In this episode of Rise with Clarity Podcast, host Dr. Katherine Lee offers guidance on how to better manage your first semester as a WOC faculty on the tenure track.
Hi Professors! I hope that your academic year is off to a great start.
For many of you, you’ve likely made it through your first week or two of classes and you’re slowly starting to get back into the rhythm of teaching, research, and writing. But if this is your very first time on the tenure track, all of these new experiences can feel quite overwhelming and sometimes disconcerting. And because you have 6 years to achieve tenure at your institution, the stakes feel high to you.
In this episode of the podcast, I’m going to offer some guidance on how to better manage your first semester as a WOC faculty on the tenure track.
Now allow me first paint a picture for you … a composite one with examples that are drawn from my own experiences as a professor in higher ed as well as those from other WOC faculty.
Snapshots of a WOC Faculty During Her First Week of Teaching
So, you just started your new faculty position at your institution. It’s week one. You’re full of excitement, nervous energy, and hope for your new life at your institution in a brand new city.
At a welcome reception on day one, a post-doc comes up to you and asks if you’re a new graduate student in the department. You kindly explain that you are actually a newly hired faculty member. He glances at your name tag, mispronounces your name, and then says very quietly to you: “You know you were only hired because you’re the diversity hire.”
You are stunned and do not know what to say. So you quickly head for the dessert table because at least the assortment of cookies provides a sense of familiarity and comfort. Plus, you’re hungry because you forgot to eat your lunch.
Later that day, your chair writes a warm note of welcome and extends an invitation to you to serve on a new campus-wide committee that has been created by the DEI office. Since you are new to the university and you are an Assistant Professor, you figure that you can’t say no to this request from your chair. You quickly respond and say yes, enthusiastically.
Later on, your first lecture of the week seems to go well, even despite the mini crisis before the start of class when the projector needed triage. You somehow managed to keep your cool and some of the students even laughed at your jokes. You consider that a small win. But you took a mental note when the person from the tech department thought you were a TA and treated you somewhat rudely.
Later in the week, you are surprised that students actually show up to your office hours during the first week of classes and are sitting outside your door. One of the students who is a senior mentions that you are the first professor in her four years of college who looks like her and she begins to tear up. You start to get choked up yourself, and you feel a sense of duty to serve students like her.
And that’s just the first week of instruction!
The “Lonely Only” WOC Faculty in Your Department
Does any of this resonate with you? If so, how did you handle that first week of your first year of teaching?
If you are the only WOC faculty in your department, you may feel like you can’t share any of these experiences with your colleagues. And if you are on the tenure track, you are also acutely aware that revealing any vulnerabilities or voicing any complaints to your colleagues may negatively impact you when you go up for tenure.
Additionally, when you do manage to have your own block of time carved out especially for your own research and writing—which is so critical in order to achieve tenure—you are easily derailed by constantly having to process microaggressions or racialized aggressions. It becomes easy to lose focus.
I certainly was not prepared for any of these experiences when I first started on the tenure track. I mostly carried all of this silently, and thought that my situation was entirely unique.
But after speaking with many WOC faculty over the years, and more recently, working with own my clients, I have come to understand that these experiences are shared by many minoritized women faculty in higher ed. And even though there are very different circumstances and specifics, why is it that some of the stories that I described earlier feel so uncannily familiar to so many of us?
While you may not currently be in a position to effect systemic change, you can gain a sense of understanding in that you are not alone in having these experiences. And there are now, fortunately, a growing number of resources to help you navigate the higher ed environment.
So, how can you manage your first semester on the tenure track as a WOC faculty? Here are just a few strategies that I’ve learned over the past decade.
Strategies for How to Manage Your First Semester on the Tenure Track
- Know that you are not alone. Turn to some of the stories written by other WOC faculty that have been covered in excellent books such as Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia, The Black Academic’s Guide to Winning Tenure—Without Losing Your Soul, and Community as Rebellion: A Syllabus for Surviving Academia as a Woman of Color. Find links to these books and their authors in the transcript for this episode on my website.
- Consider finding a small group of other WOC faculty that you can completely trust and confide in. They may not be at your campus or even in your discipline, but they will be the rock of support that you can turn to when you need to process and vent. And in turn, you will be supporting them when they need you.
- Make sure to schedule time for yourself during the week. In my first years of teaching, I was not adept at managing my own time. I allowed my time to be dictated for me versus actively creating and protecting my own schedule. Over the years, I’ve learned to be more intentional about building in time for my own research and scheduling time for rest. Listen to my second podcast episode for some tips on how to better reclaim your time when you are feeling behind in your work.
- Try to learn from your chair or recently tenured faculty members in your department what your institution’s tenure requirements are. Sometimes, these guidelines are clearly stated by your institution. But more often than not, you will need to speak to several people to determine what these metrics are. It is better to begin these conversations sooner rather than later. And if possible, try to get this down in writing.
- Celebrate your accomplishments even when your institution does not amplify them. Since this is a special one, I’m going to be devoting a future podcast episode to this topic.
- And for those times when you are told that the only reason you have your job is because you are the diversity hire, have a listen to this episode of Brown Table Talk, an amazing podcast where hosts Dee C. Marshall and Mita Mallick candidly discuss the challenges that women of color face in the workplace.
On my website, I offer a free guide called “4 Ways for WOC Faculty in Higher Ed to Manage the Tenure Track, Navigate Politics, and Design a Sustainable Path Forward.” In it, you’ll find tips on things like navigating aggressions in the workplace and designing your sustainable career. If you’re interested in learning more strategies like the ones I’ve discussed in this episode, download the copy of the guide at my website, Rise with Clarity.