Caroline Sotello Viernes Turner

Socializing Women Doctoral Students: Minority and Majority Experiences.

Abstract: Although minority women in graduate school perceive gender discrimination as more important than racial discrimination, compared to majority women, fewer of them receive socialization experiences that enhance their academic progress. Thus, although gender is a perceived barrier for majority women as well, minority women face an additional obstacle to success in graduate education and subsequent professional academic employment. The authors discuss policy implications for faculty recruitment and retention.

Interrupting the Usual: Successful Strategies for Hiring Diverse Faculty

While campuses engage in efforts to diversify their faculties, these efforts are perhaps the least successful of diversity initiatives. This study investigates the conditions under which faculty are hired. The findings highlight the significance of intentional strategies for the hiring of underrepresented faculty of color.

Incorporation and Marginalization in the Academy: From Border toward Center for Faculty of Color?.

Faculty of color entering the academy describe factors leading toward their incorporation as well as factors keeping them at the margins. Relying on educational research, the concepts of incorporation and marginalization are discussed in this article. There are positive and negative aspects to incorporation and marginalization, which are very often overlooked.

Women of Color in Academe

I recall a personal example of how multiple social identities may shape one’s opportunities in higher education. As a woman of color from a “no collar” class (I come from a farm labor background), when first exploring graduate school options I was discouraged from applying to a master’s level program in business by an admissions officer. The admissions officer stated that I would not fit. I was a woman, a minority, a single parent, I had a background in the public sector, and I had some but not enough math background. This would make it nearly impossible for me to succeed as others in the program fit another and opposite profile. Although all of this may be true, it did not occur to the admissions officer that this might not be an appropriate state of affairs for student enrollment in the program. It was merely accepted as the way things are and should remain. I remember being struck by the many ways I could be defined as not “fitting” and, therefore, not encouraged and, more than likely, not admitted. I was so easily “defined out” rather than “defined in.” I am now a faculty member at a major research university. My current work focuses on the experiences of faculty of color in higher education. While pursuing this work, I have had many opportunities to interview, converse with, and read about the lives of other faculty women of color. Many continue to speak, although in different ways, about the experiWomen of Color in Academe

The effects of Ph.D. supply on minority faculty representation

The conventional wisdom is that African-Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians are underrepresented among faculty in postsecondary institutions because they are underrepresented among Ph.D. recipients. Thus, the putative solution to the problem of minority faculty underrepresentation is to increase the supply of minority Ph.D.’s. In our book, Faculty of Color in Academe: Bittersweet Success (Turner and Myers, 2000) we point out that the supply-side argument has several flaws. In this and a companion paper (Myers and Turner, 2003) we replicate and update the analysis performed in Chapter 7 of our book using more recent census data and a larger sample for 1990. Once again, we demonstrate that an autonomous increase in the Ph.D. supply, uniform across all groups, would leave the representation of African-American and Hispanic faculty largely unchanged. This conclusion challenges the view that the underrepresentation of minority faculty is solely a supply-side phenomenon that can be addressed primarily by increasing the pipeline for new minority Ph.D.’s. Although a strong case can be made for increasing the minority pipeline, the pipeline itself does not appear to be the central cause of the continued underrepresentation of minority faculty. I. The Problem: At every point in the educational pipeline from the Bachelor’s degree to the doctoral degree, African-Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians are substantially underrepresented.

Signals and Strategies in Hiring Faculty of Color

Since the early 1960s, we have witnessed a national phenomenon as colleges and universities have undertaken a mission to increase the representation of people of color 1 on their faculties. Despite more than four decades of equal opportunity, affirmative action, and, most recently, diversity policies—men and women of color still represent only a small percentage of those in faculty positions. In reality, faculty hiring is the area in which diversity policies have been least successful. The overall pattern of representation of faculty of color is a result of individual hiring decisions. Therefore, to understand how the racialethnic composition of university faculties is produced (and reproduced) we focus on the individual hire (Konrad & Pfeffer, 1991). This chapter proposes a model of signaling that explains the exchange of information between applicant and organization in the faculty hiring process. We begin by highlighting changes in the representation of faculty of color by type of institutions from 1994 to 2004.

New Voices in the Struggle/ Nuevas Voces en la Lucha: Toward Increasing Latina/o Faculty in Theological Education

Little progress has been made to increase Latina/o faculty representation in theological education. In this study, 33 interviews with Latina/o theological faculty identify supports and challenges to their scholarly development. Latino critical theory guides the analysis. Narratives reveal faculty experiences with oppression, challenging dominant ideology, commitment to social justice, and the use of their experiential knowledge in academe. A discussion of the findings and the impact of the Latina/o presence in theological education conclude the article. El incremento de profesores Latinas/os en educación teológica ha progresado muy despacio. En este estudio 33 entrevistas con profesores teológicos Latinas/os identifican apoyos y retos para su desarrollo académico. Guiado por la teoría crítica Latina, este análisis revela experiencias de los profesores con opresión, retar la ideología dominante, compromiso a la justicia social, y el uso de conocimiento práctico. Una discusión de los hallazgos y el impacto de Latinas/os en educación teológica concluyen este artículo.