Just wondering your thoughts on the recent campus activism based on the Black Lives Matter movement.
There will be a whole slew of new job openings next year (if not this year) with administrators desperate for black hires.
I find it very exciting, though also heartbreaking to hear students' first person accounts. As to your question, honestly, I'm glad. When I was on the market last year it was a factor for me. I asked the faculty and the students if there was student activism. I was curious about whether the faculty were talking about racism. I was impressed at one school where I saw students had just chalked the campus with something like "black lives matter" (I actually don't remember if "black lives matter" had caught on yet or if it was another one such as "hands up don't shoot.") I wanted to be somewhere where people cared about this kind of issue. I think that my interest in it also helped my candidacy. I could tell the people in other areas like social were happy that I was interested in these topics (I'm in cognitive/neuroscience).
I'm not sure there will be a "whole slew of new offerings" next year. Some of the most elite schools will be able to afford new lines, plus possibly Missouri because their situation is the most extreme. But I don't think it will be as big as some people think. If schools can swing it, though, I think it would be great for everyone, especially for the students, to get more faculty of color in TT positions. It's not so simple as throwing money at the problem, though. There are too few students of color in the PhD pipeline for a whose host of reasons.
Prior to the recent BLM movement departments were already actively seeking underrepresented candidates. Both through targeted recruitment and more broadly at every hire. Each hiring committee in our dept has a designated member who re-reviews all candidates with the explicit goal of identifying potential hires that the broader committee may have missed. The committee must provide their rationale for any/all non-underrepresented group hires to the administration. There seems to be a vast disconnect between what the undergrads perceive and what universities are actively implementing.
I have taught and researched at 4 universities on both coasts. And my (gay, white male) experience has been that among white academics (even self-professed liberals who would publicly identify themselves as "against racism") the following is generally true:
1. Students/faculty of color's claims of being marginalized (or worse) are not taken seriously in the absence of "concrete evidence" that it is happening "here." This despite the fact that racism can be very difficult to "prove," its consequences difficult to measure, and at the end of the day…a lot of people feel it probably isn't worth the trouble or the possible costs of actively documenting it because nothing meaningful is likely to happen as a result. The lived experiences of minority students and colleagues should be more than enough for the rest of us to acknowledge that there are serious problems, "here" and on virtually every campus in America.
2. There is the widespread misperception that underrepresented minority applicants have an advantage on the job market, and that academia operates in any meaningful way as a meritocracy. Demonstrably false.
We have a long way to go. We owe it to these students and one another to take their experiences at face value (especially since they literally have nothing to gain and everything to lose by speaking out about it) and take what they say seriously. Campus "diversity" efforts are often total disasters that function primarily to protect the University and its reputation. I have seen this from the inside at multiple institutions. Sara Ahmed has a really useful book ("On Being Included") that explores this difficult challenge; I think it should be required reading.
My experience has been rather different. As someone who is politically conservative, I have found 'diversity' to be almost non-existent, because everyone (black and white) are liberal.
The student protests have had a chilling effect. To make matters worse, their demands are childish, vague and totalitarian in character.
If they are 'marginalized', that is likely because they are in the minority. But guess what? Blacks are ~12% of the population. What is their percentage at Yale? 11%.
We can't just span our fingers and find brilliant black students, faculty and administrators magically appear. We have AA policies on board, and these students don't have the slightest idea of how this system works.
I agree that diversity of thought, like political affiliation, is an important component of diversity, provided that the thoughts don't translate into causing harm to others. However, I disagree that these students' demands are "childish, vague, and totalitarian." I am a black woman on the market this year, and can empathize with the experiences of many of these students. I attended a predominantly white university for undergraduate training where there were instances each year that created an uncomfortable environment (e.g., hanging a black doll in the school theater, jokes about lynching, "ghetto" themed events where people thought it was a great idea to dress in blackface, racial slurs written on bathroom stalls, nonstop assumptions that all black students on campus were athletes). Wanting administrators to take these concerns seriously and to do something about it isn't childish. It's in the interest of self-preservation. It is very difficult to maintain one's focus when one's being (not ideology, practices, etc.) is the thing that others take issue with. There is great potential for many brilliant black students, faculty, and administrators-however there are obstacles that appear disproportionately more often for minorities (I'm extending beyond racial/ethnic minorities here) that lessen the probability that we will create/find them. I consider myself to be quite fortunate relative to many other black students, but, despite how much I enjoy psychology, I have wanted to stop my training at various points because of the message that "this isn't for people like you[me]." Seeing yourself reflected in people in power, at the faculty and administrative levels, can do amazing things for one's own self-concept. I'm reminded of that phrase "you have to see it to be it"—I am excited to have the chance to be that person for students.
Well said, Jess. I think the goal is to establish college as a safe place for education. If black students are feeling marginalized, then this should be seriously addressed.
But the growing mob mentality of these protests, however, is increasingly asking for things beyond reason, and is expressing itself in purely racial terms (as opposed to educational terms). Doing so will invite further anger and hatred from others - particularly the white students - and things may quickly escalate. We are already starting to see this. If it spills into violence, the discontent of the black students will only be worsened.
The point is that the university has long been a safe haven for independent thought, in contradistinction to society. Society is dominated by constricted political thinking (left vs. right), but the university was the one place wherein the student could be liberated from societal restrictions. BLM represents the intrusion of the political into the university, and thus is a threat to the integrity of its mission.
ps. sorry to everyone is this seems tangential to the discussion of academic jobs…
Thank you Corson to pointing that this thread is getting WAY off of topic of academic jobs.
As a first-generation college student from a low SES background, and a person who's parents were immigrants, I feel like I can offer some additional perspective when it comes to the job market and social identities.
Even though by any reasonable standard my background would be considered "disadvantaged," my application will receive no extra attention from diversity officers and programs because I am a White male. My parents happened to immigrate from Western Europe rather than Africa or Central/South America. It seems like the racial history in the US seems to have distorted the actual problem: socioeconomic class. I'd be willing to wager that there is more racial and sex diversity among academics than there is SES diversity (or even diversity of thought as everyone is, indeed, liberal).
Also, why is the BLM movement (and affirmative action programs in general) ignoring years of research in medical and educational science? Outcome focused programs that seek to solve problems at the outcome level (hiring more Black profs) are not as effective a preventative measures that seek to identify and treat underlying causes of problems. Society will not actually improve until there is concerted effort to understand why there is a dearth of minority candidates — thank you social psychologists for starting to identify these, though — and interventions can be developed that target those specific mechanisms. Then, change is slow. It cannot happen overnight. For example, changing one's diet and exercise habits cannot help prevent heart attacks overnight. The positive effects of process focused interventions need to accumulate. Having undergrad students rant and rave about underrepresentation without an empirical approach to solving this problem is not fruitful
@SnoopJobbyJob: I think it's obvious for all of us in academia that we can't solve the faculty diversity issue without fixing the pipeline. (I doubt most undergraduates realize how bad the pipeline problem is.) And there are actually a lot of great programs focused on the pipeline, though clearly not enough.
That said, research *also* shows that people are more likely to hire other people with similar backgrounds to themselves. That's not necessarily a problem if search committees are diverse, but they aren't. So part of the purpose of affirmative action is to be a counterweight to that bias. Plus, affirmative action does address the pipeline: People are less likely to join professions where they don't see other people like themselves.
Undergrads are very young; for them, 10 years is literally half a lifetime. Plus, they're only going to be in the institution for a couple more years. Of course they want changes to happen now. And it's probably good to have them pushing and keeping us from being complacent.
