It's not all fun and games

[Petrichor]

I'm a regular member of this forum, but I wanted to share something going on in my department right now without making it traceable. I'm sharing this because it is so important for academics to realize how difficult it is to be a person of color in academia, and I hope this starts a real conversation about what we can do as individuals to fix these kinds of nightmares. To be clear, this isn't a story about me, but a friend. And this isn't a condemnation of academia or even my department, which I fully intend to remain in. But being a black academic in our "post-racial" society is no laughing matter, and I need more people to know.

I have a very close friend in my department and, during our first semester in the program he ran afoul of a professor who was unwilling to bar the use of the n-word in his classroom. At the end of the semester, my friend wrote comments in his final class evaluation that basically expressed his disgust for the way the professor handled the situation. These evaluations are always meant to be anonymous. And yet, a month later my friend found himself meeting with the DGS about the way that his negative evaluation was in bad form. It could hurt the professors teaching portfolio and, of course, calling someone a racist is a serious accusation. Whether that accusation was true didn't appear to be up for debate. My friend walked away from the situation with the new recognition that departmental politics matter, but we all figured that was the end of the story. 

We've just started our third year in the program and this two year old issue has just resurfaced. The professor who was given the bad review has now become DGS and a week after the semester starts, my friend receives an email informing him that he is on academic probation. The given reason was that his masters project didn't show enough academic rigor. This is besides the fact that he has a 4.0 and successful papers and interactions with other professors. The feedback given on his masters project was even more suspect because it failed to directly address his argument and made assumptions about his writing process that can be easily proved untrue. The result of this academic probation is that his teaching is demoted back to TA (stipend as well), and his ability to teach at all in the next year is in jeopardy because the DGS also saw fit to remove him from the training program that would allow him to return to being Instructor of Record. He was effectively informed that he was funded for fall, but that it might be in his best interest to take a leave of absence in spring because they didn't think they'd be able to find a job for him. Which doesn't sound too bad except that our department has been accepting fewer students, and so a number of advanced students are working as TAs to make up the difference. Thankfully, my friend has excellent relationships with his primary advisors, so he'll probably end up at a program where he can build a better safety net. 

If you can think of another way to read this situation, then you're a more hopeful person than I am, because the only explanation for this is racism, plain and simple. And not the KKK type racism. The neoliberal racism that purports to support diversity but is, in fact, only supportive of the status quo. The kind that allows white male administrators and department heads to effectively stomp on someone's career path and attribute it to "following procedure" rather than their own indefensible prejudice. If you're a white person in the academy, being silent about the status quo

I want to be very clear; this is not an individual instance of racism, this is systematic. This has happened before. People of color aren't rare in the academy because they don't want to be there, they are pushed out by the microaggressions and "procedure" of the people who have no problem acknowledging how bad "actual" racism is. I'm honestly begging ya'll to be a better generation of academics, because right now I really can't deal. I'm sad, angry, and disillusioned, which surprises me in itself since no one who knows me would call me an optimist. The answer isn't multiculturalism. It isn't seeing the good in people. It should, at the very least, include white people being willing to seriously interrogate their own practices. What can we do? I'm honestly asking.

[TakeruK]

Thank you for sharing the story. I hope your friend will be at a better place. I hate that our current academic community still allows for systematic racism to happen.

I don't have any advice but I want to share a link to a blog by a black professor in my field. I have found what he wrote very interesting and I have learned a lot too. I invite anyone interested to read here: http://mahalonottrash.blogspot.com/

NOTE: If you have not heard, this weekend, news broke about sexual harassment and sexism by a very prominent professor in my field (original story: http://www.buzzfeed.com/azeenghorayshi/famous-astronomer-allegedly-sexually-harassed-students --- this professor was the PhD advisor of the professor from the blog above). So, the most recent posts in the blog above addresses this issue.

[Petrichor]

Thanks for the link to that blog, Takeruk. I had heard a little about the situation, but I'm horrified by how easy it is for me to believe that the professor initially received little punishment. I won't go into it here because that shit could be triggering, but wow.