using their family-friendly policies, and many of them did not know they existed, despite having been added in 1988. This study points to the need for a shift in cultures around these policies, so that using them does not create discrimination and negative attitudes from supervisors and colleagues. The book also explores the need for re-entry tracks for those who have left the field for childrearing or other family-care responsibilities, and vigilance about age discrimination in hiring processes upon re-entry.

Recent organizing among graduate TA’s and adjunct faculty have raised awareness that economic conditions and benefits are even bleaker among these populations. The text only begins to touch on the world of contingent faculty, except to note that women are over-represented in both their ranks and the ranks of lower-status positions (in terms of pay and benefits) at community colleges: “Compared with her childless counterpart, a woman with a child under six is 26 percent more likely to be employed as contingent faculty rather than a tenure-track position. Compared with a man with a young child, she is 132 percent more likely to be working in a contingent position” (38). These accounts demand that even in a period when tenure-track jobs are considered a luxury good because of their rarity, we must pay attention to the forces at work that create such gaps between the hiring and work experience of men and unmarried women and women who have spouses or children in our profession. Some issues might be better addressed at a societal level, such as the availability of affordable child and health care and adequate family leave policies, but many of the cultural shifts required in graduate programs and hiring processes can be addressed through increased awareness, attitudinal changes, and strategic policy changes. While the book does not trace the data after the 2008 economic downturn, such struggles in work/life ecology are increasingly a problem for both men and women as more families require two wage earners, and as even many tenure-track faculty positions do not pay enough or have adequate benefits to support families with small children on one salary, whether that of the male or female parent.