Conditionally Accepted: Navigating Higher Education from the Margins

Abstract

University of Texas Press, 2024

256 pp., $34.95

For department chairs working with marginalized and minoritized faculty, graduate students, and emerging scholars across career stages, this book offers implementable strategies, best practices, and concrete language for supporting, valuing, and amplifying the work of minoritized colleagues.

In part 1, contributors explore mentoring and visibility. Castor and Louis Jr., for example, offer strategies for supporting faculty in navigating joint appointments across multiple departments or programs, prompting home department chairs to remain mindful of supporting faculty in receiving credit for this work without taking on double faculty loads.

Blain addresses mentoring support beyond tenure, especially for women faculty of color. In addition to providing professional resources, Blain's chapter creates space for chairs to consider what this mentoring looks like at the department or local level.

Hoover's interview drawing on lived experience in economics prompts chairs to consider how biased and harmful norms about faculty and their work manifest and what role chairs play in disrupting these norms, supporting faculty, and allowing faculty talents and intellectual contributions to flourish.

The significance of visibility is consistently reinforced in part 1, including in Fong's exploration of “muted invisibility” (p. 66) through intersectional racialized experiences as an Asian American woman and contingent faculty in a predominantly white field, and in Winn's interview through the persistent dualism of racism that results in “invisibility” or “hypervisibility” (p. 85). Chairs will find much to work with in mentoring faculty through the kinds of coaching questions that Winn shares (see pages 89, 98, 99).

Extending this discussion of invisibility and its implications, opening part 2, Dutt-Ballerstadt explores responses to the #BlackInTheIvory hashtag created in June 2020, “detailing the myriad ways that Black scholars, scholarship, and excellence have been undermined and undervalued” (p. 106).

In the next chapter, Zape-Tah-Hol-Ah Starr Minthorn provides actionable steps and language for addressing the “invisibilization of Indigenous people” with strategies for “center[ing] our (Indigenous) voices and experiences” (p. 119). Significant for chairs and other administrators, the author points to missed opportunities in land acknowledgments for meaningful action (p. 120) and advocates for increased efforts to build relationships with Indigenous communities “and creat[e] safe spaces for Native students on campus” (p. 127).

Exploring ableism within a disability studies framework, Manchanda's chapter is especially relevant for chairs actively working to grow, diversify, and increase the accessibility of graduate programming.

In “Dealing with Sexual Harassment as a Junior Black Woman Scholar,” Buggs issues a direct call to action: “Advisers and department administrators must actively work to be supportive by swiftly and effectively addressing harassment at the hands of faculty and other superiors as well as between graduate students” (p. 153).

Part 3 calls on readers to interrogate the purpose and value of diversity, with important questions for department chairs. Gibson, for example, asks, “Does ‘diversity’ leave us room to inhabit our full selves and speak our own language without fear of unintended consequences?” (p. 161). Wingfield extends this call with actionable steps.

Highlighting the significance of inclusivity, Lewis Jr. calls attention to academia's “self-reinforcing spiral of exclusivity” (p. 176), which will not be eliminated by the often popular yet generally ineffective implicit bias training. Instead, Lewis provides strategies for meaningful and sustainable inclusivity.

Similarly, Vidal-Ortiz names the “exclusionary processes of symbolic or tokenistic inclusion” (p. 184) and proposes strategies chairs can undertake and enact for disrupting “an institutionally racist culture that privileges whiteness as the norm” (p. 190).

In part 4, contributors explore what public-facing scholar-activist work looks like and why it has value. Huerta highlights intersections of theory and practice, explains why personal history and positionality matter, and illustrates what it looks like to make this work scholarship (p. 209). Similarly, in “Why I Write for the Public,” Ray's answer to this question demonstrates how “public writing is important politically, personally, and practically” (p. 217). Significant for department chairs, Ray's chapter explores whether public-facing work will count and provides essential language to frame public writing as academic work.

Further illuminating lack of consistent support for public activist work, both Villarreal and Denise demonstrate physical, emotional, and intellectual stakes. Addressing the admonishment that activist work is “me-search” because it involves work with communities to which the scholar belongs (p. 241), Denise foregrounds the need to support, amplify, and make visible this commitment and work as an essential part of a chair's mentoring and leadership.

As a significant intervention in the current scholarly conversation, this collection is essential reading for department chairs.

Reviewed by Letizia Guglielmo, professor of English and interdisciplinary studies at Kennesaw State University. Email: [email protected]