When it comes to gaining tenure, are minority professors held to higher — or even shifting — standards, compared to their white colleagues? That’s the question asked by numerous challenges to negative tenure decisions nationwide in recent years. It’s also the premise behind a new book that’s attracting attention for articulating what some see as a longstanding but heretofore unspoken rule of academe.
Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure(University of North Carolina Press), was edited by Patricia A. Matthew, an associate professor of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey. She begins the volume with her own story: she was initially denied tenure at her own institution at the provost’s level with no prior warning, even after she won the approval of her faculty peers. She and colleagues spent the Thanksgiving holiday of that year scouring the faculty manual about what they could have missed in her application, and communications with colleagues turned up a similar cases involving scholars of color elsewhere — including that of Andrea Smith, then of the University of Michigan. Smith, who has said she is Cherokee (something that has since been disputed), held positions in the American culture program and women’s studies, but only the former recommended her for tenure, so she lost her bid to stay at Michigan. Due in part to her popularity with students and her credentials, the case drew national attention — and Matthew’s.
“It was the beginning of my understanding about how capricious the academy can be,” Matthew says. “[Smith] had authored two books and co-authored one, with her more recent book due out from Duke University Press. She had edited or coedited three books and two special issues of journals in her field. She matched this scholarly output with the kind of service and activism that faculty of color regularly take on. I couldn’t keep track of all she had done, even though it was right there in print for me to read.”
