Book Review Essay: Faculty of Color in Academia

Abstract

There is a rapidly growing body of scholarship highlighting the academic career experiences of faculty of color (see Aguirre, 2000;Gregory, 1995;Turner & Myers, 2000; Vargas, 2002). Faculty of color, working in historically White colleges and universities, have long emphasized the need for administrators and majority faculty to recognize and work toward alleviating both organizational and institutional barriers to their success and well-being as academics. This proliferation of research and anecdotal writing brings much needed attention to the challenges, obstacles, and triumphs that faculty of color encounter, as they seek to research, teach, and serve, in historically White colleges and universities. Faculty of Color: Teaching in Predominantly White Colleges and Universities, edited by Christine Stanley, and Neither White Nor Male: Female Faculty of Color, edited by Katherine Grace Hendrix, present compelling narratives in which an accomplished, diverse group of authors reveal the complex ways in which race, gender, class, and other identity markers affect their academic experiences. Concurrently, they present key strategies and recommendations for both individuals and institutions to create the change needed to enhance their academic career success while creating and sustaining an inclusive campus climate.In Faculty of Color, 25 scholars teaching in historically White institutions present the reader with eye-opening, critical narratives of their academic experiences. For example, Stanley's opening chapter includes both disturbing statistics on efforts of institutions to diversify their faculty as well as an organized, clearly written summary of the various challenges that faculty of color must battle in historically White colleges and universities. Unlike other texts on this topic that focus specifically on American faculty, this book centralizes various ethnic groups, such as Pacific Islanders, East Indians, and faculty from the Caribbean islands, who are often ignored or subsumed under American minority groups. Each chapter opens with the authors sharing their personal background, which includes early educational experiences, growing up in their home communities, and their overall path from college to the professoriate. Although the title of the book leads one to believe that the narratives focus solely on teaching, almost all the authors speak to the intersection of teaching, research, and service as it affects various aspects of their academic careers.