We Are All on Native Land: Transforming Faculty Searches with Indigenous Methods

Abstract

We Are All on Native Land: Transforming Faculty Searches with Indigenous Methods Becky Thompson Since its inception in the late 1960s, women's studies has brought substan tial change to curricular, pedagogical, and epistemological practices in the academy. The initial "add and stir" approach to including women in the curriculum has largely been replaced by a sophisticated analysis of gender, race, and class; a transnational focus; and a complex understanding of women's embodiment. Feminist attention to pedagogy has succeeded in illuminating multiple forms of learning as well as the multiple ways that power manifests itself in the classroom. Women's studies-inspired theoret ical formulations—including standpoint theory, mestiza consciousness, and intersectional frameworks—also reverberate across the academy.1 Although facilitating these changes has been, for many of us, the center of our life's work, acknowledging what remains to be done is a humbling experience. One area that we have yet to examine systematically is how institutions go about recruiting and hiring diverse new faculty. The percentage of full-time people of color faculty in women's studies (30.4 percent) substantially exceeds the percentage of people of color in other disciplines (19 percent), but we have yet to offer sustained discussion of the methods and ethics we use (and hope to use) to continue to diversify the faculty.2 In addition, the actual embodied experience for many women of color in women's studies still makes relevant the pioneering title, All the FeministStudies37, no. 3 (Fall 2011). © 2011 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 534 BeckyThompson 535 Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies.3 These realities are especially ironic given that the building and sustaining of women's studies and other disciplines in the twenty-first century abso lutely depend upon a process of diversified regeneration. I became particularly aware of the limited analysis in hiring and retention practices when, as a newly hired director of the recently combined Women's and Ethnic Studies Program at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs (uccs), my first charge was to lead a search for a tenure track scholar specializing in Native American studies. As I began to docu ment the process we used for the search, I looked for articles about other search processes intent upon achieving a diverse pool of applicants. Along the way I uncovered various handbooks about the strategies adminis trators and faculty have created through the years for recruiting diverse faculty. The University of Michigan Handbook for Faculty Searches and Hiring: Academic Year 2009-2010—one of the most substantial and comprehensive online hand books currently available—offered crucial points for conducting searches, including broadening pools, using active recruitment processes, and focusing on the scholarship and commitments of candidates of color (not solely their demographic characteristics).4 The most helpful quantitative research on affirmative action includes a study based on data from seven hundred searches conducted at three large elite public research universities. These data convincingly show that in order to hire people of color successfully, it is essential to change how regu lar searches and hiring processes are conducted. The authors conclude their study with a plea for detailed case studies that will "shed more light on the particular circumstances under which faculty of color hires are made."5 The value of case studies, in part, is the potential for nuance, specificity, and attention to complex power dynamics. Such specificity can, among other contributions, help counter the common tendency to lump Africans, African Americans, South Asians, Latinos, and Native Americans into one category—people of color—a conflation that misses the numerous ways that strategies for recruitment need to be culturally and racially specific.6 Although handbooks and quantitative work offer valuable guidelines, I found myself continuing to search for "thick description," for qualita tive analysis of searches that successfully resulted in hiring faculty of color. 536 BeckyThompson The dearth of case studies—on practicing affirmative action in general and in relation to Native American scholars in particular—is of special concern because few faculty members have been granted the training we need to conduct race-, gender-, and language-conscious searches. This reality...