Faculty Identities and the Challenge of Diversity

Reflections on Teaching in Higher Education

Mark A Chesler, Alford A Young Jr, Mark A. Chesler, Alford A. Young Jr.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317259763
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book focuses on understanding the experiences of faculty members of various races/ethnicities and genders and their classroom encounters with students in the United States. It illustrates some of the dynamics for faculty members facing the challenges and opportunities the diversity presents.

Part I Background and Contexts

Chapter 1

The State of Research with Faculty Identities in Higher Educational Classrooms and Institutional Contexts

Mark A. Chesler

Faculty members are not simply lone scholars and researchers, isolated teachers, or freewheeling entrepreneurs in the university. Much of what they do—or can imagine doing—is affected by the disciplinary, departmental, and organizational context within which they work, teach, and learn and by their relationships with their peers and students. The different missions, operating structures, cultures, and resources of varied higher educational organizations affect support for and resistance to departmental/peer climates and classroom experiences that might improve the quality of life for all faculty, especially for white women faculty and men and women faculty of color. They also impact faculty members’ pedagogical options and encounters with students. These organizational contexts often are not conducive to good teaching and learning, let alone to creating effective and diverse environments in which faculty can realize the goals of a critical multicultural community and the creation of generations of students prepared to live in a diverse democracy. Any serious analysis of the professional lives and practices of faculty members as well as of race, gender, and class equity or discrimination in higher education must take account of the organizational cultures and structures within which faculty operate.

This chapter establishes a context and background for the chapters to follow by (1) discussing the raced and gendered nature of these institutions that provides the setting within which faculty members enact their pedagogical and organizational practices, (2) reviewing some of the scholarly and anecdotal literature about the experiences and pedagogical approaches of faculty members of different racial/ethnic and gender identities, and (3) introducing the empirically based chapters that follow and their links to this established literature. As such, it relieves the following chapters of creating lengthy independent reviews of the scholarly literature except insofar as there are sources that pertain most directly and uniquely to their foci. A common understanding of the cultural and structural characteristics of higher educational institutions and related research is background for the following chapters’ descriptions and interpretations of the experiences of faculty members of different social identities.

Higher Education as Raced and Gendered Culture

Our research-oriented higher educational institutions (R-1s) and their curricula, pedagogies, and scholarly traditions have been developed principally by—and for—members of privileged social groups and have been maintained more or less in this fashion until very recently (and how much “more or less” is a matter of considerable debate). These systems have privileged white and male faculty members and students and have provided the basis for exclusion and discrimination against members of various racial/ethnic groups and white women. As Jayakumar and associates (2009, 555) note, such privilege may or may not be known or sought: “White faculty benefit from institutional racism irrespective of whether they are consciously aware of or actively support racist attitudes, practices, policies.” The benefits to white faculty—and disadvantages to others—include the treatment of some kinds of cultural stances and priorities as legitimate and others not, some faculty scholarly pursuits as normative and others not, and some ways of teaching and relating with students appropriate and rewarded and some not.

Many of the core cultural priorities and practices of higher educational institutions have played significant and positive roles in the history of education and science in our nation. But in their extended application in Historically White Colleges and Universities (HWCUs, also known as Primarily White Institutions, PWIs) they also sustain and reproduce race and gender inequality and discrimination. Some of these traditions clearly work to the detriment of all scholars and students, but they fall especially hard on people who come from backgrounds supporting alternative values, who are less socialized into or comfortable negotiating the academic culture (a culture dominated by white and male and relatively affluent lifestyles and norms), or who have experienced a history of educational and societal disadvantage, exclusion, and oppression.

These traditions include a focus on the individualistic value orientation of white culture and on individual achievement as the standard for faculty members’ scholarly and teaching performance and for student performance. They are reflected in the academic emphasis on and greater reward for single-authored papers or for being the “lead author” on multi-authored works. Individualistic norms also diminish the importance of teamwork and skills in interactions among the faculty, often sapping the vitality of groupwork, communal styles of working and relating, thereby leading to a lack of community or “hollowed collegiality” (Massey, Wilger, and Colbeck 1994). And as Creamer (2006, 74) argues, “The individualistic values that are at the center of the traditional academic reward structure offer one explanation why early career faculty often voice a concern about a sense of isolation and lack of community.” They also affect the career trajectories of women colleagues and colleagues of color who may adopt a more collective or communal orientation to departmental life or classroom instruction.

The emphasis on individual achievement also leads to pedagogical approaches that treat students as individual learners, minimizing consideration of their cultural and socioeconomic identities, backgrounds, and peer group relationships. Moreover, because groupwork or teamwork is seldom employed as part of instructional designs, the potential power of collaborative learning is lost. One result of these pedagogies is that generations of students have not learned how to work effectively as team members and especially not as members of diverse teams nor with people of different racial/ethnic backgrounds.

A second tradition emphasizes universalistic norms/definitions of merit and the utilization of standardized—universally applicable, assumed to fit to everyone regardless of cultural background or style—tests or criteria as indicators of such merit. This orientation (along with concerns about bureaucratic efficiency) led to the use of SATs and GREs as admissions criteria, which we know now are culturally biased and systematically disadvantage certain racial/ethnic groups of students and those of lower-class origins, especially those who have been tracked or segregated into inadequate forms of elementary and secondary education. They also privilege students whose prior cultural, socioeconomic, and educational experiences and resources enable them to fit neatly into these narrow definitions of talent and merit. The failure to recognize and act on the limits of universalistic assumptions and policies minimizes race/ethnic, gender, and class differences and justifies the mythology of a meritocratic system that is open to all.

At the faculty level narrow definitions of merit promote a set of orthodoxies that limit the possibilities for diversity in faculty ranks and work and lifestyle. To be sure, different disciplines have different criteria for excellence, but by and large the range is narrow and privileges research topics and methods that can gain publication in prestigious academic journals that are read primarily by elites and are typically unavailable to the general public. They constrain the hiring, retention, and promotion of faculty members who have opted for lifestyles that may have delayed their entry into the academic job market (i.e., nonaffluent men serving in the armed forces in order to generate the resources to pay for continued education, women bearing and raising children, people of color struggling to overcome societal barriers to educational opportunity). Thus, scholars coming from or committed to serving the interests of women, racial minorities, and working-class or poor communities may face exclusion, punishment, or sanctions in hiring searches or at tenure reviews. Tate (1994) argues that universalism, with its emphasis on transcendency, acontextuality, and single truths, is a worldview that “tends to minimize anything that is historical, contextual or specific with the unscholarly labels of literary or personal” (249). The universalistic tradition obviously erects barriers to retrieving or using such different perspectives and the potentially unique contributions or stances undertaken by many scholars of color and feminist scholars (and students), thus negatively affecting their advancement within traditional notions of scholarship. As a result, the academy loses the expertise of faculty from different racial/ethnic, gender, class, or cultural backgrounds who are likely to bring unique and valuable insights to the table—to the curriculum, to views of students and pedagogy, to decisions about hiring and promotion, and so forth.

Culturally narrow notions of merit also mean that “On and off college campuses [the products of] white status and privilege are often mistaken for meritorious privilege” (Feagin, Vera, and Imani 1996, 152). Thus, by being seen as “normal,” whiteness dominates the culture of the academy and the knowledge it produces and disseminates. In like fashion, Auster and MacRone (1994) discuss how the “masculine” nature of the educational system, reflected in public displays of superior knowledge, argument, and challenge, is seen as a common form of intellectual exchange.

A third major tradition is the generally low priority for undergraduate education in our large, prestigious research universities. Despite rhetoric about commitments to undergraduate education, the recent report on undergraduate teaching at Harvard notes that “The problem lies, for the most part, not in individual values but in what the institution seems to prioritize and reward in its official, publicly visible routines. In principle, FAS (Faculty of Arts and Sciences) expects all faculty members to do what many in fact do: devote comparable time during the academic year to teaching and research, and teach undergraduates as well as graduate students. But in institutional practice cutting-edge academic research is what FAS celebrates and most consistently rewards” (Harvard 2007, 6–7).

To the extent that white women faculty and faculty of color are likely to spend more time than do white men on teaching and service roles (see, among others, Antonio, Astin, and Cress 2000; Bellas and Toutkoushian 1999), they are disadvantaged by the priority on research as the primary—if not sole—criterion for academic advance. Further, the research priorities of these institutions encourage a form of academic specialization that, as James J. Duderstadt, former president of the University of Michigan and author of the visionary Michigan Mandate, (2007) recently pointed out, often prevented or delayed the hiring of minority scholars/teachers who could enhance departmental strength even if they did not fit a narrow (sub)disciplinary need.

Large and prestigious research-oriented universities along with their stellar departments gain their reputations and enhance their own sense of excellence via the activities of research scholars and the production of research. These scholars, especially the senior research-oriented faculty, enhance and enrich the intellectual environment of the university and often are beacons of light and stimulus for interested and committed colleagues and students. At the same time, as academic administrators Cross and Goldenberg (2009, 1) point out, “Today, outstanding teacher-scholars spend much more of their time and energy on their individual scholarly work and their national and international networks than they spend on their local institution.” Clearly, not all these senior scholars are interested in or committed to undergraduate education or are effective undergraduate classroom teachers.

The research priority of many R-1 institutions also is reflected in the overrepresentation of the newer generation of junior scholars in nontenure-track roles (often women faculty and faculty of color), in the instruction of large introductory lecture classes, and in some institutions doing the bulk of undergraduate teaching. Cross and Goldenberg (2009, 71) further argue that R-1 institutions’ growing rise of non-tenure-track faculty (NTTs—lecturers, instructors, part-timers) is due partly to deans who are “more powerfully driven by academic research and scholarly needs than by teaching needs.” These NTT colleagues’ lower status conveys important messages about the relatively low priority of such instruction and of the appropriate roles for white women and men and women of color in the larger frame of organizational responsibilities, assignments, and rewards.

An additional result of the low priority on undergraduate teaching in general is a press for efficiency, an emphasis on mass production of students, and an assumption that one type of instruction works best for all faculty and students, regardless of their cultural background or style. The dominance of large lecture-style and “transmission belt” forms of pedagogy (see Freire 1970) fit best, if at all, with white- and male-oriented styles of being, relating, teaching, and learning. Indeed, Johnsrud (1993, 13) argues that “Traditional academic values of autonomy, competition and individualism are called into question as women and, to some extent, minority faculty counter with values of community, connectedness and collaboration.” Some of this “countering” is reflected in research by Lindholm and colleagues (Lindholm and Astin 2008; Lindholm and Szelenyi 2006; Lindholm et al. 2005), suggesting that women faculty and faculty of color are more likely than white men faculty to use a wider range of nonbanking and nonnormative approaches in class—student-centered and participative techniques such as open discussion, peer evaluation, dialog, and so forth.

Such alternative approaches are critical because racial/ethnic diversity (called “structural diversity” by Gurin 1999) is a necessary but not sufficient condition for an effective multicultural learning environment. The level and quality of interaction among students (and among students and faculty) of different backgrounds is the crucial added element (see the distinction between “structural” and both “classroom” and “interactional” diversity in Gurin 1999; Gurin et al. 2004; Gurin et al. 2002). Marin (2000, 64), among others, continues this emphasis on pedagogy as she argues, “interaction—in the form of discussion and other active learning techniques—is essential if the potential of multi-racial/multi-ethnic classrooms is to be maximized.” Such active and learner-centered pedagogies are quite different from the more typical teacher-centered and lecture-based approaches to teaching (Maruyama and Moreno 2000; Nagda, Gurin, and Lopez 2003).

Finally, contemporary standards of scholarly work in our elite and trendsetting institutions emphasize the production of research that advances academic theory and disciplinary goals over the expansion of public knowledge. The very nature of scholarly activities that focus on limited methodological and epistemological designs and that privilege disciplinary agendas results in work that is read by and generally serves narrow professional audiences and ruling public elites—white and affluent constituencies, for the most part. And even work that might serve the interests of poor people or of communities of color seldom finds its way out of academic texts and journals into the hands of members of these communities.

Many white women and men and women of color—and a good number of younger white men—enter the academy with strong commitments to reduce race and gender oppression and to do scholarly work that links to the needs and interests of disadvantaged or oppressed constituencies in student or civic communities. When their commitments lead them to spend considerable time advising white women students or students of color or otherwise work in ways and on issues not valued or rewarded by traditional academic norms (Tierney and Bensimon 1996; Turner 2003), they may be seen as deviants or transgressors. Then the power of the dominant normative system works to threaten, constrain, or sanction them for their alternative choices, both in formal tenure and promotion reviews and in informal everyday forms of interaction.

Tierney and Bensimon (1996, 10) suggest that as a result of some of these conventions, core norms, or sacred cows, “The social fabric of the academic community has been torn asunder.” A focus on diversity efforts in R-1 institutions and the evidence in this volume regarding the different classroom, pedagogical, and collegial experiences of their white faculty and faculty of color as well as their women faculty and men faculty lay bare the narrow and elitist cultural assumptions and organizational practices that govern higher education and help explain much of the underlying lack of community and civility of discourse within academe.

The Campus and Classroom Climate

The demographic realities and cultural traditions identified above set the stage for how faculty members approach and respond to what goes on in the classroom, the central arena for student learning and faculty teaching. And the faculty’s approach to the classroom, the pedagogical and curricular choices they make, determines much of students’ experiences. Of course most faculty members care about the instructional process and try hard to be effective teachers. At the same time, however, many have not been trained to, do not know how to, are not rewarded for, and are not provided with the support to be effective in diverse and multicultural classroo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface Why?
• Part I Background and Contexts
• Part II Difference and Diversity in Classroom Interactions
• Part III Examinations of the Role of Identity
• Part IV Larger Contexts … and Change
• References
• Index
• About the Editors and Contributors