In Name Only: A Principal Investigator’s Struggle for Authority (original) (raw)
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Journal of Working-Class Studies, 2017
Women of color in academia face challenging obstacles when it comes to surviving and thriving in the ivory tower. Enduring the grind of graduate school and immediately upon attaining a PhD, women of color are often burdened with heavy student loan debt, large teaching loads, unrealistic service expectations, experience microaggressions based on race, gender and class, isolation, alienation and other challenges which compound and negatively impact the path to tenure. Many of the challenges mentioned above often differ from those of their white and/or male counterparts in the academy. Throughout this article, we will examine the literature of Black women in academia, provide personal narratives situating these complexities, and root them all in the context of being Black and Woman in academia. The academy is a place we are rarely welcomed and constantly fighting to survive and thrive.
Fight the Tower: A Call to Action for Women of Color in Academia
With massive budgetary cuts at universities nationwide and trends towards corporatization, underrepresented groups again find themselves increasingly targets of bullying, harassment, and dismissal. Sadly, the vast majority continues to endure the violent onslaught feeling isolated and alone, unable and sometimes unwilling to seek assistance and fight. Parallel to this dismal reality, however, is the growing movement of scholars speaking up against the injustices in the academe. Led in part by the women behind the seminal anthology, Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia, is where women of color from diverse fields of study share their deeply personal stories and provide empirical data that exposes systemic wrongdoings. This article is broken up into three parts. Part I discusses my personal journey through academia, exposing me to the many discriminatory practices within the tower, targeting issues of gender, race, ethnicity, class, disability, and motherhood. I naively struggled through invisible barriers looking more inward than outward, essentially blaming myself instead of recognizing the early signs of systemic wrongdoings. Part II discusses my two-year protracted tenure fight and my transformation from an embattled scholar to a strategic warrior. When faced against mounting attacks, I found ways to defend my work and personhood, changing not only my own future, but also that of those around me. Part III is a call to action. Here I propose practical strategies for women of color to stand up against the grave injustices we face. I argue that if we arm ourselves with these strategies, we can build a unified solidarity movement and political action to fight the tower.
2011
Women scholars are underrepresented in faculty governance positions in the university settings. This initial descriptive study described the successes and challenges faced by eight (n=8) women of color in current or former governance roles in California universities. A semi-structured interview schedule was administered that focused on participant’s perceptions in the three areas: competence, confidence and credibility. The findings were analyzed and implications as well as recommendations for further research were made.
Frontiers in Psychology
This paper describes the Gender Equity Project (GEP) at Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY), funded by the U. S. NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation Award (ITA) program. ADVANCE supports system-level strategies to promote gender equity in the social and natural sciences, but has supported very few teaching-intensive institutions. Hunter College is a teaching-intensive institution in which research productivity among faculty is highly valued and counts toward tenure and promotion. We created the GEP to address the particular challenges that faculty, especially White women and faculty of color, face in maintaining research programs and advancing in their careers at teaching-intensive institutions. During the course of the ADVANCE award, its centerpiece was the Sponsorship Program, a multifaceted paid mentorship/sponsorship program that paired each participant with a successful scholar in her discipline. It offered extensive professional development opportunit...