African American Faculty Members Research Articles

The Jackie Robinson Dynamic for African-American Faculty at the Most Prestigious and Elite Predominately White Institutions (PWIs) that Teach Cybersecurity and Technology

Abstract The incredible strength and bravery of Jackie Robinson in breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball is remembered and admired by many. However, the difficulty of his journey is often underestimated. As the Black Lives Matter movement has become more prominent, African-American faculty members at Predominately White Institutions (PWIs) face their own trials similar to Robinson’s. The need for psychological safety in the workplace from their colleagues and organizational leadership has never been more critical. They experience isolation, alienation, and inequality as faculty and potential professionals in cybersecurity and technology fields. This paper explores those dynamics through the concept of Jackie Robinson’s journey.

Creating the South Caroliniana Library

Creating the South Caroliniana Library

Identifying and Understanding Microaggressions among Michigan Medicine African-American Faculty Members (2460)

Identifying and Understanding Microaggressions among Michigan Medicine African-American Faculty Members (2460)

Micro-Protests as Co-cultural Communicative Practice

In this article, I utilize phenomenologically-based creative nonfiction to present a case study of what micro-protest looks like for an African American faculty member working in a predominantly white university. Drawing from observations and informal information-gathering techniques over a 20+ year period, I present a layered account to share snippets from a larger narrative that vividly capture the nuanced ways co-cultural group members navigate predominantly white organizational spaces in the margins. Ultimately, I introduce the various ways micro-protest—as a new conceptualization of co-cultural practice—is enacted to achieve the preferred outcome of separation. I conclude with a brief discussion of how this scholarly endeavor contributes to co-cultural research and theorizing.

Trump’s America is Making Microagressions an Even Greater Reality for Women Faculty of Color: An African American Faculty Member’s Lived Experiences

Trump’s America is Making Microagressions an Even Greater Reality for Women Faculty of Color: An African American Faculty Member’s Lived Experiences

Commentary: Diversity in physics: Are you part of the problem?

Commentary: Diversity in physics: Are you part of the problem?

Does race still matter in nursing? The narratives of African-American nursing faculty members

BackgroundThe rise in undergraduate enrollment of African-American students has not translated into more African-American faculty members, although they could mentor minority students and promote an ethos that encourages their academic success. Discrimination against African-American faculty members continues, which could lessen their presence. PurposeThis study explored the narratives of 23 African-American faculty members to determine if race still matters in nursing. MethodsA narrative approach grounded in social constructionism and critical race theory was used to illustrate the journey of African-American faculty into and throughout academia and to reveal factors related to decisions to enter and remain in academia. DiscussionMost of the participants stated that they faced racial discrimination that tested their resilience and reinforced their commitment to the academy. ConclusionIntentional actions and open discourse could strengthen institutional commitments to racial diversity and facilitate the recruitment and retention of racially diverse nursing faculties.

Where are minority physics faculty members?

There is a significant clustering of African-American physics faculty members at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Almost half (47%) of African-American physics faculty members are employed by physics departments at HBCUs. Physics departments at 30 HBCUs award degrees in physics; this accounts for about 4% (30 out of 746) of the physics-degree-granting departments in U.S. colleges and universities. Half of all African-American physics faculty members work at just 23 departments, meaning that most physics students will never see a black faculty member.

Performing Political Responsibility: Ralph and Fanny Ellison’s Appeal to Visual Arts

When Christopher McElroen sought the University of Iowa as a location for putting the finishing touches on his 2012 stage adaptation of Invisible Man, he was inspired by the intriguing convergence of Fanny Ellison's and Ralph Ellison's history in Iowa City. In 1936, Fanny McConnell earned her bachelor's degree from the Department of Speech and Dramatic Art of the State University of Iowa, and in 1959, Ralph Ellison, who married Fanny in 1946, was invited to become the first African American faculty member in the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop. Examining their early training, as well as the creative work that shaped their professional paths, reveals both Ellisons' enduring interest in art and performance. Although Ellison scholarship has not pursued their Iowa connection or the significance of the couple's shared interest in visual art, McElroen recognized the rich possibilities of exploring this confluence as he fine-tuned his play. His twenty-first century interpretation of Ralph Ellison's mid-twentieth-century novel celebrates the rare ability of the stage to foreground the human truths that Invisible Man explores. His staging also recalls both Ellisons' investment in visual art to examine the politics of race.1McElroen's attention to period costumes and sets evokes the historical moment that shaped Fanny Ellison's and Ralph Ellison's artistic and political sensibility. The protagonist of Invisible Man comes of age during the Jim Crow era and searches for his political voice during the pre-civil rights movement years, evolving along a similar trajectory as the Ellisons. The vivid role that plastic art occupies on McElroen's stage cleverly portrays the power that visual images wield in molding intellectual, cultural, and political beliefs and subtly introduces Ralph Ellison's investment in visual art aesthetics. For instance, in an early scene that re-creates the confrontation between Invisible Man and Bledsoe, the college president who keeps the naive protagonist running, McElroen features a large portrait of Booker T. Washington. As a set piece, the image of the Tuskegee president deepens the scene by introducing Ralph Ellison's biographical history, the politics of Invisible Man's college, and Washington's appeal to photography to spread his educational and political philosophy.2 More broadly, McElroen taps into the Ellisons' dual investment in exploring the ability of visual art to engage complicated political positions. Taking a cue from McElroen's stage adaptation, this article ponders Fanny Ellison's engagement with visual media and particular artists and probes Ralph Ellison's attention to specific paintings in his literary work to sharpen our understanding of their nuanced analysis of race relations in the twentieth-century United States.Fanny Ellison's Early Aesthetic: Theater, Art, and Cultural PrideFanny McConnell appealed to plastic art and performance to advance discussions of race long before she met Ralph Ellison in 1944.3 When she transferred from Fisk University to the University of Iowa in 1934, she changed her focus from literature to drama. As one of the few black undergraduates in Iowa's cutting-edge theater arts program, she flourished, notwithstanding the many difficulties African American students encountered.4 The 1934-1935 theater season at Iowa found McConnell working on production crews for plays as disparate as Sidney Howard's Yellow Jack and Susan Glaspell's Allison's House.5 She valued her undergraduate instruction, and the unwritten rules that prohibited African American students from acting onstage at Iowa failed to deter her. Instead, her undergraduate experiences fueled her passion for the stage. She viewed the theater as a space to challenge racial inequality without compromising artistic excellence.6After graduation, McConnell channeled her theatrical training directly into addressing African American community concerns. She returned to Chicago, where she briefly taught speech and drama at the YMCA before joining the Board of Education of Museum Extension Aid. …

Seeing Color in School Choice

Research across states has consistently shown that African American parents tend to send their children to charter schools with higher concentrations of African American students as compared to the concentrations of the district-assigned schools their children would otherwise attend. However, little research has addressed why these parents choose these schools. The present case study begins to fill this void in the literature by exploring the following research question: Why have African American parents chosen to enroll their children in one predominantly African American (> 95%) charter school. Parents’ choice of this school was not a “color-blind” one. Parents were impressed with the school’s welcoming atmosphere, its small setting and classroom sizes, and its high number of African American faculty members. Parent participants reported feeling comfortable with school staff and feeling assured that their children would be loved, respected, and cared for by school personnel. Their beliefs and preferences should be contextualized with the understanding that African Americans have and continue to be victims of racial discrimination and hatred in the United States. Study participants’ preference to have their children in the charge of other African Americans, their higher degree of comfort in the presence of other African Americans, and their beliefs that White teachers are less capable of truly understanding African American children may come as a result of racism and racist interactions in predominantly White schools as well as broader American society.

Southern Coup: Recruiting African American Faculty Members at an Elite Private Southern Research University

Competition for highly qualified African American faculty members among elite universities in the United States remains keen. Two of the most successful research universities at recruiting African American faculty members are located in the Southeast. Employing a conceptual framework grounded in organizational culture and climate literature, in this qualitative study the authors identified sets of tangible, intangible, and non-work-related factors that influenced the decisions of 12 African American faculty members in several disciplines to accept positions at an elite private research university in the Southeast. Study participants identified other factors not included in the original conceptual framework that also played significant roles in their decisions to accept positions at this university. Understanding such factors may assist other elite research universities in developing recruiting strategies to compete more effectively for African American faculty members.

African American Faculty and Student-Oriented Challenges: Transforming the Student Culture in Higher Education from Multiple Perspectives

Introduction Higher education is charged with the dual mission of promoting the development of innate human potential and of ensuring the evolution of civilization (Hall & Rowan, 2000). It provides a conduit for diminishing social divisions among individuals and groups, and yet, it has not successfully forged bridges within its own context in relation to race. Historical and current cultural and social dynamics must be understood in order to recognize the challenges experienced by African American faculty members (Allen, Epps, Guillory, Suh, & Bonous-Hammarth, 2000; Epps, 1989). Higher education emerges from the social milieu, and thus, the experiences of various racial groups within academia reflect the status and power of these groups within the larger social structure (Allen et al.; Epps, 1989; Marcus et al., 2003). Contemporary literature suggests that African American faculty members are influenced by racial inequalities within academia (Astin, Antonio, Cress, & Astin, 1997; Nettles & Perna, 1995; Tack & Patitu, 1992). Creating strategies for transforming higher education would be ineffective if the role of discrimination and racial inequities and how these emerge within domains of higher education are not considered or are only considered in a cursory manner. Discrimination in academia is subtle and difficult to identify in a clear and concise manner (Menges & Exum, 1983). Societal perceptions of race pervade the system of higher education and influence administrators, faculty members, staff, and students. Within the United States, race is a social construction that encompasses sociopolitical factors which work to devalue specific groups of people (Robinson, 2005). Race and its corresponding social perceptions is correlated with huge variations in occupational choice, income, education, access to health care and other resources, and longevity (Anderson, 2003). The social ramifications of race transcend contexts and situations. In academia, it manifests in a variety of ways including, but not limited to, teaching evaluations, promotion and tenure procedures, recruitment and retention policies, and work climate (Bradley & Holcomb-McCoy, 2004; Collins, 1990; Collison, 1999; Cornelius, 1997; Perna, 2001; Tillman, 2001; Toutkoushian, 1998). Across the last three decades, the challenges encountered by African American faculty members have been documented in the literature. Although there has been progress in the domain of recruitment, there continues to be difficulties connected to creating an optimal environment in which faculty can thrive and flourish as academicians (Allen et al., 2000; Marcus et al., 2003; Turner, Myers, & Creswell, 1999). One of these difficulties encompasses the intentional and unintentional challenges posed by the student culture. There is a dearth of literature that clearly articulates how student culture influences the experiences of African American faculty members. Despite efforts on college campuses to increase representation of African-American faculty members and students and to promote an environment of consciousness, many campuses continue to experience cultural encapsulation (Bucher, 2004). Diversity consciousness refers to understanding, awareness, and skills in the area of diversity (Bucher, p. 22). Establishing a learning community revolving around consciousness is a dynamic process that requires ongoing commitment to openness, learning, and evolution. African American faculty members and all the individuals involved in higher education have the potential to promote such a learning environment. This article overviews the race-related challenges experienced by African American faculty members in higher education and articulates how the student culture compounds the difficulties present in academia. Understanding and recognizing these dynamics is the necessary foundation on which to build strategies for promoting consciousness in the student culture. …

The New Nuns: Racial Justice and Religious Reform in the 1960s (review)

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 68 The New Nuns: Racial Justice and Religious Reform in the 1960s. By Amy L. Koehlinger. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. x, 304 pp. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-674-02473-1. In the 1950s Catholic nuns were educating nearly ten percent of U.S. children. There were more nuns in the United States than in any other country in the world. “Sisters,” as they were addressed, formed the vast majority of teachers and administrators in thousands of Catholic schools and a significant proportion of nurses in Catholic hospitals. In a nation known mainly for its affluence, tens of thousands of young women had relinquished personal possessions and family ties in order to dedicate themselves to prayer, convent routines, and service in schools and hospitals . By 1965, the peak year of membership, more than 180,000 sisters were living in scores of orders, each with its own distinctive medieval dress or “habit.” In that same year, however, the rules and routines of sisters’ lives were suddenly thrown into flux. In the wake of Vatican II, a major reform council in Rome that aimed to update and liberalize the Church’s teachings and institutions, sisters began to modify the traditional habit, move out of convents into smaller communities, and initiate new works with the mainly non-Catholic poor. Given their impact on education and healthcare in the United States, it is remarkable that so little has been written about American nuns in the twentieth century. Amy Koehlinger’s The New Nuns, a beautifully written account of the experiences of the sisters who initiated programs for interracial justice in the 1960s, begins to fill this void. Koehlinger recounts how, in March 1965, fifty-six sisters transcended the traditional strictures of cloister to join the thousands of civil rights activists who marched from Selma to Montgomery. Although many more lay Catholics than nuns participated in the freedom marches, the media focused upon Catholic sisters marching in their robes and veils. As the Selma sisters’ photos flashed across the country, those images inspired other sisters to re-think their ministries. Some sisters began to lobby their superiors for permission to leave the parochial schools to engage in work that they said was more relevant to the social needs of the times. They argued that working for justice for society’s most oppressed would be in closer keeping with the original purposes of their orders as well as the ecumenicism and social justice promoted by the Vatican council. Koehlinger narrates how one of the Selma marchers, Sister Margaret Traxler, coordinated a mini-explosion of programs aimed at gaining justice for blacks and reducing prejudice among whites. Traxler was a master at securing funds J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 8 69 from Catholic sources and the federal government (President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity) in order to run new sisterstaffed programs for racial justice. Hundreds of sisters volunteered as summer instructors at southern black colleges so that African American faculty members could devote their summers to research and publishing . Others ran racial sensitivity training workshops in Catholic parishes around the country. In Project Cabrini, sisters ran a free summer school near a Chicago housing project that offered art, music, reading, math, and African American history to nine hundred children a day in 1965. By 1967, nuns were running similar programs in eleven U.S. cities. Koehlinger gives us an astute account of the confluence of religious, educational, and political forces that helped to make the new nuns possible . She reports that the sisters involved in interracial ministry in the 1960s subsequently wielded disproportionate influence over the shape of reforms in sisters’ communities in the 1970s. She also mines a treasure trove of sisters’ letters, supplemented by interviews, to offer a perceptive reading of nuns’ inner experiences. In her chapter on the “Selma Sisters,” Koehlinger compares the attitudes of white sisters who ran a hospital for African Americans in Selma with the attitudes of northern sisters who came to march in Alabama in 1965, revealing varied approaches of...

The Affirmative Activism Project

Recently the MLA and its affiliate ADE produced two significant reports that highlight the professional challenges currently facing the profession, one from the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion and the other from the ADE Ad Hoc Committee on the Status of African American Faculty Members in English. While the MLA report focuses on the increasing demands being placed on faculty members in the tenure and promotion process, the ADE report details the particular difficulties that African American graduate students and faculty members contend with as they navigate the various stages of ca reer development. These two issues are not unrelated. Both reports make important and concrete recommendations on how to create more diverse academic communities that foster the expansion of the field in terms of scholarly contributions and on how to promote specific institutional prac tices that work to ensure that the professoriat more adequately reflects the population at large. These publications provide a much-needed institu tional context for understanding individual narratives of racialization and marginalization many of us witness in the profession. These reports, the result of massive effort and care, will only prove significant, however, if they are circulated, discussed, and integrated into the ongoing conversa tions all of us engage in about what it means to be part of the academy. This article and the two others (by Williams and by Justice and Barker) published in this issue of Profession under the heading taken from the ADE

Talent, the Staying Power of Racism, and Transformation: Trans-Atlantic Observations

This paper argues that the transformation of universities will not happen until the central issue of racial discrimination is consciously addressed at Predominantly White Universities (PWUs) in South Africa. The paper makes a concerted effort to address issues that reveal why Black faculty members in North American and South African academies have had to struggle to make their presence felt as far back as the beginning of the twentieth century. It does this by looking initially at the history of intelligence testing the early pioneering South African Black faculty members, and by comparing the current contemporary scenes of both societies insofar as what African American and Black South African faculty members undergo. The paper concludes by positing that only in the event of a strong anti-racist agenda will genuine transformation of the PWUs be possible without alienating Black talent.

Affirmative Activism: Report of the ADE Ad Hoc Committee on the Status of African American Faculty Members in English

Affirmative Activism: Report of the ADE Ad Hoc Committee on the Status of African American Faculty Members in English

When Counter Narratives Meet Master Narratives in the Journal Editorial-Review Process

The author shares her experiences with the editorial-review process while publishing a qualitative research study on the teaching experiences of African American faculty members at two predominantly White research universities. She likens the experiences of African American faculty members to counter narratives, troubles master narratives in the editorial-review process, draws implications, and makes recommendations for researchers invested in nonmainstream educational research in higher education. This is a call to journal editors and reviewers to examine their roles as disciplinary gatekeepers and to break the cycle of master narratives in educational research and the editorial-review process.

The Status of African American Faculty Members in English

The Status of African American Faculty Members in English

Review of Scholarship on the Status of African American Faculty Members in English

Review of Scholarship on the Status of African American Faculty Members in English

Racial experiences influence us as teachers: Implications for gifted education curriculum development and implementation

As African American faculty members, the authors share one narrative from their collective experiences to elucidate how race manifests itself in lived experiences and, thus, curriculum development and implementation. In sharing their experiences and telling this story, the authors make the cogent point that race dces matter (C. West, 1993) in curriculum development and implementation. Because the authors believe that race matters in the curriculum, they challenge gifted education professionals to move beyond colorblindness (D. Y. Ford, J. J. Harris III, C. A. Tyson, & M. Frazier Trotman, 2002; D. Y. Ford, J. L. Moore III, & H. R. Milner, 2004), to think seriously about their own racial experiences, and to think about the racial experiences of their students in developing and implementing curricula. The authors urge and challenge all education professionals to consider how race penetrates the curriculum in a number of ways and what the implications may mean for all students. The authors do not stop at putting out a call for action; in this article, they share a personal, race‐central story, and connect that story to curriculum development and implementation. The authors conclude the article with a discussion of strategies for educators to consider and, ideally, adopt when developing and implementing curricula.