It’s not just Nikole Hannah-Jones: Black women are underrepresented among tenured faculty
N’dea Yancey-Bragg
USA TODAY

The weeks of controversy over a university’s initial failure to offer investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure shed light on a long-standing problem: the number of Black women in tenured positions across the country remains disproportionately low.

Tenure is meant to protect academic freedom by preventing faculty members from losing their jobs because of their work, said Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors. Tenured professors can’t be fired except for cause or severe financial issues.

People of color in higher education have raised the alarm for years that although student bodies are becoming more diverse, faculty are still overwhelmingly white. Experts said the lack of diversity is partly due to a subjective tenure application process and the failure to value labor by professors of color.

Black people make up 13.4% of the U.S. population but accounted for less than 6% of faculty at public and private nonprofit four-year colleges in the USA in 2018, according to federal data analyzed by the AAUP.

Though less than half of faculty members are tenured, Black professors held about 5% of those positions in fall 2018. Black women make up a little more than 2% of tenured professors.

To receive tenure, professors must be hired by a committee of the faculty in their department for a competitive tenure-track opening. Then they have six years to earn the tenure distinction. They amass a portfolio of research, teaching experience and service on committees. The other faculty in the department weigh in on their application for tenure, taking into account how the person contributes to the department’s workplace culture as well. A tenure committee then sends a recommendation to the school’s administration or board of trustees.

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“The tenure and promotion process is problematic in a few ways,” said LaWanda Ward, an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University who seeks tenure.

“The challenge for Black women is the unspoken academic norms that are still in place that are harmful to them,” she said. “Specifically, how people can use nebulous concepts like fit and quality and collegiality to prevent them from being hired, prevent them from getting tenure.”

A study in 2020 noted that Black women face a wider range of microaggressions in the workplace, have their judgment questioned more often and are less likely to say their manager advocates for opportunities for them than their colleagues of other races and ethnicities.

That may come into play when a professor is considered for tenure.

Tenure is essentially a lifetime appointment that comes with an increase in pay,influence and opportunity within the university. Critics of the tenure system say it makes it difficult to remove professors accused of misconduct, such as sexual harassment.

More than 70% of Black faculty members reported “feeling a need to work harder than their colleagues to be seen as legitimate scholars,” compared with less than half of white professors, according to a report in 2019 from the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles.

This feeling may be fueled in part by a lack of clarity surrounding the promotion and tenure process, the report found.

“The policies aren’t specific. You have to do rigorous work, or you have to do enough work or high-impact work,” said Kimberly Griffin, a professor of higher education at the University of Maryland at College Park who studies faculty diversity.

“It can be very subjective,” she added.

Griffin said many tenure-seeking professors of color report feeling unwelcomed by white colleagues and unable to find mentorship opportunities to help navigate the “really fuzzy” process.