![]() So, every few days, I put aside time to do this work that probably doesn’t count to the people who assess my scholarly productivity. Those are the ones I’m most interested in-the student in a small midwestern town who wants to help his classmates understand why folks are chanting Black Lives Matter the student who’s seeking more context after being assigned Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me the student who explained to me that she is chairing a committee on her New England campus that is focused on racial reconciliation. We’re also called on to “diversify” campus committees and to represent the views of a variety of ethnic groups. ![]() The thing I hear most often is that they want to do something for their students but they feel ill-equipped to do so because the issue falls out of their area of expertise. To date, I’ve personally received more than 200 requests for the reader from professors and student-service administrators from all kinds of institutions: high-school libraries, Ivy League professors, community-college faculty, and people who want to read it for their own edification. We worked outside of our expertise as a service to our institution. I write and teach about 19th-century British literature, and the colleagues I worked with on the reader are not historians or sociologists. There’s not a lot of room in my teaching or research for this kind of work. It reminded me of the importance of such service. In those tweets, I mentioned that my colleagues and I put together a reader with articles and essays that we thought would offer useful context for our students for a Ferguson event we had planned. For example, earlier this year, I got a lot of attention for a series of tweets that focused on how I have learned to talk to students of color, particularly black students, during a time when the extrajudicial deaths of black men and women are getting more attention than they have in the past. I’m not sure what choices I would make now. I was happy to follow that advice even if it meant keeping as low a profile as possible and declining requests to take on important projects that I knew would not count when I came up for tenure. She certainly isn’t going to get tenure for it.Īlthough I have tenure now, as a new, African American faculty member I know I was strongly advised by my senior colleagues and administrators to keep my service to that so-called diversity mission to a minimum, and it was advice that I was happy to follow. Chances are a faculty member of color is not going to get a sabbatical or a grant from her institution because she contributes to the diversity mission her university probably has posted somewhere on its website. ![]() ![]() Those like me who pay attention to diversity in higher education call this work “ invisible labor”-not because no one sees it but because institutions don’t value it with the currency they typically use to reward faculty work: reappointment, tenure, and promotion. In turn, when faculty of color are hired, they are often expected to occupy a certain set of roles: to serve as mentors, inspirations, and guides-to be the racial conscience of their institutions while not ruffling too many of the wrong feathers. This is in part because a call for a more diverse professoriate suggests that faculty of color, simply by being brown and on campus, can serve the institution in unique ways. To put it simply, in the parlance of social media, the students protesting are woke AF-and one of the things they want are more faculty of color. Such activism took place on campuses that don’t have such high profiles, too. Then, students of color called for their schools to develop more inclusive climates-with big stories breaking from campuses like the University of Missouri and Princeton-and pressed elite institutions to confront the racist histories of the leaders they enshrine. The spate of racialized attacks on college campuses after the election are, in some ways, the flip side of the protests that sprung up across the country starting last fall.
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