Presumed Incompetent II

Race, Class, Power, and Resistance of Women in Academia

Yolanda Flores Niemann,Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs,Carmen G. González

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781607329664
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The courageous and inspiring personal narratives and empirical studies in Presumed Incompetent II: Race, Class, Power, and Resistance of Women in Academia name formidable obstacles and systemic biases that all women faculty—from diverse intersectional and transnational identities and from tenure track, terminal contract, and administrative positions—encounter in their higher education careers. They provide practical, specific, and insightful guidance to fight back, prevail, and thrive in challenging work environments. This new volume comes at a crucial historical moment as the United States grapples with a resurgence of white supremacy and misogyny at the forefront of our social and political dialogues that continue to permeate the academic world.

Contributors: Marcia Allen Owens, Sarah Amira de la Garza, Sahar Aziz, Jacquelyn Bridgeman, Jamiella Brooks, Lolita Buckner Inniss, Kim Case, Donna Castaneda, Julia Chang, Meredith Clark, Meera Deo, Penelope Espinoza, Yvette Flores, Lynn Fujiwara, Jennifer Gomez, Angela Harris, Dorothy Hines, Rachelle Joplin, Jessica Lavariega Monforti, Cynthia Lee, Yessenia Manzo, Melissa Michelson, Susie E. Nam, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Jodi O'Brien, Amelia Ortega, Laura Padilla, Grace Park, Stacey Patton, Desdamona Rios, Melissa Michal Slocum, Nellie Tran, Rachel Tudor, Pamela Tywman Hoff, Adrien Wing, Jemimah Li Young

SECTION ONE

Tenure and Promotion

Jacquelyn Bridgeman

“Still I Rise”

Lolita Buckner Inniss

The Lucky Law Professor and the Eucatastrophic Moment

Penelope Espinoza

Tenure with a Termination Letter

Pamela Twyman Hoff

Picked to Pieces: The Cost of Opportunity

Cynthia Lee

Surviving a Difficult Tenure Process: Tips for Junior Faculty of Color

Jessica Lavariega Monforti and Melissa R. Michelson

They See Us, but They Don’t Really See Us

Jemimah Li Young and Dorothy E. Hines

Promotion while Pregnant and Black

ONE

“Still I Rise”

Jacquelyn Bridgeman

DOI: 10.7330/9781607329664.c001

I am an African American, cisgender, heterosexual woman who has spent over half of my life in Wyoming, first as a child growing up from ages six to eighteen and again when I returned in 2002 at the age of twenty-eight to join the faculty at the University of Wyoming College of Law. I was the first African American tenure-track professor hired at Wyoming’s law school. Before hiring me, the college had never hired a minority tenure-track professor. I was the first Associate Dean of Color at the College of Law, I was the second Person of Color to be appointed a dean in the history of my institution, and I am still the only woman to serve as dean of our college in its nearly 100-year history. At the time of my hire there was only one American-born tenured Professor of Color in the entire university, which at that time had 612 full-time instructional faculty.

Mine is a narrative about transformation. Transformation of self, transformation of one’s circumstances, transformation of one’s institution. It’s about how I went from almost not getting tenure to having one of the most secure positions at my university. How I went from being the lowest-paid faculty member in my college to being one of the highest paid in the entire university. How I helped my institution move from a place that had one Tenured Faculty Member of Color to now having so many I don’t even know them all. It is about how I learned how to blossom and thrive where I was planted, despite the unconscious racism, overt racism, and rampant sexism I have endured. It is about coming to understand that perhaps the most important work we ever do is not for ourselves, but for others.

The Pre-tenure Crucible and How It Has Shaped My Career

In the nearly sixteen years I have been in academia I have begun to think of a professor position as akin to a polygamous marriage, one that exists between the university, oneself, and one’s colleagues, with the tenure-track process much like a formal courtship in which all parties are trying to determine if they would like to make a long-term commitment. As with most such relationships, mine with the University of Wyoming College of Law and my colleagues went through a honeymoon period, which lasted almost a year.

I often wonder if the honeymoon period would have lasted longer, perhaps indefinitely, had I done a few things differently. Would it have lasted had I not been an outspoken member of the faculty? Or an unconventional, albeit effective and popular, teacher? Or if I had not written on controversial topics like race, gender, and Black identity? Or if I had continued to straighten my hair? Perhaps it would have lasted longer had I not been the first female professor in many years to have children while on tenure track or if I hadn’t also taught in African American studies and insisted on holding those classes in the law school. Even in hindsight it is hard to judge whether doing any of those things differently would have altered the situation I found myself in the year prior to my tenure vote. After all, not doing those things or doing them differently would not have changed the fundamental problem many of my colleagues had with me—the color of my skin. Although it was a problem none of them ever expressed directly, I came to realize over the course of the first six years of my career that the issue affected the evaluation of all aspects of my job.

Teaching: The Unrequited Labor of Love

During the time I have been at Wyoming I have been voted a class hooder, teacher of the year multiple times, and I have received the university’s highest award for teaching excellence. In response to the question, “How did you become a good teacher?” the honest answer is “Unmitigated fear.” The first day I taught my hands shook during the entire seventy-five-minute class period and I spoke so quickly several students considered dropping the class for fear they would never be able to understand me. I had nightmares—about accidentally oversleeping and missing class, about not being able to answer questions, about missing a big change in the law—that robbed me of sleep nearly the entire first year I taught. I broke out in shingles.

When I took my position at Wyoming I was twenty-eight years old, which meant over half the student body was older than I. I had never taught before. The one African American third-year student and I were the only visible People of Color in the entire school. It became clear almost immediately, when one of my students addressed me by my first name without permission within a few weeks of the start of my first semester, that the imprimatur of respect and deference afforded by virtue of standing in front of the class and being called professor did not apply to me.

I overcame my initial day-to-day fear and survived my first year of teaching by working like a crazy person. In one of my evaluations my dean referred to me as a natural teacher. I nearly laughed when I read that statement because the reality was I was anything but. I just worked hard. I worked hard and I taught for the benefit of my students. Fairly early in my teaching career I had an epiphany that changed everything for me. I realized teaching had very little to do with me and everything to do with my students. Ironically, it was my connection to Wyoming that caused me to focus on my students and fueled my drive to become a good teacher.

We are the only law school in Wyoming. Currently, the governor, all of the state Supreme Court justices, many lower-court judges, state legislators, and practicing attorneys are graduates of our law school. Because of the small practices that most of our graduates will enter, they must hit the ground running. They will not have the luxury of a few years after graduation to learn how to be good attorneys. Consequently, if we do not educate our students well, the entire state suffers. Once I understood this, my teaching became about how I could best prepare my students for the jobs they might do upon graduation and much less about me.

Further, I felt very strongly that I did not want to subject my students to the hostile, alienating, and traumatic experience that law school had been for me. I adopted an approach whereby I wanted each student to feel like they got their money’s worth such that they would regret ever missing a class. I called on students in law firms or groups to make answering in class less daunting, and I used group work, simulations, and other activities to encourage active learning, cooperation, and support among the students. I used a variety of techniques to cater to a range of learning styles, and I strove to make class fun.

With respect to the tenure process and my continued longevity, teaching as I have chosen to teach has been a mixed blessing. My teaching approach is extremely time intensive, which makes balancing the scholarship requirements, tremendous service obligations, and now administrative responsibilities that I also have that much more difficult. What’s more, being a good teacher, in and of itself, was not enough to save me or to insulate me from attacks on my scholarship or myself when it came time for my tenure decision. This was in part because my teaching received less value during my evaluation for tenure due to race.

The transparent nature of our tenure and promotion process allowed me to compare the work my colleagues did to my own and the kinds of comments they received to the ones I received. Consequently, I was able to witness firsthand how several of my colleagues attributed the poor teaching of my White male counterparts—often characterized in their student evaluations as an inability to convey information in an accessible and understandable way—to the high level of those teachers’ intellect. In contrast, those same colleagues postulated that the students liked me because I was too easy on them and too helpful—an assessment made despite the fact that evaluation after evaluation described me as challenging and demanding and my classes as some of the hardest the students had taken in law school. The consequence was that my White male colleagues got the same or even more credit for their teaching as I did, even though they did less work and had poorer evaluations. Consequently, that allowed them more time to engage in other pursuits, such as their scholarship.

While a part of me has resented the fact that I received less credit for my teaching versus some of my colleagues, I don’t believe that is the crux of the problem. Rather, I believe my colleagues should have been held to the same standards as I. Since teaching well garnered me little marginal benefit in the tenure and promotion process, there was little incentive for me to be more than a mediocre teacher. This was true despite the fact that quality teaching is something typically valued and rewarded at our institution. Similarly, since my colleagues were rewarded for mediocrity there was little incentive to improve their teaching. None of which served to help students and all of which I worked to change when the opportunity presented itself.

Service: The Structural Racial Tax

While the time I have devoted to teaching has been substantial both before and after tenure, that time has been matched, if not exceeded, by the time I have spent in service work. When I arrived at the University of Wyoming there were four other Black professors. There was an African American studies program in existence, but it was on life support. It became clear almost immediately that if I, and others like me, did not teach in and support the program it wasn’t going to survive. At the same time, there were not enough mentors and means of support for Students of Color, African American or otherwise, and there were not enough people from underrepresented groups to add diversity to the many places where it was desperately needed. That meant that the five of us found ourselves very early in our careers being called upon to keep the African American studies program afloat and sitting on, if not running, all of the university committees that wanted or needed an African American presence or just a Person of Color. The five of us mentored graduate and undergraduate Students of Color throughout the university, in addition to our regular advising and mentoring duties within our own departments, and we frequently helped organize, support, and consult with the greater African American community.

In addition to the service burdens that come with being Black, there are those that come from being in a sparsely populated state. In a state of roughly 500,000 inhabitants, people with professional expertise are not plentiful. Thus, all professors, regardless of race or gender, are frequently called upon to serve when expertise of one kind or another is needed.

I think there is no question I could have done much less service without it negatively affecting my tenure evaluation, and now that I am a tenured, full, senior professor, I could also do less. Moreover, less service pre-tenure would have made my life after tenure easier, though not all classes for African American studies would have been covered. It would have meant that there would have been even fewer than five people to help carry the load of mentoring, advocating, and serving in all the many ways our institution needed People of Color to serve.

I have always believed that the opportunities my forebearers fought for mean very little if, once one takes advantage of the opportunity, one does not work to change and better the institution of which one is a part. It means little if one does not speak out regarding things of import and if one does not work to help pave the way for others to follow. Accordingly, I have tried to make all the service work I have done transformative and lasting. Whenever possible I have tried to take on only work that would lead to significant change at my institution or open up opportunities for others. For example, when I served on hiring committees I made sure we advertised and targeted underrepresented populations, often doing extra work to build a diverse applicant pool and to encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply. I then fought for people from these groups to be interviewed and hired. Because I was the token member on so many hiring committees, over time this strategy helped change the makeup of people hired at my institution. Later, when I was in charge of appointing hiring committees, I made sure they were staffed with people committed to diversity and inclusiveness.

Similarly, I found that many in my institution were willing to make changes and were willing to listen and learn if there was someone to lead, or to educate, so I took the lead in a lot of initiatives and worked to educate my colleagues in the process of us doing work together. For example, during my second year, I agreed to co-chair a fledgling university-wide committee that was tasked with creating a weeklong set of events centered around the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. I used my service on that committee to develop relationships across the university with people who were committed to issues of diversity and inclus...