Category Archives: Job Market

02.16.18
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A Time for Arrogance

“No. 1 in your life’s blueprint should be a deep belief in your own dignity, your own worth and your own somebody-ness.” — Martin Luther King Jr.

This time last year, I was spreading my wings in the big, bad world: I was a clinical psychology graduate student on the market for a tenure-track faculty job at a major research university who still believed in fairness in academe. Once interviews were over one month later, I was glued to the Psychology Job Wiki, praying for daylight to come so my job-search nightmare would end.

Since long before entering the job market last year, I have struggled with my own somebody-ness while perplexingly being accused of arrogance. Being acutely aware of my shyness and personal insecurity, I felt as if I have worn the scarlet letter — for Arrogant. But in reflecting on my experiences on the job market last year, I’ve recognized the value of fostering quiet arrogance as a woman of color within a system that would rather I didn’t exist.

It is with this newly adopted arrogance that I recount my experiences on the job market to highlight systemic discrimination in academic job searches. In exposing my naïveté and wounds, I have hope for our collective sanity as scholars who continue to be marginalized.

Job Market Expectations and Realities

As a black woman who developed cultural betrayal trauma theory — a framework that implicates societal inequality in the outcomes of violence within minority groups — I expected to experience discrimination before I received campus invitations. Mindlessly assuming my application dossier would eliminate me from consideration in departments that devalue the work of women of color, I looked forward to in-person interviews free of discrimination.

And although the job market was painful, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the many positive experiences I had in this process. In the first round of applications, I received six phone or video interviews for faculty positions and three on-campus visits. At various points throughout the interview process, I was shocked by the level of respect I was shown from senior and high-status faculty, junior faculty and graduate students, both of color and white. The professional connections I made at multiple departments have resulted in a growing network of collegial support and respect.

Yet alongside those positive experiences, I also experienced discriminatory behavior throughout campus visits. The first was when a white male faculty member told me that I had explained my own theory on cultural betrayal trauma incorrectly. Next, a senior white female faculty member described cultural betrayal trauma theory to me as my “ideas” with air quotes and expressed her concern that my work was not scientific enough for that top-ranked department. Finally, while I was explaining how cultural betrayal can occur in rapes perpetrated by black men against black women, a white male faculty member interrupted me to suggest that being raped by a black man is simply worse for any woman, black or white.

Perhaps because I had expected kinship from minority faculty, my most painful interaction came from a high-ranking male faculty member of color. In probably a genuine attempt to help me, he expressed concern that publishing my researchfindings for the would undermine my academic credibility. Painting a one-dimensional picture of university life, he suggested that academe might not be for me. Having not expected such comments from a faculty member of color, I felt a profound cultural betrayal. Even though I can sympathize with the compromises he has had to make as an elder in the field, to this day, I have yet to forgive him. Yet to heal.

Those experiences were exclamation points amid an ongoing barrage of condescension. I remember leaving interviews, thinking, “Am I stupid? They’re talking to me like I’m a complete idiot.” I checked in with my white colleague allies who told me they were sure everything was going fine: You’re qualified! Your CV speaks volumes, and you explain your work so well!

What I Learned

It was not until the interviews were over, with no job offers, that I reached out to faculty of color. I was validated: they told that I wasn’t crazy (well, except for assuming that I wouldn’t experience discrimination while interviewing –that was a little crazy). I was reminded of things I already knew but had somehow forgotten: the ubiquity of antiblack microaggressions; critical race theory, which centralizes the experiences of people of color (not their supportive white colleague allies); and the vast literature detailing the toll of perceived discrimination.

Facing impending unemployment in a field I had spent 10 years preparing for, I went through my second wave of applications. I received two job offers, ultimately accepting my current position as a fellow in the Postdoctoral to Faculty Transition Program at Wayne State University, with placement at the Merrill Palmer Skillman Institute.

The campus visit was unlike most of the others. I was not subjected to any open discrimination. I was spoken to respectfully, with my expertise valued. This interview resulted in a speedy job offer, with a negotiated, stellar start-up package. With one semester done, I feel I am working in a nontoxic environment — a rare academic feat I was unsure was possible after my experiences last year.

Returning to My Arrogance

I do not envy those academics currently on the job market. Nevertheless, the threat of attacks on marginalized scholars is ever looming. Therefore, at a time when so many of us are being explicitly and implicitly devalued — as humans, souls and scholars — I hold my arrogance close to my heart. Instead of waiting for them to please just notice my value, I know who I am and what I have to offer. With my diplomas and awards strewn across my office, I make the decision to not feel ashamed for being good at what I do, while continuing to possess the rebellious perseverance that I hope will carry me for a career to come.

Will you join me?

Bio

Photo of Jennifer M. Gómez

Jennifer M. Gómez is a postdoctoral fellow in the Wayne State University Postdoctoral to Faculty Transition Program at Merrill Palmer Skillman Institute. She developed cultural betrayal trauma theory to examine outcomes of violence in minority populations.

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Jennifer M. Gómez
02.10.17
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Victor Ray On “The Racialization Of Academic Funding”

victor-rayNote: this blog post was originally published on our career advice column on Inside Higher Ed. Dr. Victor Ray is an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. You can follow him on Twitter at .

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This essay is the first of two in which I will provide advice on getting research funding in graduate school. Here, I outline how disparities in graduate funding are deeply racialized and how that connects to racial issues in higher education more generally.

Let’s first take a brief look at the history of higher education in the United States. American colleges and universities were founded as white organizations. Part of their intellectual mission was to further the ideology and material practices of white supremacy. Profits from slavery, the exclusion of people of color and complicity in scientific racism were much more than unfortunate footnotes to an otherwise noble system.

As Craig Steven Wilder shows in the remarkable , higher education in the United States was founded on racial exclusion and explicitly designed to further white privilege. The life of the mind was underwritten by the cut of the whip. Although the civil rights movement and tepid diversity programming have reconfigured the racial relations central to higher education, they have by no means erased them. Colleges and universities attempt to project the illusion of a level playing field, yet racial disparities in funding, admittance and graduation rates remain deeply unequal.

Research funding is a racial issue in ways both easily apparent and occasionally hidden. Race shapes funding most obviously through the fact that the bulk of institutional resources remain firmly in white hands. Racial stratification is a defining feature of higher education at all levels of the hierarchy. For example, despite hand-wringing over supposedly “reverse racist” policies, whites are overrepresented relative to their proportion of the population when it comes to scholarships.

According to recent research by Louise Seamster and Raphaël Charron-Chénier, black students graduate with higher debt burdens. This bias extends to national funding agencies like the National Institutes of Health. After accounting for a host of factors that influence funding decisions — essentially, to statistically compare equally qualified white candidates and candidates of color — researchers found that black scholars were still 10 percent less likely than white scholars to receive NIH research funding. Such funding inequalities can make it less likely for students of color to be able to support their schooling and research, furthering racial inequity in higher education more generally.

Wider social factors also influence the ability of people of color to self-fund their education. As William Darity Jr., Darrick Hamilton and their colleagues have shown, deep racial differences in family wealth persist. Black and Latino families have fallen farther behind since the Great Recession, such that the “median black family has $7,113 in wealth, while the median white family has $111,740 in wealth.” The numbers are similarly stark for Latina/os. Those disparities are directly traceable to racist social policies like redlining, subprime lending and educational segregation, and they may make self-funding more difficult for nonwhite students.

Historical inequalities that can influence research opportunities and educational trajectories do not always show up in obvious ways. For instance, most legacy admittances can easily be construed as white racial preferences, given that many colleges and universities were only integrated in the 1960s. Similarly, the bias in so-called aptitude tests — which are excellent measures of inherited wealth — create the illusion of meritocracy while legitimizing educational inequality. Those historical inequalities influence current research realities. For instance, a dustup at New York University, in which the director of graduate admissions told a black student that perhaps he should rethink his application if he could not afford the fee, is a particularly blatant example of this racialized dynamic.

Because people of color are more likely to come from families without an ample and reliable store of wealth, they may not have the economic resources needed to support some basics of research. In my own discipline (sociology), necessary tools of the trade — such as laptops, digital tape recorders, data analysis software and money for transcription — may be unaffordable. A lack of funds for this basic equipment can put you behind your peers. And, psychologically, the very real sense of shame that comes from lacking resources in a society that measures your worth by your wealth can also constrain productivity. As a critical sociologist interested in racial inequality, I see how unequal funding holds implications for who gets to tell the stories of people of color.

Racial inequalities have real implications for conducting research. Sociologists have long argued that early disparities in funding create a Matthew effect that advantages scholars over the course of their careers. Based on the scripture “to them that has, more shall be given,” sociologist Robert K. Merton observed that scholars who found early success in securing funding were likely to have higher career productivity. Early funding provides vital resources — research assistants, course releases, money for travel — that scholars can use to extend their advantages. Those resources are then turned into the capital of academe: visibility, publications and access to social networks. Like compound interest, the productivity of scholars who achieve funding early in their careers is boosted, and that early advantage opens up subsequent opportunities. Racial disparities in funding thus create a cycle of cumulative disadvantage.

Beyond these reasons, the ability to acquire funding is becoming more important on the job market. Increasingly, departments in the social sciences are looking to hire scholars with a proven record of acquiring funding. Given the well-substantiated racial differences in rates of funding, this is yet another hurdle that scholars of color face — one that sets many of us behind.

Although personal action can never serve as a full substitute for institutional change, some strategies may make receiving funding more likely. In my next essay, I will offer practical advice on how students of color can increase their chances of getting funded and why they should apply for everything.

09.16.16
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PhDs Of Color, Don’t Accept The Initial Job Offer!

sylvanna_0Note: this blog post was originally published on our career advice column on Inside Higher Ed. Sylvanna Falcón () is an associate professor of Latin American and Latino studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and affiliated faculty of feminist studies and sociology. She is the author of Power Interrupted: Antiracist and Feminist Activism Inside the United Nations (U. Washington Press, 2016). She has recently discovered the wonders of yoga and meditation.

You Deserve Better

Over the past few years, I have started mentoring junior scholars, primarily women of color, about how to negotiate tenure-track job offers. This kind of mentoring came about rather organically, as I do not pitch myself as some kind of expert negotiator. But over time I became increasingly passionate about helping others secure better job offers as it started to align with my politics as a brown, Latina, middle-class, antiracist, feminist sociologist.

I became deeply troubled hearing time and time again that academics of color were advised against negotiating beyond the initial offer, to just be grateful about getting a job. Sometimes that advice is coming from other academics of color! Even though resources exist online about how to negotiate job offers, too many people, and recent Ph.D.s in particular, are getting the misguided advice to accept the initial offer, even in cases when they have competing offers from different institutions.

Increasingly, negotiating an offer is seen as a risk that could end in losing the job altogether or that we are being ungracious — or worse, ungrateful. This shift is particularly salient since the Great Recession of 2008, when the academic job market radically declined. Rather than having a plethora of tenure-track jobs to which to apply, such jobs have become scarce and intensely competitive, and many of us are simply unable or unwilling to live just anywhere in the country.

I remember a time in the early 2000s, when advanced graduate student cohorts in sociology would apply for 50 or more jobs; this job mecca was not my experience at all. I went on the academic job market four times, moving from positions as a lecturer to an assistant professor at a liberal arts college on the East Coast and then to a postdoc and an assistant professorship at a research-1 institution on the West Coast.

I would like to posit that our mind-set when negotiating academic job offers has to shift from being grateful that we have received an offer to knowing that we bring value to an academic institution — even in this new job climate. This shift in mind-set directly undermines the gratitude discourse prevalent at neoliberal universities. Why should we be grateful (and hence indebted) to labor for an institution? After all, we worked hard to earn that Ph.D. and receive that offer — facts we quickly forget when we are repeatedly told that we should be relieved to be offered an academic job at all these days. That is not to deny the very real and good fortune many of us have in landing a tenure-track job when too many Ph.D.s are unemployed, in severe debt and/or living the adjunct life. It is always sobering to hear the latest statistic about only 60 percent of Ph.D.s getting tenure–track jobs in the social sciences and humanities, yet this new normal should not somehow circumvent our legitimate desire to enter a new job feeling happy and respected.

As academic job seekers enter into the negotiation phase for a tenure-track position, I encourage them to embrace three points.

Understand the value that you bring to the institution and your future department, even if you are a newly minted Ph.D. If you accept the job offer, you plan to work at this particular academic institution for the foreseeable future. The students and your future colleagues are going to benefit from your outlook, energy, research, recent graduate school training and knowledge. You will bring renewed enthusiasm to your teaching and research. They extended the offer to you so your future colleagues see your value. Now you should, too.

The offer is yours to accept … or not. I have yet to hear firsthand of a case where someone asked for an increase in salary and it resulted in the offer getting pulled, but there are stories. You are going to hear “no” a lot in academe (so, develop thick skin now), but in order to even get to that stage, you actually have to ask for something. If the offer is not to your liking, then you can walk away. Yes, you can actually walk away! Why should you accept an offer that has not met your standards and expectations? You have a bargaining position that you need to finesse to your advantage rather than be taken advantage of.

However, you have to be an effective and strategic negotiator, meaning that you request reasonable considerations typical of that particular institutional structure. Asking for things typical of a research-1 job offer at a liberal arts institution is not in your strategic interest. It is in your interest to consult widely — online and with multiple mentors — and to give serious thought to what you need in place to excel at that particular institution.

Do not pre-emptively sabotage yourself by not asking for anything. Ignore the advice and reaction from your mentors or other supporters to just sign the initial offer. I have helped women of color negotiate increases in salaries, research funds and course releases after people they trust told them not to ask for anything. I have literally lost count of how many people of color I have helped to negotiate better packages against the advice of their academic mentors. This help has translated to larger salaries for senior positions (by $20,000), substantial increases in research funds (by $15,000) and modest increases in salaries for assistant professors (ranging from $2,000 to $5,000).

Now, you will not get everything for which you ask; negotiations means compromises. But even I have been stunned at some of the aforementioned successes when people of color get serious about negotiations. That is not because I have some inside secret or deft negotiation skills to pass on, but because, with some close mentoring, people of color began to think concretely about what they needed to thrive. The key, I believe, is that they offered an effective explanation as to why they merited these items. Your salary has a chance to increase if you can provide a clear and compelling rationale for the increase based on the value you bring, not because you have a lot of debt. This same logic applies to your research funds, summer salaries and course releases. If you ask for it, you must be able to explain why you deserve it.

With a tight and scarce job market and the trend toward neoliberalizing universities, people of color — especially women — seem scared, literally, to ask for anything beyond the initial offer. You do not want to start a new job from a place of fear or misplaced gratitude. The content of the job offer sets you on a career trajectory. Change your mind-set about the purpose of job negotiations away from indebtedness to an institution and academe. Nurture an understanding of what you need for your well-being and to thrive professionally.

07.15.16
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Transphobia On The Job Market

alex-hannaNote: this blog post was originally published on our career advice column on Inside Higher Ed. Alex Hanna is an assistant professor in the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on how new and social media have changed social movement mobilization and political participation more generally. Methodologically, she is interested in computational social science, textual analysis and social network analysis. This article will also appear in Reflections on Academic Lives: Identities, Struggles and Triumphs in Graduate School and Beyond, a collection of essays to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017.

In September 2016, Alex was interviewed on Feminist Killjoys PhD podcast about her experiences on the academic job market as a trans woman.

Being Transgender on the Job Market

Being on the academic job market can be traumatizing for a job candidate. With the current disparity between Ph.D. holders and available jobs, the casualization of academic labor, and the shrinking of public university budgets, what was once a field of possibility has become one of rabid competition.

An ideal job candidate is supposed to have a track record of publishing in top academic journals, a broad range of teaching experience and a commitment to university service. And in a field with so many candidates, it is — as Karen Kelsky of The Professor Is In said in her — a buyer’s market. Any slight edge may mean the difference between getting a campus visit or never hearing back. The uncertainty of a highly competitive market makes anxiety, depression, stress and other mental and physical health problems commonplace for job candidates.

Transgender people on the market have to negotiate a host of additional difficulties, even before getting a campus visit and interview. Obviously, I cannot speak for all transgender folks — I identify as transfeminine and a trans woman, am a person of color, and transitioned during graduate school. As a whole, transgender people are drastically underrepresented within academe — a fact that was apparent to me during the last meeting of the American Sociological Association. Although the theme of the conference was “Sexualities,” only a handful of transgender people were in attendance, mostly transmasculine and trans men. In fact, as far as I could tell, I was the only transfeminine person or trans woman in attendance. I had an overall positive experience, but in disciplines that don’t talk about gender explicitly, the lack of transgender representation may be an even starker problem.

The difficulties of applying to academic jobs as a transgender person begin before submitting any applications. The first question is whether you should even disclose your transgender status. Parts of your application may need to be explained, such as the disparity between the name that you use on an application and the name under which you have published. Outing yourself may lead to subtle or even outright discrimination, but because those negotiations are made behind closed doors, you have no way of knowing for sure. If you do choose to disclose your transness, you have to decide how to do it. There aren’t many places on the cover letter to talk about gender and sexuality. A supportive adviser can do so in recommendation letters, but an unsupportive adviser may misgender you just the same. Recommenders also have to use the correct pronouns, and therefore you can be at the mercy of ignorant or hostile writers.

The experience of being transgender on a campus visit can go south quickly. Such a visit requires you to be professional at all times, and keeping up your emotional guard to gender issues makes it doubly trying. Bathrooms pose a glaring problem — although this is improving, it is still fairly rare for academic buildings to have unisex or gender-neutral facilities. Professional clothing can be a problem for more clearly expressing gender, and the process of getting those clothes can be stressful in itself. In all interpersonal interactions, misgendering is continual fear, including one-on-ones, a group meal or, in the worse case, when a senior faculty member introduces you to a room full of people with the wrong pronouns.

I recently had a nightmare interview in a sociology department at a college in a major metropolitan city in the Northeast. At the job talk, the (older, white male) search chair — let’s call him George — introduced me with the wrong pronouns, which meant the rest of the audience took his lead. He knew my correct pronouns, but he didn’t seem to be able to get them right at all. The situation came to a head at dinner, attended by George and three women faculty members. His misgendering was constant, and the other faculty members were repeating it. It annoyed me less that he was consistent in doing it but that the other faculty members were acquiescent in it. I remember at one point, he said something to which he wanted to engender a big response or laugh but managed to misgender me in the statement. While everyone else laughed, I just looked down and felt humiliated.

I considered not returning to the second day of the interview, but decided to soldier on. That evening I wrote an email to one of the faculty members at the dinner, with whom I felt more free to speak — let’s call her Charlie — about all the misgendering, and how it was disrespectful and degrading. The next morning, Charlie, George and I sat in George’s office, where he offered an apology and said something about needing training on transgender issues. George and I then went to another meeting with the head of another department. Upon entry, that person asked, “How’s the visit going?” to which George responded, “Oh, not too well,” and then we had to rehash all that had happened.

At that point, it just felt like the obsession with my transness and George’s inability to get my pronouns right had become the focal point of my visit. After George came back from taking a phone call, I turned to him and said I couldn’t continue the interview and wanted to go back to the hotel. Although this is a worst-case scenario, it displays many of the tensions and emotional exhaustions of being transgender on the market.

How does this get better? A tenure-track faculty interview, even though potentially anxiety producing and traumatic, is still a relatively privileged situation. Before getting there, there are significant barriers to entering the higher education pipeline, including proper K-12 education, parental well-being and income, and adequate housing. According to a survey of transgender people commissioned by the National Center for Transgender Equality, 78 percent of respondents had been harassed in K-12 settings, 57 percent had experienced significant family rejection and 19 percent had been reported experiencing homelessness at some point in their lives because of their gender identity. In addition, 41 percent of respondents have attempted suicide. Nearly all those numbers are worse when considering people of color, especially black transgender people. So things for transgender folks in academe will probably get better along with larger movements for racial, educational and housing justice.

For transgender people currently in academe, strategies for coping in other spheres of life go double when it comes to the job market. Having a good support system is vital. Find other queer and trans academics going through the job-seeking process. In addition, be mentally prepared for worst-case situations. Finally, try to find allies among the faculty and on the search committee. As a last resort, it’s OK to just leave. Seriously — if the environment is toxic at a two-day campus visit, then it’s no place you want to work.

06.10.16
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Advice On Writing An Effective Diversity Statement

Note: this blog was originally published on our career advice column on Inside Higher Ed. Dr. Tanya Golash-Boza () is a professor of sociology at the University of California at Merced. Her most recent book is Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor and Global Capitalism (NYU Press, 2015). She blogs at Get a Life, PhD.

Tanya Golash-BozaFaculty job postings are increasingly asking for diversity statements, in addition to research and teaching statements. According to the University of California at San Diego website, “the purpose of the statement is to identify candidates who have professional skills, experience and/or willingness to engage in activities that would enhance campus diversity and equity efforts” (emphasis added). In general, these statements are an opportunity for applicants to explain to a search committee the distinct experiences and commitment they bring to the table.

So, how do you write an effective diversity statement? If you are a job candidate who actually cares about diversity and equity, how do you convey that commitment to a search committee? (Note that if you do not care about diversity and equity and do not want to be in a department that does, don’t waste your time crafting a strong diversity statement — and you need not read any farther in this essay.)

My first piece of advice is: do not write a throwaway diversity statement. Some job applicants think that writing a diversity statement that shows they actually care about diversity and equity may be too political. Thus, they write a blasé statement about, for example, how they encourage students to come to class in pajamas if they feel comfortable. That is not an effective strategy, because it does not show a genuine commitment to diversity and equity.

Of course, it is true that many faculty members overtly reject campus efforts to enhance diversity and equity. However, it is also true that search committee members who do not care about diversity do not read diversity statements. Just like search committee members who do not care about teaching gloss over teaching statements, those who do not care about diversity gloss over diversity statements. So, don’t bother writing a statement directed at faculty members who do not care about diversity. Write one for those faculty members who will take the time to read your statement carefully.

I can assure you that many faculty members truly care about diversity and equity and will read your statement closely. I have been in the room when the diversity statement of every single finalist for a job search was scrutinized. The candidates who submitted strong statements wrote about their experiences teaching first-generation college students, their involvement with LGBTQ student groups, their experiences teaching in inner-city high schools and their awareness of how systemic inequalities affect students’ ability to excel. Applicants mentioned their teaching and activism and highlighted their commitment to diversity and equity in higher education.

Here are seven additional suggestions to consider as you write your diversity statement.

  • Tell your story. If you have overcome obstacles to get to where you are, point those out. If, in contrast, you are privileged, acknowledge that. If you grew up walking uphill to school carrying two 20-pound sacks of rice on your back, by all means, tell that story. If you were raised with a silver spoon in your mouth, acknowledge your privilege. Either way, use your story to explain how you can empathize with students who confront challenges on their way to achieving their educational goals.
  • Focus on commonly accepted understandings of diversity and equity. Concentrate on issues such as race, gender, social class and sexual orientation. Don’t try to tone down your statement by writing about how it is hard to be a Kansan in Missouri, for example. Instead, write about racial oppression, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism or some other commonly recognized form of oppression.
  • Avoid false parallels. By that I mean do not equate the exclusion you faced due to being a Kansan in Missouri with the exclusion an African-American faces at a primarily white institution. You do not have to be an African-American to have insight into the challenges they face, but if you do not have experiential knowledge of racism, then do not claim it. Instead, focus on writing about what you do know. If you feel comfortable getting personal, you can write about your own experiences of privilege or oppression. But you don’t have to get personal; you can cite statistics or studies to make your points.
  • Write about specific things you have done to help students from underrepresented backgrounds succeed. If you have never done anything to help anyone, then go out and do something. Sign up to be a tutor at an underperforming school, build a house with Habitat for Humanity or incorporate antiracist pedagogy into your teaching. In addition to having a rewarding experience, you can write about it in your diversity statement.
  • Highlight any programs for underrepresented students you’ve participated in. If you have had any involvement with such programs (e.g., McNair Scholars Program), describe that involvement in your statement. This involvement can either be as a former participant or as a mentor or adviser to someone who has participated. These kinds of specific examples show that you understand what effective programs look like and how they work.
  • Write about your commitment to working toward achieving equity and enhancing diversity. Describe specific ways you are willing to contribute. You can mention your willingness to contribute to pre-existing programs on the campus or you can express interest in creating new programs based on models at other campuses.
  • Modify your statement based on where you are sending it. Your statement for a land-grant institution in the rural South should not be the exact same one you send to an elite institution in urban California. Look up the demographics of the institution to which you are applying and mention those demographics in your statement. For example, if the university you are applying to is a Hispanic-serving institution, you should be aware of that. Or if it has a well-known scholarship program for underrepresented minorities, you should mention that program.

Diversity statements are a relatively new addition to the job application packet. Thus, search committees are still developing assessment tools for such statements, and many campuses lack clear guidelines. Nevertheless, you can use this novelty to your advantage by writing a stellar statement that emphasizes your record of contributions to diversity and equity as well as your commitment to future efforts

06.03.16
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On The Price LGBTQ Academics Pay For Safety And Well-Being

bonnie-morrisNote: this blog post was originally published on our career advice column on Inside Higher Ed. Bonnie J. Morris has been half-time faculty at both George Washington University and Georgetown University for over 20 years and is the author of 15 books, including three Lambda Literary Award finalists. She is also a consultant for Disney Animation, the AP U.S. history exam and the AP unit on high school psychology.

Academe’s ‘Gay Tax’

Like all part-time or contingent faculty members, I have learned to stretch the dollars from my fluctuating salaries over the years. Like many but not all lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer faculty members, I am comfortably out in the classroom, my identity never a secret. And like many historians passing the age-50 mark, I sometimes enhance my lectures with personal anecdotes, reminding my students that I Was There at this or that rally or riot, this or that cultural turning point, earthquake or election. But all of those eyewitness aspects are part of a triad that I have not seen addressed when we speak about fair adjunct wages.

For years, my LGBTQ colleagues and I paid a “gay tax.” We paid higher costs in food, rent and other services because we lived and worked in America’s more expensive cities: those cities where civil rights statutes recognized our equal rights in housing, adoption, partnership and workplace arrangements. We may very well have pored over tenure-track job ads for positions offering better packages than our adjunct appointments yet found only prospects in states or cities (or at faith-based colleges) where we would never be free to be open and out, acknowledged or housed.

It’s easy to forget the legal climate of open homophobia and biphobia that prevailed so recently. My long-term renewable half-time appointment at George Washington University, for example, began in 1994 — the year when a court in Virginia cheerfully removed a child from a loving home with two moms simply because one relative complained that no child should grow up in a lesbian household. Young people wanting to learn more enlightened views on this topic in 1994 had another problem: some Northern Virginia public libraries forbade youth under the age of 18 from taking out books about bi- or homosexuality without a parent’s permission.

It would be another decade before Lawrence v. Texas overturned the state sodomy laws that declared someone like me a criminal, even a felon, in Virginia and in other states — but felon status made us less favorable in many a state university job search. In 1986, as I was taking my M.A. exam in graduate school, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Bowers v. Hardwick decision grimly reminded all of gay America that private, consensual lovemaking with a partner in one’s own bedroom was not protected action and could result in arrest, jail time and a sex offense record. Such a record was hardly the best résumé for a hopeful educator.

So, we avoided Virginia. We avoided Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas. We ground our teeth during the American Historical Society discussions about whether to hold annual meetings in cities that openly discriminated against LGBTQ people. We knew we were thus an inconvenience to our straight peers. Meanwhile, as America lumbered toward a greater understanding of full citizenship, we competed against all other gifted LGBTQ colleagues for that one tenure-line job in San Francisco, Ithaca or Chicago. And I continued working two or three jobs in order to live in D.C., rather than in its more affordable but LGBTQ-inhospitable southern neighbor, Virginia.

We put ourselves on the line financially and politically by insisting on ordinary quality of life up through very recent years, which the nation risks forgetting in all the focus on the recent Supreme Court decision to legalize same-gender marriage. It was not long ago that one of my colleagues won an academic appointment in Florida that she ultimately left, given that state’s rules against gay adoption, gay foster parenting and hospital visitation rights for same-gender couples. Even at liberal GWU, I was not immune to homophobia’s depressing tentacles. Well into this 21st century, I received threatening calls and letters due to my curriculum on gays in the military, and I watched tensely as our terrific women’s basketball team — including some lesbian players and at least one beloved transgender man — competed against Liberty University, the evangelical institution still banning LGBTQ students and faculty members.

I have lived on a budget as a gay historian in a gay neighborhood (or “gayborhood”) for 22 years, and just as we move to almost (but not quite) universal protections, I now face losing my job as LGBTQ historian altogether. This year, my women’s studies position was marked for elimination in new budget cuts, effectively gutting the LGBTQ minor that I helped create. Where my curriculum and I will go is a question in arbitration. But having been a living role model for my newly arriving students every fall — Be out! Live authentically! — I intend to go on speaking as a living relic of that recent, gay-taxed time. In looking back on how I planned my budget, I know that surviving on contingent labor pay was always linked to living freely, where possible — and required carefully weighing isolation against income.

Substitute black for LGBTQ and this story is an old one; for my ancestors it was Jew and for others, Irish or Native. We can’t always search for a job where we’re not wanted. I have personally also experienced the discomfort of teaching women’s history where women faculty members were not wanted and where the campus climate was not merely hostile but also unsafe for women students and faculty members, regardless of our personal feminist identities. Where we see a high ratio of women (and women and men of color) in the adjunct or contingent labor pool, the intersectionality of these issues is clear: Which of one’s interrogated identities benefits a college or university seeking to “diversify” yet places the applicant in a miserable situation — the unsafe and isolated exhibit A of their own identity? In a job interview, is it fair to ask how one might not merely survive but also thrive at an institution offering a salary yet lacking a community? What quality of life is an adjunct professor allowed?

Over the years, those friends who asked me, “Why don’t you have tenure?” were usually not LGBTQ. Their job-search engines did not drive with a rainbow flag flying up front. I am asking that we call attention to these stories as we talk about the “living” in the living wage agenda, for there is much to learn from everyone who paid the gay tax and, in gentrifying cities, formed the gayborhood locus that often displaced longtime residents/people of color. We are the faculty members who taught the very history we lived out. We lived it out, on part-time pay, in zip codes that were the safe zones of our time.

05.13.16
by

There Is Life (And Happiness) Outside Of The Tenure-Track

julie-shayneNote: this blog post was originally published on our career advice column on Inside Higher Ed. Julie Shayne is a senior lecturer in interdisciplinary arts and sciences at the University of Washington Bothell and affiliate associate professor of gender, women and sexuality studies and Latin American and Caribbean studies, as well as faculty associate, at the Center for Human Rights at the University of Washington Seattle. She was born and raised in California and seems to be living happily ever after with her family in the Pacific Northwest.

“Off Track, On Point”

I should be an advanced associate professor by now. I am not. I should serve on tenure review committees. I do not. I should have had one sabbatical at my current institution by now. I have not.

I earned my Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2000. I cannot lie; I do feel a twinge of frustration watching assistant professors whom I helped to recruit and mentor earn tenure while my position stays relatively unchanged. I have one tier above me on my track (principal lecturer), for which I recently became eligible. But after that, I hit a glass ceiling.

I certainly feel that I am long overdue for a well-earned sabbatical. And I do wish that my primary title were associate professor, not senior lecturer. I am confident that I have the academic qualifications congruent with that title: three books, decades of teaching and service, awards, yada, yada, yada. The longing for a title that equals my years and accomplishments post-Ph.D. is fleeting, especially when I reflect on why I am where I am today.

In 2006, I resigned from my tenure-track assistant professor job about a year before I submitted my tenure portfolio. Yes, I wanted tenure — who doesn’t, especially after going through the hell of the tenure track? But I wanted a happy family and personally rewarding life, as well. And being a West Coaster living in the Southeast made the nonwork happiness an unattainable reality, tenure or not. So I resigned. (I discuss that decision and move in an essay called “Mother’s Day,” which is the afterword in my newest book, Taking Risks: Feminist Activism and Research in the Americas.)

When I resigned, I had no idea how things would work out. As a straight, white, upper-middle-class woman, I had the privilege of knowing that my family and I had my husband’s salary and health insurance to fall back on if my career move proved unsuccessful. Fortunately, I had very good timing. I showed up at the University of Washington Bothell just two years after it started admitting first-year college students (as opposed to just transfers), and the campus needed people to teach new freshman classes. I am now housed in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, a unit that encourages me to frame my research, teaching and even service in a way that prioritizes passion and social justice over the treadmill of self-doubt and limiting professional norms. (I have written about this part of the story here.)

Like many academics, I was a professional organizer before I was a professor; that is, a grassroots leftist turned institutional leftist. I became an organizer in 1984 as part of the U.S. sanctuary movement and Salvadoran solidarity movement, working with the Committee in Solidarity With the People of El Salvador. I started as an undergraduate student at University of California at Santa Barbara. But not long after getting sucked into the movement, I decided to drop out of college. (Every Jewish parent’s dream: a child who’s a college dropout, right?) I moved to Washington, D.C., ironically, to be CISPES’s full-time national student organizer. I went across the country, campus to campus, traveling with Salvadoran refugee activists, in order to inspire college students to organize on their campuses in solidarity with the Salvadoran revolution. It was a heady time, to say the least.

Health issues forced me to reroute my path, and eventually I returned to college, this time at San Francisco State University, where I earned a B.A. and M.A. in what was then called women’s studies. During my very first semester there, I decided that I wanted to be a professor. I couldn’t believe I was sitting in rooms full of leftists, mostly women, discussing things like black women, music and politics with Angela Davis (who taught at the university at the time) — and I was getting credit for it! Who would leave that reality? Plus, the institution was full of nontraditional students like myself and had great ethnic studies departments and a wonderfully diverse student body. (Very sadly, the future of ethnic studies at San Francisco State is presently under attack.) I wanted to teach at a place like that. And as many of us probably know, when we decide we want to be professors we are not thinking about writing books, academic service or moving to the middle of how-the-hell-did-I-end-up-here U.S.A.

After San Francisco State, I went back to the University of California at Santa Barbara to earn a Ph.D. in sociology. The longer I stayed in academe, the more I could feel my passion being pushed to the margins. I landed my tenure-track job and read the memo all lefty academics get: leave your politics at the door. I didn’t quite realize what was happening as it was happening, because when you’re on the tenure track, you’re not given a lot of time to stop and think, let alone second-guess any earlier decisions.

But leaving the tenure track allowed me to remember why I wanted to be a professor in the first place: to teach about and inspire social justice activism, especially feminism. The longer I teach, the more invested I become in this profession as my locale for social justice activism. In having Latinx students who have never seen their histories taught in a class, I know that fleeing the tenure track for what I originally thought were incredibly personal reasons was also my way of bringing my long-buried activist back to the surface.

And the longer I stay at an institution that lets feminists reshape old and build new degrees to center intersectional analyses, the more I am convinced that prioritizing personal quality of life is invariably connected to our political sanity. It is actually quite embarrassing that it took me so long to notice this.

Colleagues, including feminist colleagues, have invariably looked down on me for presumably prioritizing family over career. Put another way, happiness over self-implosion. In retrospect, I think others have mocked me because I haven’t played by the rigidly outlined rules, rules that say profession first, family and activism, at best, next. I don’t like those rules. I decided to be a professor to teach and do social justice activism, and I am grateful that I have accidentally figured out a way to make that a reality.

But I cannot lie: I do still wish my primary title was associate professor and that I would be submitting my dossier for promotion to full professor in a few years, as many of my grad school colleagues probably will. But not if that means exchanging the emotional and professional satisfaction that I experience in my current reality for what, in the end, is only a title.

I suppose my message here is to ask, why did we decide to become professors in the first place? Did we even know which titles and tracks existed? (I certainly didn’t; I didn’t know what tenure was until a few years into my Ph.D. program.) Are we really advancing a social justice agenda if our so-called professional pursuits are forcing us to abandon our convictions?

I am not suggesting everyone jump ship. As I said, I am very privileged to have the family resources available that allowed me to take the risk, combined with impeccably good timing. From where I sit now, I am quite confident that if I showed up unannounced at my university today, as I did eight years ago, the trajectory would be very different and far less secure.

That said, I do think it’s important for people to pause and ask themselves, “How did we end up on the path we are on, especially if it’s not where we hoped to be?” Although we do not often talk about it, the reality is that there is more than one path through academe. Despite the dominant professional narrative that suggests otherwise, all of us are not meant to be on the tenure track.