There generally remains a gulf between the way most Black faculty perceive the racial climate at their institutions and the recognition by non-Black faculty and administrators that there are problems ...and that these perceptions have merit. This book is intended to promote a productive dialogue. This book weaves the authors' own experiences with the responses of 136 Black faculty to a questionnaire, and a smaller sample who were interviewed, to identify the factors that determine Black faculty's satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their jobs and institutions. Recurring themes underscore the importance of a supportive work environment that is built on mutual respect, full inclusion in the decision-making process, and an institutional climate that does not tolerate cultural insensitivity or racism. The qualitative and quantitative information and the authors' conclusions can help postsecondary institutions improve Black faculty satisfaction levels, and ultimately, retention rates. This book will resonate with any Black faculty who have felt frustrated enough to consider leaving a postsecondary institution and with those who are content at their current institutions. For non-Black faculty and for administrators of all races, the book illuminates the sources of job satisfaction and dissatisfaction, explains the reasons their Black colleagues leave or stay, and offers valuable recommendations for change. For anyone, at any level, interested in the issue of the racial climate at his or her institution, this book offers a constructive framework for discussion and action
How colleges and universities can live up to their ideals of diversity, and why inclusivity and excellence go hand in hand. Most colleges and universities embrace the ideals of diversity and ...inclusion, but many fall short, especially in the hiring, retention, and advancement of faculty who would more fully represent our diverse world--in particular women and people of color. In this book, Abigail Stewart and Virginia Valian argue that diversity and excellence go hand in hand and provide guidance for achieving both. Stewart and Valian, themselves senior academics, support their argument with comprehensive data from a range of disciplines. They show why merit is often overlooked; they offer statistics and examples of individual experiences of exclusion, such as being left out of crucial meetings; and they outline institutional practices that keep exclusion invisible, including reliance on proxies for excellence, such as prestige, that disadvantage outstanding candidates who are not members of the white male majority. Perhaps most important, Stewart and Valian provide practical advice for overcoming obstacles to inclusion. This advice is based on their experiences at their own universities, their consultations with faculty and administrators at many other institutions, and data on institutional change. Stewart and Valian offer recommendations for changing structures and practices so that people become successful in ways that benefit everyone. They describe better ways of searching for job candidates; evaluating candidates for hiring, tenure, and promotion; helping faculty succeed; and broadening rewards and recognition.
Presumed incompetent Gutierrez y Muhs, Gabriella; Niemann, Yolanda Flores; Gonzalez, Carmen G ...
2012, 20120521, 2012-10-31
eBook, Book
Presumed Incompetent is a pathbreaking account of the intersecting roles of race, gender, and class in the working lives of women faculty of color. Through personal narratives and qualitative ...empirical studies, more than 40 authors expose the daunting challenges faced by academic women of color as they navigate the often hostile terrain of higher education, including hiring, promotion, tenure, and relations with students, colleagues, and administrators. The narratives are filled with wit, wisdom, and concrete recommendations, and provide a window into the struggles of professional women in a racially stratified but increasingly multicultural America.
In question-and-answer form, Ms. Mentor advises academic women about issues they daren't discuss openly, such as: How does one really clamber onto the tenure track when the job market is so nasty, ...brutish, and small? Is there such a thing as the perfectly marketable dissertation topic? How does a meek young woman become a tiger of an authority figure in the classroom-and get stupendous teaching evaluations? How does one cope with sexual harassment, grandiosity, and bizarre behavior from entrenched colleagues? Ms. Mentor's readers will find answers to the secret queries they were afraid to ask anyone else. They'll discover what it really takes to get tenure; what to wear to academic occasions; when to snicker, when to hide, what to eat, and when to sue. They'll find out how to get firmly planted in the rich red earth of tenure. They'll learn why lunch is the most important meal of the day.
Adjunct Faculty Voices Roy Fuller, Marie Kendall Brown, Kimberly Smith / Roy Fuller, Marie Kendall Brown, Kimberly Smith
2017, 2023-07-03, 2017-10-31
eBook
As the debate regarding the increasing use of adjunct faculty in higher education continues to swirl, the voices of adjunct faculty themselves are rarely heard. Stories abound regarding the poor ...working conditions in which most adjunct faculty labor, yet many of those that employ adjunct faculty are unaware of how the conditions impact an adjunct's ability to teach effectively. Adjunct Faculty Voices gives a voice to this growing population. It shares the experiences and clear benefits adjuncts gain from having access to professional development opportunities. In spite of a shortage of resources, there are institutions offering development programs that target the pressing needs of this population.The first part of the book features the voices of adjunct faculty who tell their stories of finding professional development and creating or connecting with communities of colleagues for mutual support. These adjunct voices represent a range of disciplinary perspectives, career stages, and institutional types. In the second section, the authors draw upon a benchmarking study of adjunct faculty developing programs, examine specific challenges and highlight successful practices. Institutions can support adjunct faculty through teaching academies and faculty learning communities; mentor programs; conference support; and adjunct faculty liaison positions.Topics discussed include:
Best professional development practices that support and benefit adjunct faculty
Faculty social isolation and community-building opportunities
An overview of changes affecting the academic workforce
An outline of issues and working conditions
Current demographics and types of adjunct faculty
Survey results from adjunct faculty developers
Adjunct faculty narratives featuring their professional development and community experiencesTeaching and Learning centers across the country are responding to the growing adjunct cohort in innovative and efficient ways. Administrators, deans, department cha
Much attention has been paid to the increasing proportion of non-tenure-track faculty--adjuncts, lecturers, and others--in American higher education. Critics charge that universities exploit ..."contingent faculty" and graduate students, engaging in a type of bait and switch to attract applicants (advertising institutional standing based on distinguished faculty who seldom teach undergraduates), and as a result provide undergraduates with an inadequate educational experience. This book, by two experienced academic administrators, investigates the expanding role of part-time and non-tenure-track instructors in ten elite research universities and the consequences of this trend for the quality of the educational experience, the functioning of the university, and the excellence of the academic environment. The authors discover, to their surprise, that the existing data on the workforce in higher education is ambiguous (different institutions use different terms for non-tenure track instructors; some even omit them from faculty data reports), making comparisons suspect. Many academic administrators are unaware of the tenured/nontenured breakdown of their own faculties and the hiring practices of their own universities. The authors look closely at the teaching workforce at Berkeley, Illinois, Michigan, Virginia, Washington, Cornell, Duke, MIT, Northwestern, and Washington University, believing that these outstanding universities provide a strong test case of resistance to pressures on the traditional tenure system. They describe hiring trends and what drives them, explain why they matter if we want to improve undergraduate education, support collegiality on campus, trust in academic governance, prevent the erosion of tenure, and preserve America's global leadership in higher education.
Higher education is becoming destabilized in the face of extraordinarily rapid change. The composition of the academy's most valuable asset--the faculty--and the essential nature of faculty work are ...being transformed. Jack H. Schuster and Martin J. Finkelstein describe the transformation of the American faculty in the most extensive and ambitious analysis of the American academic profession undertaken in a generation. A century ago the American research university emerged as a new organizational form animated by the professionalized, discipline-based scholar. The research university model persisted through two world wars and greatly varying economic conditions. In recent years, however, a new order has surfaced, organized around a globalized, knowledge-based economy, powerful privatization and market forces, and stunning new information technologies. These developments have transformed the higher education enterprise in ways barely imaginable in generations past. At the heart of that transformation, but largely invisible, has been a restructuring of academic appointments, academic work, and academic careers--a reconfiguring widely decried but heretofore inadequately described. This volume depicts the scope and depth of the transformation, combing empirical data drawn from three decades of national higher education surveys. The authors' portrait, at once startling and disturbing, provides the context for interpreting these developments as part of a larger structural evolution of the national higher education system. They outline the stakes for the nation and the challenging work to be done. Appended are: (1) The National Faculty Surveys; (2) Selected National Faculty Surveys: A Concordance of Contents; (3) Interpreting Faculty Surveys: Challenges and Strategies; (4) Variables for Classifying Faculty Subgroups; (5) Definitions of Terms Used in Tables and Figures; (6) Academic Appointments: Historical Milestones; (7) Faculty Compensation: Data Sources; (8) Note on Accessing the Survey Instruments; (9) Faculty Diversity: Race and Ethnic Categories; and (10) Appendix Tables. A bibliography and an index are included. (Contains 37 line drawings.)
The life and accomplishments of an influential leader in
the desegregated South
This biography of educational activist and Black studies
forerunner Bertha Maxwell-Roddey examines a life of remarkable
...achievements and leadership in the desegregated South. Sonya Ramsey
modernizes the nineteenth-century term "race woman" to describe how
Maxwell-Roddey and her peers turned hard-won civil rights and
feminist milestones into tangible accomplishments in North Carolina
and nationwide from the late 1960s to the 1990s.
Born in 1930, Maxwell-Roddey became one of Charlotte's first
Black women principals of a white elementary school; she was the
founding director of the University of North Carolina at
Charlotte's Africana Studies Department; and she cofounded the
Afro-American Cultural and Service Center, now the Harvey B. Gantt
Center for African-American Art + Culture. Maxwell-Roddey founded
the National Council for Black Studies, helping institutionalize
the field with what is still its premier professional organization,
and served as the 20th National President of Delta Sigma Theta
Sorority, Inc., one of the most influential Black women's
organizations in the United States.
Using oral histories and primary sources that include private
records from numerous Black women's home archives, Ramsey
illuminates the intersectional leadership strategies used by
Maxwell-Roddey and other modern race women to dismantle
discriminatory barriers in the classroom and the boardroom. Bertha
Maxwell-Roddey offers new insights into desegregation, urban
renewal, and the rise of the Black middle class through the lens of
a powerful leader's life story.
Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining
the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the
National Endowment for the Humanities.
The first decade of the 21st century brought major challenges to higher education, all of which have implications for and impact the future of faculty professional development. This volume provides ...the field with an important snapshot of faculty development structures, priorities and practices in a period of change, and uses the collective wisdom of those engaged with teaching, learning, and faculty development centers and programs to identify important new directions for practice. Building on their previous study of a decade ago, published under the title of Creating the Future of Faculty Development, the authors explore questions of professional preparation and pathways, programmatic priorities, collaboration, and assessment. Since the publication of this earlier study, the pressures on faculty development have only escalated-demands for greater accountability from regional and disciplinary accreditors, fiscal constraints, increasing diversity in types of faculty appointments, and expansion of new technologies for research and teaching. Centers have been asked to address a wider range of institutional issues and priorities based on these challenges. How have they responded and what strategies should centers be considering? These are the questions this book addresses.For this new study the authors re-surveyed faculty developers on perceived priorities for the field as well as practices and services offered. They also examined more deeply than the earlier study the organization of faculty development, including characteristics of directors; operating budgets and staffing levels of centers; and patterns of collaboration, re-organization and consolidation. In doing so they elicited information on centers' "signature programs," and the ways that they assess the impact of their programs on teaching and learning and other key outcomes. What emerges from the findings are what the authors term a new Age of Evidence, influenced by heightened stakeholder interest in the o
The university is often regarded as a bastion of liberal democracy where equity and diversity are promoted and racism does not exist. In reality, the university still excludes many people and is a ...site of racialization that is subtle, complex, and sophisticated. While some studies do point to the persistence of systemic barriers to equity and diversity in higher education, in-depth analyses of racism, racialization, and Indigeneity in the academy are more notable for their absence. "The Equity Myth" is the first comprehensive, data-based study of racialized and Indigenous faculty members' experiences in Canadian universities. Challenging the myth of equity in higher education, this book brings together leading scholars who scrutinize what universities have done and question the effectiveness of their equity programs. The authors draw on a rich body of survey data and interviews to examine the experiences of racialized faculty members across Canada who--despite diversity initiatives in their respective institutions--have yet to see changes in everyday working conditions. They also make important recommendations as to how universities can address racialization and fulfill the promise of equity in higher education. A landmark study on racism in Canadian universities, "The Equity Myth" shows how the goal of achieving equity in higher education has been consistently promised, but never realized for racialized and Indigenous faculty members. It further reveals that the policies and diversity initiatives undertaken so far have only served to deflect criticism of a system that is doing little to change itself. The book will appeal to anyone interested in the issue of equity within the university setting. This includes faculty members from many disciplines; administrators at all levels; students and graduate students; and people interested in equity issues outside of academia.
