Ida Yalzadeh Nicole Cardoza Ida Yalzadeh Nicole Cardoza

Rethink what a professor looks like.

When we talk about issues of diversity in higher education, we usually are referring to the student population. While it is important to work on increasing MFGLI (minority, first-generation, and low-income) student representation on college campuses, I’d like to focus on a problem commonly overlooked outside of the academy: the lack of diversity in those who research and teach at the university level.

Happy Sunday and welcome back to the Anti-Racism Daily. As we've discussed, much of what defines dominant culture is taught to us. This sounds meta, but we're also taught who's supposed to teach us by the racial and ethnic composition of teachers. Today, Ida joins us to express the importance of diverse faculty at the university level.

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By Ida Yalzadeh (she/her)

When we talk about issues of diversity in higher education, we usually are referring to the student population. While it is important to work on increasing MFGLI (minority, first-generation, and low-income) student representation on college campuses, I’d like to focus on a problem commonly overlooked outside of the academy: the lack of diversity in those who research and teach at the university level. 

Although the U.S. Census shows that people of color account for over a third of the United States’ population, a 2017 survey reports that only 18.9% of full-time faculty in higher education identify as people of color (National Center for Education Statistics). Even worse, the number of faculty of color in the United States has not grown over the past decade (Inside Higher Ed). And this is a problem.

A lack of racial diversity in the professoriate means that the popular image of what a professor looks like remains predominantly white (and usually male).  The consequences of this assumption are wide and varied. For students of color, this lack of representation in the academy means that they may not see themselves reflected in who teaches them. As a result, students of color may not feel like they belong in academic environments, leading to retention issues and perpetuating uneven enrollment (Forbes).

For faculty of color themselves, though, this underlying assumption of what a professor looks like speaks to how these individuals must face daily microaggressions and even direct, institutional harassment. Twitter hashtags like #blackintheIvory and academic threads

have exposed these issues.  Faculty of color—particularly women of color faculty members—have been mistaken for cleaning staff, a spouse of a student, or a student. (As a woman of color who is a faculty member myself, I have commonly had people mistake me for a student or otherwise be in disbelief that I am, in fact, a professor.) One professor started a Twitter thread shared microaggressions he had received, including: “You speak so well—were you adopted?” and “I see you struggle with certain words that start with specific letters—I know that is a common problem for your people.” 

Faculty of color also experience surveillance and harassment on campus.  A few months ago, a Black professor at Santa Clara University described how campus security racially profiled her brother and followed him back to her home. Afterward, security required the professor to show her campus ID to prove she lived in her own house (HuffPost).

Moreover, many faculty of color must contend with institutions and disciplines that call their credentials and accomplishments into question. In 2019, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a professor of Classics at Princeton University, was speaking on a Society for Classical Studies conference panel when he was told by a white female independent scholar that the only reason he got his job was because he was Black, an accusation that reeks of tokenism (Inside Higher Ed). That she felt comfortable enough to make these remarks in public speaks to the reality of the academy as an overwhelmingly white institution. In 2015, only 10.5% of all Humanities doctoral degrees were awarded to people from underrepresented backgrounds, and the percentage for Classics doctoral degree holders is even less: 3.9% (American Academy of Arts and Sciences). While many at the conference denounced such racist remarks, her view highlights the entitlement endemic in these historically white spaces.

In response to this incident, Peralta commented on this pervasiveness: “White fragility disrupting the practice of grounded and data-backed critical scholarship: what a surprise… This wasn’t the first and won’t be the last time I receive the ‘you got X because you’re Black’ treatment; and if I had a dollar for every scholar of color with the same experience, I’d hum Cardi B’s ‘Money’ all the way to a safe deposit box” (Medium).

But what is most troubling for Peralta—and for many other scholars of color—is what these institutions and disciplines are missing. They don’t realize that it is precisely because of a diverse faculty of scholars and teachers that new paths can be forged in research. As Peralta put it, “I should have been hired because I was Black… because my Black being-in-the-world makes it possible for me to ask new and different questions within the field, to inhabit new and different approaches to answering them” (Medium). 

Through their research, a more diverse professoriate can ask a more diverse set of questions—questions that are critical of using whiteness and capitalism as the norm by which all other subjects and ideas are measured. In the United States, the history of knowledge production has established a Euro- & Western-centric point of view (Journal of Black Studies, Equity & Excellence in Education). While disciplines like sociology and public health have historically touted their commitment to “objectivity,” the particular standards by which issues such as the family unit and disease were measured assumed whiteness as the ideal (Seeing Race Again). 

Although legitimate ways of knowing are produced outside of the Ivory Tower, it is still important to increase the number of faculty of color at institutions of higher education. It is high time that we expand our understanding of what a professor looks like. A more diverse faculty is another step towards further exploration of issues that are important to communities of color and their liberation. It is another step toward building a more equitable future.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • A 2017 survey reports that only 18.9% of full-time faculty in higher education identify as people of color (National Center for Education Statistics)

  • A lack of racial diversity in the professoriate means that the image of what a “professor” looks like remains predominantly white & male. 

  • Through their research, a more diverse professoriate can ask a more diverse set of questions—questions that are critical of using whiteness and capitalism as the norm by which all other subjects and ideas are measured.

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