Walking the Talk: Toward a Values-Aligned Academy

A HuMetricsHSS White Paper

The HuMetricsHSS Team¹

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Walking the Talk: Toward a Values-Aligned Academy is the culmination of 18 months of research interviews across the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA). Conducted by the HuMetricsHSS Initiative as an extension of their previous work on values-enacted scholarly practice, the interviews focused on current systems of evaluation within BTAA institutions, the potential problems and inequalities of those processes, the kinds of scholarly work that could be better recognized and rewarded, and the contexts and pressures evaluators are under, including, as the process progressed, the onset and ongoing conditions of COVID-19. The interviews focused primarily on the reappointment, promotion, and tenure (RPT) process. Interviewees outlined a number of issues to be addressed, including toxicity in evaluation, scholars’ increased alienation from the work they are passionate about, and a high-level virtue-signaling of values by institutions without the infrastructure or resources to support the enactment of those values. Based on these conversations, this white paper offers a set of recommendations for making wide-scale change to address systematic injustice, erasure, and devaluation of academic labor in order to strengthen the positive public impact of scholarship.

Traditional processes of RPT do not support the values articulated in mission statements and hiring meetings. The research–teaching–service triangle is heavily imbalanced in favor of research — a certain number of publications in problematically determined “top” or “excellent” journals or university presses is considered a “threshold” for advancing toward or attaining tenure or promotion to full professor, only after which is teaching considered. “Service,” often defined only as participation on ponderous university-level committees, might be taken into account, if necessary. Scholarship that produces objects other than articles and books, interdisciplinary scholarship that falls between disciplinary expectations, the creation of supportive learning environments, engagement with colleagues through peer review and collaboration, and the emotional and intellectual labor of mentorship are all either left out of evaluation processes entirely or considered “extra credit” work that might tip an otherwise “mediocre” number of publications over the line into tenure. This is more often than not the reality, despite the fact that many of these activities are the primary motivators for people to have become academics in the first place and the primary ways to make the academy a welcoming, safe, and equitable place for the next generation of students and researchers.

Attempts to bring the norms and habits of an institution into alignment with its stated values are often hollow and unsuccessful, as they are rarely backed with any kind of structural power or significant resources. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices and committees in particular are established as a gesture toward “diversity,” a value found in the mission statements of all fourteen BTAA institutions, but these offices can do little on their own to address genuine issues of equity and inclusion, not to mention anti-racism. Often they are given symbolic rather than actual power, with students, faculty, and staff relying on them on an informal basis to intervene in instances of racism, ableism, or homophobia, rather than their being included as a permanent fixture in systems of evaluation or given resources for trainings or other longer-term interventions aimed at changing entrenched behavior. Their power, such as it is, is palliative rather than preventative, and as such can only address atomized, not structural, bias.

The responsibility for making change in systems of RPT and evaluation more generally seems at once to belong to everyone and no one. Departments bow to disciplinary convention or the bylaws laid out by deans and provosts; deans and provosts swear that the departments themselves set the standards by which they are evaluated. A refusal of agency for fear of failure — and of consequences for the attempt (such as plummeting university rankings, loss of grant money, and so on) — results in a foundering machine aware of its defects but unwilling and unable to fix them, with the weight of these defects coming down hardest on the most vulnerable members of the academy.

The academy must recognize these multiple levels of agency for it to be able to transform itself into what it professes to be. While there are endless ways to potentially bring about this change, this paper identifies a number of specific recommendations for broadening the definition of scholarship and for reducing harm to BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and disabled faculty, students, and staff.

Create a university-level committee to support the evaluation of emerging or underrecognized research approaches aligned with institutional values. Community-engaged participatory research, public scholarship, and interdisciplinary approaches need to be recognized at the unit level not only as something that “counts” toward a threshold publication goal, but as valuable academic work regardless of the kinds of scholarly objects they produce.

Rethink expectations for tenure by aligning achievements with opportunity. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many departments and units have granted tenure-clock extensions and other modifications to tenure requirements. These changes have made it clear that change is possible and should open the door to other potential interventions regarding the time required for trust-building in communities, for the pedagogical work of making educational materials accessible, and for the adoption of proactive, preventative approaches to bias in RPT processes.

Align clear expectations of faculty assignments (including job letters or hiring documents) with institutional values and with specific outcomes and indicators associated with the aspirations of the new member of the faculty. Faculty are often hired on the strength of their interdisciplinary or community-engaged work, but then asked to alienate themselves from that work to be promoted. Promotion criteria should be drawn from the intersection of the institution’s values and what the scholar themself deems important in their work.

Develop a rubric to inform annual review conversations between chairs and faculty members. Annual review meetings are important mentoring opportunities and are necessary moments for the department chair to ensure that the faculty member is getting what they need from the department to progress along their desired path toward tenure or promotion.

Reform the way external review letters are solicited, valued, and evaluated. Readers rely on external letters for disciplinary expertise that they may not share. Making the expectations for external letter writers clear and basing those expectations on the values and goals of the institution and the scholar themself allows a truer understanding of a scholar’s work and its potential contributions. Additionally, letters should be solicited from writers who are genuinely well-versed in someone’s work rather than solely from “peer” institutions.

Participate in values-based workshops at the unit level. Values-focused workshops can open a space for faculty and administrators to connect with one another around the core goals that shape a shared mission.

Revise unit-level governing documents. Governance documents at the unit level can and should serve as guides for the higher levels of the review process, rather than for policing the work of scholars within a department. Support for public scholarship, participatory community-engaged work, or interdisciplinary approaches can be made explicit in these documents.

Shift the categories of the tenure and promotion process from the means to the ends toward which they are directed. Research, teaching, and service are not meaningfully distinct categories of modern scholarly labor and should not be treated as such by systems of evaluation. Instead, evaluation should focus on the ends those means serve: sharing knowledge, expanding opportunity, and mentoring/stewardship.

Collaborate with provosts to revise university-level statements on promotion and tenure. The process by which promotion and tenure guidelines are set varies from university to university. However, campus-level expectations must work in tandem with the department-level governing documents mentioned earlier to realign institutional values with the practices and policies of tenure.

Increase opportunities for disciplinary leaders to experience evaluation practices and procedures from a wider diversity of disciplines across the mission of the university. Leadership training programs supported by college deans and managed through offices of associate provosts for faculty affairs would provide opportunities to explore and share disciplinary values and practices, with the goal of expanding perspectives on the assessment process.

Break down silos both intra- and inter-institutionally. Despite the myriad challenges and resistances to change outlined in this paper, there are many people engaged in addressing the problems of the RPT system. Developing formal and informal lines of communication among individuals engaged in transformative work would allow greater leverage, understanding, and resource-sharing.

Create better and more consistent ways to track what is now often invisible labor to ensure equity. The work of addressing bias often falls on those most affected by it, and the labor required to prevent further trauma and bias goes unrecognized and unrewarded. Structures of evaluation need to recognize this as important work that enriches the institution and the academic community at large.

Dedicate resources toward creating an inclusive, anti-racist campus climate. To create a genuinely inclusive and anti-racist (not simply diverse) campus environment, institutions of higher education must come to terms with the racist and oppressive relationships their campuses have been built upon, as well as how those relationships still manifest in social, geographic, and systematic ways.

These recommendations are not intended to be exhaustive, nor will they address every issue raised by the interviewees consulted in our research nor felt by every member of the academy. They are, however, aimed at addressing the most exciting potential intervention points of the current moment, meant to take advantage of gaps highlighted by the crisis we are experiencing and to harness the hope, creative energy, and transformative power of faculty, administrators, and staff determined to create a better academic world.

INTRODUCTION

The Humane Metrics in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HuMetricsHSS) Initiative endeavors to facilitate the local creation of values-based frameworks that will enable scholars in the humanities and social sciences (HSS), academic units, and institutions to tell more textured and compelling stories about the impact of their research and pedagogy and the variety of ways they enrich public life. To advance the broad culture change that the HuMetricsHSS Initiative envisions requires strategic interventions at specific leverage points in the ecosystem of higher education.

We began five years ago by asking what on its surface seemed a simple question: What would it look like to start to measure what we value, rather than valuing only what we can readily measure? This led us to a series of subsequent questions: How does the academy, particularly within the context of the United States, currently measure scholarly work? Does this evaluation reflect the values of the institutions and individuals who work in the academy? What kinds of work and workers does the current system fail, and how do incentives, as they exist, drive some work and hinder others? How do individuals and institutions articulate their values, and how do those align — or not — with systems of assessment and evaluation? Much of that work has been described in our article “The Transformative Power of Values-Enacted Scholarship.”² This white paper, the culmination of a research project undertaken over the last 18 months, generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, serves to deepen understanding of the problem and articulate concrete steps that can be taken to align institutional and personal values with practices of scholarly evaluation by broadening our methods of review and assessment so they respect and recognize the full range of scholarship practiced, the wider network of contributors to academic scholarship, and the different forms that impact may take.

REASON FOR THE PROJECT

As we outlined in our article for Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, current systems of evaluation in academia tend to rely on a set of proxy measures, often drawn from science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and mapped poorly onto HSS disciplines, that fail to recognize and reward the many dependencies upon which a healthy scholarly ecosystem relies. These proxy measures privilege certain kinds of scholarship — and scholars — over others and reinforce historical biases and barriers for scholars of marginalized backgrounds and identities. There is a growing sense among scholars across all disciplines, but particularly those within HSS, that they are being evaluated on what can be easily measured rather than on a holistic and textured understanding of their work and the impact it has on communities within and outside of the academy.³ As we and others have shown — and as was evident throughout the 123 interviews conducted during this study — attempts to determine the quality of scholarship by measuring the quantity produced alienate scholars from the work they think truly matters. As one colleague we interviewed put it in a conversation about how personal and institutional values might be aligned:

“I’ve been discouraged from doing the kind of work that’s really meaningful for me.”

Our research suggests that evaluation policies and the cultural practices that surround them are not only misaligned with work scholars find personally meaningful, they are also out of joint with the very values many institutions of higher education identify as core to their mission.⁴ Current mechanisms of evaluation capture a limited set of outputs when considered against the wide diversity of scholarly activities that enrich academic life. This narrow, highly quantified approach to evaluation fuels a toxic culture predicated on scarcity, competition, and alienation from personal and institutional values.

Our research is intended to identify the specific mechanisms within those systems of evaluation — especially within the relatively well-defined structures of reappointment, promotion, and tenure (RPT) — that create the conditions of inequality and alienation within the academy, and to provide a set of recommendations for interventions that begin to address them. However capacious and aligned with values our practices of evaluation may become, we must remain attuned to the ways implicit and explicit bias shapes academic judgment. The danger is not simply that unexamined prejudices will inform our decisions, but also that a naïve understanding of objectivity will prevent us from recognizing the biases that condition all judgment. As Brittney Cooper puts it, “We can neither heal nor fix that which we will not confront” (84).⁵ Confronting inequity and alienation within the academy requires candor, courage, and a sophisticated understanding of the role bias plays in human judgment.

Our approach draws the rich history and resources of the HSS disciplines into a space that is too often overshadowed by perspectives adopted from the sciences. The rapid publication practices and more standardized forms of scholarly expression in the sciences have elevated publication rates and citations as the metrics that dominate in faculty evaluation. STEM disciplines often assert more fiscal and social power in academic settings than do the arts and HSS; as a result, STEM practices have been increasingly adopted as appropriate across all academic disciplines. Despite this dominance, when during our interviews, workshops, and events we have engaged our STEM colleagues in conversations about values-enacted approaches to scholarship and values-based forms of evaluation, they express a deep appreciation of and eagerness to join attempts to align values with practices. Our research suggests that there is a deep yearning across disciplines for practices of evaluation that at once empower scholars to align their values with their work and more effectively enable institutions to put their articulated mission into concrete practice.

To create genuine change in systems of evaluation, we recognize the need to identify intervention points at the individual, departmental, collegiate, and institutional levels. To that end, we conducted research that engaged individuals across a wide variety of institutional levels at every university in the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) in the hopes of gaining a better understanding of the metrics currently gathered at those institutions, the contexts within which evaluation is undertaken, the kinds of bias (implicit and explicit) that are either built into institutional systems or perpetuated by decision-making bodies in those institutions, and the pressures that evaluators, faculty, staff, and librarians might be under to meet institutional expectations for RPT. We also explored with our interviewees what they believe is missing from those evaluation processes and spoke about the values that animate their own work.

THE CORE ISSUES

Despite institutional mission statements that promote inclusivity, the public good, diversity, transdisciplinary research, and student success, our interviews uncovered considerable consensus across staff and faculty roles at all levels that the traditional process of tenure and promotion does not support these articulated values.⁶ Furthermore, at a more personal level, current approaches to scholarly evaluation do not value the kind of meaningful (e.g., community-engaged, cross-disciplinary, or openly available) work a diverse new generation of faculty have expressed a need and desire to do. For example, institutions may claim to value interdisciplinary scholarship, but often require interdisciplinary scholars to do extra work to legitimize their approach to different disciplines. Indeed, the disciplinary structure of most universities itself presents barriers to advancing inter- and transdisciplinary work. Institutions may espouse the merits of public scholarship, but relegate community engaged, participatory scholarship to the undervalued category of “service” rather than the more highly esteemed category of “research.” Institutions may advertise their communities as inclusive, even as minoritized faculty colleagues too often struggle to create space for the work they care most deeply about. We as members of a national academic community need interventions that align institutional and personal values with the vital work of advancing knowledge capable of creating a more just world in the wake of a pandemic and in the shadow of a rapidly deteriorating biosphere.

Our interviews suggest that the current systems of rewards and evaluation no longer serve the core values of higher education institutions or the faculty in the tenure system. What is more, the system itself exacerbates institutional inequities, allowing tenure-track faculty and administrators to devalue critical work done by colleagues outside the tenure system. While non-tenure-track faculty are not the focus of this paper, there is a distinct lack of meaningful professional development and career engagement for adjuncts and instructors, and many of the problems outlined here apply as well to non-tenure systems of promotion and reward.

“A lot of people are just stuck. They know there are flaws in the system but can’t let go of the fact that if they succeeded [within it], it must work.”

The values that institutions of higher education profess to care most deeply about — articulated through university mission statements, promotional materials, and talking points — are often not the values enacted in the policies and practices that shape academic life. This disparity has led to a growing sense of alienation among faculty who entered higher education with a deep commitment to certain core values, values that are themselves very often articulated in the founding documents of institutions of higher education. For example, a faculty member might be hired to do innovative transdisciplinary research, only to find themself constrained by highly policed disciplinary expectations as they move through the tenure process. Or they find themself caught between an interdisciplinary program that values the work they do and a departmental tenure home that only “counts” a limited slice of their scholarly activity as “real research.” The very institution that sought them out because of the ways their scholarship challenged the status quo is now mobilized against them in order to preserve that very status quo.⁷

“Everyone knows these proxy measures don’t work, but nobody can change them.”

Whether it is because of willful ignorance about how tenure and promotion processes are determined, unacknowledged investment in the idea that merit equates to success in a hierarchical system, a feeling of being overcome by the enormity of a decades-long problem, or a trepidation to poke an already irascible bear, it seems that no one feels that they have sufficient agency, authority, or energy to change the system, although there is broad recognition that the system is broken. There is a tendency for administrative leaders at one level of the promotion and tenure process to point to leaders leveraging power at a different level of the hierarchy as the source of the resistance to change.

Deans point to chairs, chairs to deans or to tenure-and-promotion committees, provosts say they rely on disciplinary expertise within units, junior faculty look to their senior colleagues, while senior faculty fall back on institutional norms or the expectations of the broader scholarly community.⁸ The result is that a broken system continues to operate while no one feels that they are themselves the agents of the change our institutions of higher education so desperately need.

METHODOLOGY

The methodology of this methodology

The original draft of this white paper contained a more traditional methodology section, narrow in scope and limited to the work that had gone into the creation of the paper itself. However, in the process of internal reflection by the HuMetricsHSS team, we realized that a traditional methodology section failed to capture the rich texture of the range and depth of the labor that went into the creation of this report. This unrecognized labor ranged from the intellectual contributions of HuMetricsHSS colleagues who refined our theoretical framework over the past five years, to the participants in our workshops who contributed greatly to our thinking on values, to the practical and logistical contributions of colleagues on and beyond the team who scheduled interviews, reserved rooms, copyedited the text, and prepared the document for accessible publication on the web and in the PDF version. Our own commitment to valuing the process as much as the product and to recognizing the widest possible diversity of labor that makes scholarship possible led us to a series of self-reflective, candid, and sometimes difficult conversations, facilitated by Xhercis Méndez, that resulted in an agreement to write a different kind of methodology section, one that more effectively aligns with the values we have sought to embody in this project and that seeks to write each other into the text as a way to recognize the range of contributions and diversity of expertise that went into the creation of this white paper.

Preparing for the research

Over the course of 18 months (October 2019 – April 2021), with the generous support of the Mellon Foundation, we conducted interviews with 123 people across the BTAA. At each university we spoke with those who are daily involved in metrics, evaluation, and impact: deans and other administrators (e.g., faculty affairs, research administration, diversity and inclusion), faculty (particularly those who serve on relevant committees in the faculty senate), librarians, and research evaluation managers. We also reviewed institutional mission statements, statements of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and other “values-driven” documents already produced by these universities. Although our original intention was to visit each of the BTAA universities in person to conduct a full day of interviews, we were only able to visit three of the 14 universities before COVID-19 restrictions curtailed travel; the balance of the interviews were coordinated through Calendly, a software that facilitates online appointment scheduling, and conducted via Zoom. The script we used (see Appendix A) remained unchanged whether we were meeting in person or on Zoom. 

We began our process by seeking institutional review board (IRB) approval at Michigan State University for the research project, and we were provided with exempt status. The IRB work was led by Chris Long and Rebecca Kennison. Our process for ensuring informed consent is outlined in Appendix B. In addition to the process spelled out there, a draft of this white paper was shared with all participants and their feedback shaped the revision process we undertook before releasing the paper to the public.

The interview process

Upon receiving approval from the IRB to proceed with our study, we started by compiling lists of individuals in similar roles we wanted to interview at each institution. Although no two universities have exactly the same organizational structure, we targeted our invitations to deans of humanities and social sciences and their associate deans of research and faculty affairs; university library deans and their associate deans of research, as well as the impact librarian (if there was one); and appropriate administrators in the office of faculty affairs and the office of research, including whomever oversees the analytics platforms utilized by the institution to track faculty productivity and impact (see Appendix C for a list of those platforms). Administrators who are responsible for DEI efforts on campus were also included; sometimes these are members of a campus-wide office, sometimes a part of administration at the college level, and sometimes a single individual who advises the president directly. We also spoke with members of the faculty senate who served on various committees whose work focuses on related issues: tenure and promotion, faculty affairs, DEI, and so on. 

In all we invited 445 people to speak with us and ended up interviewing 123 individuals in 71 separate sessions. Although we interviewed a minimum of two people at each institution, representation from each university varied widely. (See Appendix D for more about participants’ demographics.) To ensure we could have the frank conversations desired, we did not record the sessions but did take extensive notes. For consistency, all notes were taken by a single notetaker, Penelope Weber, who later tagged the interviews as described below. The interviews were moderated by Rebecca Kennison, who followed a written script and ensured all questions were answered (see Appendix A), but most conversations were free-flowing, with additional questions being posed by Deans Chris Long (Michigan State University) and Bonnie Thornton Dill (University of Maryland, College Park) as the interviews progressed. The questions sought to uncover what kinds of metrics each institution gathers on faculty research productivity and impact and how those metrics are used, especially within tenure and promotion processes. We inquired as to which metrics were felt to be most effective, especially in ensuring that the work that the institution valued most was being properly recognized. We also asked our interviewees what they felt is missing in the current evaluation process and whether there was something they felt they would like to see better recognized or stories that they felt they were currently unable to tell that they would like to be able to tell. The first three questions — the role(s) played by the interviewees, metrics gathered by the institution on faculty productivity and impact, and blue-sky thinking about what evaluation might look like to address the issues raised throughout the conversation — were consistently addressed in all the interviews. If time permitted and the interviewee had (unprompted) mentioned values in their comments, we asked a final question about a value or values that guided the interviewees’ own work or that they saw reflected across their unit or institution. 

Data analysis and the writing process 

The notes that arose from these interviews were tagged by Penelope Weber using MAXQDA2020. Based on the content of the interviews, she created a coding structure. The general codes included “metrics systems,” “university operations,” “values,” “what’s missing or should be rewarded,” “barriers to change,” and “alternative metrics already in use,” with smaller subsets along the lines of “invisible labor,” “external letters,” “zero-sum thinking,” and “mentorship.” These codes served as organizational tools across the 14 BTAA institutions, assisting the co-authors of this paper in the writing process. A similar methodology and the same software were used by Rebecca Kennison in evaluating the institutional “values statement” documents; for an aggregated list of those values, see Appendix E. 

Both preceding and running concurrently with the interview process, the HuMetricsHSS team led a series of workshops that provided key intellectual framing and gathered significant feedback, some of which helped generate the research plan for this white paper and others of which took place concurrently with the research interviews and likewise helped to inform our work. All the workshops provided insight into specific challenges faced by staff and faculty that helped generate recommendations that are reflected throughout this white paper. Most of these workshops were led by Nicky Agate, Chris Long, Jason Rhody, and Penelope Weber. We wish to thank all of the workshop attendees for their participation, which contributed substantially to our thinking. Similarly, the team has had ongoing conversations with those at similar and synergetic initiatives, such as the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI), DORA, Imagining America, the INORMS Research Evaluation Group, Invest in Open Infrastructure, the Next Generation Library Publishing Values and Principles Framework, the Open Knowledge Coalition, the Open Syllabus Project, OPERAS, Publishing and the Publicly Engaged Humanities, and the ScholCommLab; Nicky Agate has taken the lead in representing the HuMetricsHSS team in many of these conversations, connecting the work of the HuMetricsHSS project with other aligned initiatives in ways that generated both vital partnerships and insights reflected throughout this report.

The initial draft of the white paper, including the first articulation of the challenges and recommendations, was undertaken by Penelope Weber, Rebecca Kennison, Chris Long, and Bonnie Thornton Dill. The HumetricsHSS team worked collectively on the research design and everyone on the team contributed to the writing, refining, and editing of the final version of the paper. A literature review, conducted primarily by Rebecca Kennison, confirmed the major themes we heard in our interviews and helped to further inform our understanding of the issues. The data visualizations included in the appendices were created by Bonnie Russell and reviewed by Simone Sacchi.

As a final step in the process, we invited every interviewee to review a draft copy of the white paper and to respond with suggestions and observations. Eight provided feedback. As might be expected, given the range of views we heard in our interviews, not every interviewee agreed with our description of the challenges nor with all our recommendations and conclusions. We have tried as best we could to address all comments we received. We are grateful to everyone who provided feedback and who gave generously their time to be interviewed for this project. 

Once the feedback from the interviewers was incorporated, Bonnie Russell designed and built the web-based and PDF versions, and we worked as a team to ensure all outputs met accessibility standards.

CHALLENGES

“How do we turn this barnacled ship?”

CHALLENGE: Not everyone wants change.

Although academics are perceived by many as being progressive(s) in their outlook and philosophy, the academy itself is often stifled by its history. Traditional outputs are prized and prioritized even while a facility with new but unrewarded modes of inquiry is increasingly required of new faculty members. Change is slow.⁹ And incentives for change are few.¹⁰

One of the marks of the neoliberal university that prizes competition has been a growing obsession with rankings of all kinds.¹¹ Despite calls for caution,¹² universities, colleges, and even departments are all continually ranked.¹³ Fear of “slipping” in those rankings really matters — and not just to administrators. Many within the academy have also internalized the value of being highly ranked, not least because with prestige comes very tangible material reward;¹⁴ for example, to be tenured or promoted, the scholar in question must be validated as one of the top scholars in their field, the expression of which takes the form of letters written most often by peers at universities of equal or higher rank and of citations by other scholars whose work appears in a “top” journal or university press–published monograph. This unrelenting focus on the “prestige economy” and unabashed pride in being, if not a “top university,” at least one with such an aspiration shapes the process, policies, and practices at every level of the university — whether for better or (often) for worse.¹⁵

“Even though everyone says rankings don’t matter, when you’re ranked high you’re happier than when you’re not.”

And as we heard in our interviews, for some faculty — perhaps for many — this status quo works just fine, particularly within the tenure-track system.¹⁶ As in the guild system, the route for advancement from novice (graduate student) to apprentice (assistant professor) and journeyman (associate professor), and finally to master (full professor) is well demarcated, even if it is not always well documented. There is often a reluctance to change, if not an outright fear of doing so, especially when it comes to evaluating new, engaged, or digital work. In particular, there is a strong desire to keep in place traditional formats (e.g., the monograph) and traditional policies and practices (e.g., research being valued more than teaching and teaching being valued more than service). Even those who understand the importance of rewarding activities and outputs that might fall outside the traditional criteria for promotion find themselves resistant to shifting reward mechanisms that are often considered to have worked well, even if imperfectly. Daniela Garofalo is not alone when she notes in her article “Tenure by the Book”¹⁷ that “important work” such as “digital projects, community engagement, or research whose purpose is primarily focused on administering an academic program” is not being rewarded in the same way as a monograph, but she still worries: “[H]ave we thought carefully enough about the problems that might arise from waking this sleeping giant [of changing tenure criteria so they reward such work]?” ¹⁸ This attitude is passed from generation to generation.¹⁹ As one of our interviewees observed,

“The native culture does not encourage young people to shake the tree. They see their best way forward is to reinforce the status quo rather than to try and change it."

Even so, time and again we heard in our interviews how three major areas of academic work were undervalued and unevenly supported: digital projects, community engagement, and interdisciplinary scholarship. While highly valued by scholars and administrators alike (see Appendix E), none of these are (yet) recognized and rewarded, at least in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, in the same way as the traditional single-authored article or monograph. Collective and collaborative work often requires an increased commitment of time and effort, and although it advances the publicly engaged research that institutions say they hope to support, doing such work poses considerable challenges, not the least of which are the limited publishing venues available for interdisciplinary research,²⁰ the common practice of receiving only partial credit for any multi-authored publication,²¹ and the fact that a focus on the end product (the website or the funded grant or the published article, for example) often obfuscates the immense amount of scholarly labor that went into its production (such as the creation and distribution of datasets, the building of trusting relationships with collaborators and community partners and the public, and the development of truly accessible resources that engage a wide diversity of scholars).²² Furthermore, such work is considered more like icing on the cake than the cake itself. As one of our interviewees stressed,

“It [all] comes back to the threshold of research productivity [as determined by traditional outputs]. If they’re barely above the threshold or at the threshold, then all of this wonderful work would put them over the edge, but if they haven’t passed the threshold, it’s not going to count [at all].”

CHALLENGE: Everyone espouses support for diversity, equity, and inclusion, but putting those values into practice cannot be done without reckoning with the history of public universities such as those that compose the BTAA.

“If you’re serious about diversifying, you have to do something, and if you’re not willing to do something you’re not serious about it.”

Though referenced in the mission and value statements of every BTAA university we reviewed (see Appendix E), the terms “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” have different meanings, representations, resources, and expectations not only across different campuses but among the vast array of units that make up any single university. In some documents, the goals associated with the DEI mission are specific and clear, such as “increase the number of faculty of color and the number of women faculty by X” or “recruit a student body that looks more like the residents of the state in which the institution resides.” In others the goals are vague and diffuse and people are left wondering if this term — which was originally invoked to ensure that campuses became a home for people whose lived experiences differed from that of the overwhelmingly white, middle-class majority that historically dominated most of these institutions — refers to diverse identities, diverse ideas, or non-descript differences within the population.²³

“Being frank, this [DEI officer] position was created with no job description. Here, you’re appointed! Solve everything: faculty, students, curriculum.”

Most campuses have a DEI office with responsibilities that range from student advocacy to faculty and administrative bias training. Though deeply invested in producing equitable and inclusive outcomes for minoritized groups and individuals on campus, the leaders with whom we spoke experience considerable frustration in their efforts to accomplish a set of goals that they believe will make the institution a more welcoming and inclusive place for minorities. Some of that frustration derives from the tenuous structural location that many of these offices occupy.²⁴ DEI officers are placed in the role of experts and advocates, but are often structurally disconnected from the processes central to running the institution: DEI officers and their offices generally do not participate in the process of approving curriculum revisions and changes; they often have no role in the recruitment, hiring, retention, or advancement of faculty.²⁵ At best, these offices act as a kind of institutional conscience — encouraging, informing, and advocating for more inclusive practices, but with little leverage to implement or enforce changes that are needed. In this role of mentor and counselor on the one hand and advocate on the other, DEI officers are often put in the position of being the most informed yet lacking power to effect direct change, including in tenure review cases. As one person we interviewed put it:

“Sometimes I’m the person who even negotiates with the associate provost, because there are things shared with me that may not be shared with [them], so I end up advocating for a second review. Depending on the relationship I have with a dean, I can [perhaps] pick up the phone.”

The power that does reside in these offices is power to influence through expertise, through their association and support from the president (which is not always a given), through resource distribution (if available), and through access to and dissemination of information. Except in matters related to Title IX compliance, DEI offices generally lack authority to implement, sanction, or reward actions that promote campus diversity. Because decisions regarding faculty hiring and retention are decentralized and rest in academic units, university-level DEI offices have the challenge of working with a wide range of structures, values, histories, and cultures within the university to help bring about change.²⁶ There is a recognizable trend of hiring unit-level DEI officers who are capable of intervening in unit-level hiring and evaluation processes. While this can offer university-level DEI officers structural support for institutional transformation, these unit-level DEI officers are often overwhelmed by requests for support without the requisite resources to provide it. Further, they can become the single point of engagement and responsibility for issues connected to DEI, thus displacing the responsibility each member of the academic community has to proactively create a culture of belonging that is inclusive and equitable.²⁷

Thus, while the general acknowledgement of DEI is important, many of the steps that need to be taken to have a meaningful impact in these areas are lacking. Much of the DEI work done on campus falls to BIPOC, queer, and disabled faculty,²⁸ many of whom have themselves experienced harm throughout their educational experience and continue to experience microaggressions and other forms of discrimination that their white, cis, able-bodied colleagues do not understand and both unknowingly and knowingly repeat.²⁹ For example, insufficient attention is paid, even now, to the daily challenges our disabled colleagues face.³⁰ As one colleague we interviewed put it:

“The pandemic has been really good for me because I don’t have to interact with anyone who hurts me. I’m happier, I’ve been more productive, because I don’t have to deal with the everyday microaggressions and bullshit that I’d deal with on a daily basis going to the office. I know a lot of people have been struggling, but for me it’s been great. I would love to continue working from home so I don’t have to see any of them.”

True progress in our professed commitment to DEI work requires uncovering, discussing, and addressing these harms and identifying specific interventions that can redress them.³¹

Furthermore, the notions of excellence and elitism that pervade the culture of higher education perpetuate inequality.³² These are most apparent in the hierarchical ways we construct knowing and knowledge production and in our processes of assessment that measure productivity and impact, all of which reinforce systemic inequities.³³ Finally, we must acknowledge our history. As Brendan Cantwell pointed out in a recent essay, “Higher education’s racist history is embedded in the norms and processes that anchor the institution. History is not just in the past; it’s living today.”³⁴ In Toxic Ivory Towers, Ruth Enid Zambrana makes a similar point, noting that the narratives of her informants illustrate how "institutional structures are deeply embedded in the reproduction of exclusion and racism while simultaneously claiming the diversity discourse as a language of power to maintain the status quo" (211).³⁵ Meaningful interventions will need to respond to the ways entrenched structural and historical challenges resist the change we so urgently need.

CHALLENGE: Institutional inertia and abdicated agency for change are more common than not.

“People don’t think they have the power to do anything.”

Most universities in the BTAA are “proudly decentralized,” which gives academic units a high degree of autonomy while making it difficult to establish university-wide consensus that would lead to substantive, structural change. While decentralization opens the opportunity for experimentation that can lead to genuine transformation, too often one layer of the hierarchical structure defers authority or shifts responsibility for change to another decision-making level within the institution. So, for example, a department chair might point to the dean or the provost as the reason why a certain expectation or regressive policy is in place, or a faculty committee might point to the chair or to the expectations of the discipline as expressed by their scholarly society as sources of resistance to change. Generally, we found in our interviews that academic leaders at the decanal and provostial levels defer to the disciplinary expertise of the faculty to articulate the processes, practices, and norms associated with the evaluation of scholarship, recognizing that large research universities need to evaluate the quality of work across a wide range of disciplines — from the fine and performing arts, to the bench and social sciences, to the humanities and professions. While this disciplinary diversity infuses the system with a wide array of ways of evaluating and recognizing scholarship, rather than being a source of innovation and change, these different approaches are siloed. Thus, the novel practices of evaluation they may open remain largely isolated from one another.

In addition, administrative leadership turnover can mean dramatic shifts in priorities and focus that make structural change to the RPT process difficult.³⁶ For faculty whose career advancement depends on a clear understanding of how they will be evaluated, such changes in administrative leadership reinforce the importance of long-term stability within the tenure and promotion process. The average tenure of a dean is often only three to five years,³⁷ while the traditional tenure process routinely takes six years, so it is not uncommon for faculty to experience two or three different administrative leadership changes during their pre-tenure probationary period. There is little incentive for administrative leaders or pre-tenure faculty to advocate for substantive changes to the promotion-and-tenure process given the time horizon such changes would require. Developing long-term, strategic interventions in the tenure and promotion process under these circumstances is very difficult as administrative leaders have little incentive to make meaningful change while pre-tenure faculty yearn for clear expectations and stability.³⁸

CHALLENGE: The prestige economy seems an intractable force.

The prestige economy relies on rankings, metrics, and practices that punish those institutions who might move first to change the manner in which scholarship is evaluated and rewarded. Organizations like the Association of American Universities have historically relied on traditional indicators of quality that fail to capture the wide breadth of transdisciplinary and participatory research and creative activity. Competitive relationships between research-intensive (R1) institutions convert the discovery and dissemination of new knowledge — which is not a rivalrous good because one’s use or access to it does not use up or diminish it for another — into a zero-sum endeavor that pits institutions against one another in a competitive effort to procure advantage within the prestige economy.

Within such a competitive environment, institutions are punished for attempts to shift away from the logic that drives the prestige economy and toward approaches that facilitate collaboration, coordination, and cooperation or that introduce new ways of knowing shaped by public engagement that fall outside traditional mechanisms of academic measurement.³⁹

Those institutions that have long benefitted from the prestige economy have little reason to change it, while those for which it has been detrimental too often lack the traction to make meaningful change or risk relinquishing access to resources required for their survival.

And yet, some indicators of the prestige economy are beginning to crumble. Conditions resulting from COVID-19 led many universities to move toward test-optional admissions, an action that begins to erode their ability to cite SAT and ACT scores as measures of the competitive excellence of their students.⁴⁰ COVID-19 is also bringing other factors into consideration as students make college decisions.⁴¹ And many universities are reconsidering tenure and promotion timelines and other productivity measures.⁴² These shifts are a long way from creating an avalanche of changes, but they might be building blocks for the future.

CHALLENGE: Regressive mentoring and the “received” hierarchy of scholarly activities are entrenched.

Although faculty are held annually accountable for their productivity, not all “products” are considered equal. As we argue elsewhere,⁴³ disproportionately rewarding certain forms of academic labor (such as publications) and discouraging other forms of necessary scholarly labor (such as reviewing) creates an unsustainable imbalance in overall scholarly production (reflected most clearly in the challenges faced by editors in obtaining suitable and thoughtful reviewers).⁴⁴ But the problem runs deeper than that. Even when institutions have made substantive changes to their evaluation processes in response to the articulated values of the faculty and the mission of the university, junior scholars continue to report that they receive conflicting advice from their senior colleagues. Pre-tenure faculty regularly are advised to put off meaningful research until after they receive tenure, because doing work that pushes the boundaries of existing expectations is too risky. As one person we interviewed put it, the advice often sounds like this:

“It’s difficult and maybe not a good idea to gamble too much when they’re coming up for tenure. It’s your entire future you’re gambling with. Tenure’s value, of course, is that once you’ve got it, it’s hard to fire you. Once you’re up there, you can gamble.”

Under the guise of “protecting” the time and “supporting” the effort of their junior colleagues, senior scholars in fact reinforce and police traditional practices of scholarship that too often pull junior colleagues away from the work that is most meaningful to them.⁴⁵ “Service” (which is where community-engaged scholarship, for example, often falls) is widely seen as a category of scholarship from which junior scholars must be protected if they are going to be able to submit a dossier that demonstrates research productivity and teaching success. Indeed, the clear value-hierarchy operating in the RPT processes we reviewed across the BTAA sets the category of “research” above all other scholarly activities, with some lip-service given to teaching, while the catch-all category of “service” is always put off, deprecated, and diminished.⁴⁶

If there is a three-legged stool for the tenure and promotion process, the legs are not equal in length or strength. Research, as understood and measured in narrow ways, is the most important of the legs, while teaching is an uneven second, and service a very weak third. This makes for a very unbalanced and precarious stool indeed!

“This is where the protection happens. You protect your young scholars from doing too many reviews.”

The rhetoric of “protecting” junior faculty from service and teaching responsibility serves to police and regulate a regressive tenure and promotion process that undermines the very mission of the university to advance knowledge, serve the public good, and transform lives.

CHALLENGE: The COVID-19 pandemic has had — and will continue to have — an enormous impact.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to a boil many of the inequities that have simmered below the surface for so long,⁴⁷ disproportionately affecting women and faculty of color, the latter of which are more likely to come from communities with higher rates of infection or have family and friends who are part of those communities.⁴⁸ Last year a number of universities encouraged faculty to submit a “COVID Impact Statement” along with their research narratives as part of their annual review, a seemingly generous acknowledgement that many faculty have been struggling during this time. A number of scholars, however, have reported declining to provide such statements out of concern for how these statements will be viewed by their administrators and their colleagues. In addition, junior faculty in particular fear that if they were to request an extension of their tenure clock, a provision that has been automatically granted in many institutions, they may be held up to even more scrutiny because they had an “extra year.”⁴⁹ As UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women notes, in professionally acknowledging personal circumstances, a faculty member must “rely on the good will of their department chairs and deans, in a way that leaves individual faculty members and instructors vulnerable to implicit bias, including sexism, racism, ableism and class-based prejudice.”⁵⁰

The studies that looked at faculty productivity over the first year of the pandemic underline the reality that even if no one acknowledges an impact by COVID on their academic life, those who have suffered the most in terms of research productivity are (unsurprisingly) women, who have traditionally been the primary juggler of work and family.⁵¹ But while the challenges of childcare have been foremost in the discussions of COVID’s impact on faculty and staff, we know there have been other struggles that have gone mostly unacknowledged,⁵² including for those who may be experiencing what has come to be known as “long COVID,”⁵³ which worryingly has been shown to affect cognitive functions.⁵⁴ A recent study shows that 36% of people who have been infected by the virus still experience symptoms many months later, whether or not they were originally asymptomatic or vaccinated.⁵⁵ With the onset of the much more infectious Omicron variant, which has proven capable of causing breakthrough infections among those fully vaccinated and even boosted, the possibility of many faculty, staff, and students developing long COVID remains very real. Although the United States Department of Health and Human Services has determined that long COVID can be considered a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act,⁵⁶ as employees in the academy who were disabled before the pandemic can attest, colleges and universities are usually very poor at acknowledging disability, much less providing accommodations for those who need them.⁵⁷ Should they experience long-term effects from COVID, full-time tenure-track and tenured faculty have some protection against financial hardship through health insurance and sick-leave benefits and the flexibility of a 9-month contract; contingent faculty do not. While students with long COVID must be given accommodations and universities are working hard to provide them,⁵⁸ faculty and staff are less likely to have that same experience. Indeed, the generosity of the early pandemic now seems at an end,⁵⁹ even though COVID continues to infect and thus affect individuals and their communities at the same rate as a year ago.

CHALLENGE: “Between the idea and the real falls the shadow” (as T. S. Eliot would say).

While the actual processes for promotion and tenure being followed may have been long established and may be well understood and documented,⁶⁰ implementation of guidelines and bylaws are often open to interpretation and subjectively applied.⁶¹ At some institutions this lack of clarity may be intentional, as noted by one interviewee:

“A wise [institution] lifer pointed out to me that the key thing is that [the institution] doesn’t follow its written policies and won’t write down the policies it actually follows.”

Terms like “quality,” “collegiality,” and “professionalism” are often weaponized and can be especially targeted toward BIPOC and disabled faculty members. Many times the idea of “fit”/”collegiality” within an existing culture can be used to bar faculty from well-deserved promotion.⁶² There can be pressure from more senior faculty to keep those whose research may contradict or question another’s from promotion by questioning the quality or even the legitimacy of that person’s work.⁶³ As the AAUP report On Collegiality as a Criterion for Faculty Evaluation notes, “Historically, ‘collegiality’ has not infrequently been associated with ensuring homogeneity and hence with practices that exclude persons on the basis of their difference from a perceived norm.”⁶⁴ Community-engaged work that is seen to be too “activist” can be in this category. As Corey Miles wryly observes, “Universities embrace activist rhetoric, but not activists.”⁶⁵ The cautionary tale of Garrett Felber, an assistant professor of history at the University of Mississippi known for pushing boundaries in his work who was terminated for not being “sufficiently” communicative with his chair, bears this out: “In this context,” notes Miles, “the tenure track conveys to junior scholars that career security is earned only through a set of narrow values and beliefs.”

While there are opportunities for risk-taking on every rung of the career ladder, many universities look to “protect” junior faculty and to be clear (and often restrictive) about what they need to do to achieve tenure. Many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences still rely on the monograph as the standard or require a certain number of articles to be published in so-called “high-impact” journals. For some digital humanities scholars, this is a major barrier.⁶⁶ One of our interviewees, who had been hired specifically to do digital humanities work, related a story in which they asked their dean explicitly about the “traditional” work it seemed they were also expected to do:

“I asked, ‘Do I need to do both?’ [The answer was] Yes. ‘You have to do digital stuff because that’s why you were hired, and you also have to meet the traditional thresholds.’ So we did.”

They did get tenure, but the cost of doing so still brought tears to their eyes.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Meaningful change in higher education requires intentional efforts to align scholarly practices with deeply held personal and institutional values. Many of the challenges we have identified are ultimately rooted in a misalignment between the workings of the system and the values the system professes to advance and support. Recognizing that this values misalignment is at the root of the sense of alienation that prevails across higher education opens the possibility of strategic interventions at every level of the system, from the very personal to the most entrenched structures of institutions. However daunting this may at first appear, the truth is that change can begin to take root and grow in even the smallest of personal interactions as individuals clarify for themselves — and with their colleagues — the values that make their work meaningful and the practices that make their values real in the world. An intentional commitment to enact values in every academic encounter, in the policies we adopt, and in the modes of evaluation we embrace, will, over time, begin to shift the culture of higher education. Even small intentional changes in the manner in which we interact will have substantive structural impact.

Although one of the challenges we have identified is an adherence to the status quo and a reluctance to change, the upside of having established and fairly well-understood mechanisms and governance structures in place for RPT is that it affords us with an opportunity to leverage those very processes and structures to enact the change we wish to see. Since traditional approaches to RPT are so well defined, we are able to identify specific strategies of intervention that can be accomplished without a complete overhaul of the system.

Each stage of the RPT process provides inflection points for change. Much of the formal documentation produced by departments, colleges, and offices of faculty affairs strives to provide a shared understanding among all the stakeholders of process, criteria, and required metrics. There is value in clarity of the process, and we heard in our interviews a strong desire for even more transparency. Clear hiring letters, memoranda of understanding, and tenure criteria that spell out innovative work expectations, for example, are key to ensuring such work is recognized and valued from the beginning of the faculty member’s employment at a given institution and provides a frame of reference for the faculty member, departmental colleagues and chairs, and deans.

Faculty of all appointment types (including contingent faculty and professors of practice and instruction) and all members of the staff are important change agents, but they must be given more power and opportunities to enact transformation within their departments and schools through inclusive practices of shared governance. Here, too, advocacy for shared governance must be put into intentional action through the practices and policies that shape institutional habits. Articulated institutional values are too often misaligned with the practices of evaluation that shape faculty research and teaching and with the wider policies that shape academic life. The following recommendations are designed to reform mechanisms of research and teaching evaluation to realign values with practices.

RECOMMENDATION: Create a university-level committee to support the evaluation of emerging or underrecognized research approaches aligned with institutional values.

One emphasis in many of our interviews was the importance of public scholarship at all levels of the university, whether we were talking with librarians, contingent faculty, tenure-track and tenured faculty of all ranks, chairs, deans, or other administrators — with the caveat that the concept itself was very difficult to define, much less to measure.⁶⁷ What is acknowledged is that while universities value community-engaged, participatory research, public scholarship, and interdisciplinary approaches, these efforts are often not supported at the unit level. Community-engaged work of necessity crosses all three areas of research, teaching, and service in ways that are not discrete, complicating the narrative faculty need to tell about their work. In particular, research is defined too narrowly, as only that which results in a citable publication of some kind — and efforts looking to change such definition are scattershot, rather than unified or overarching. (See Appendix F for an example from Michigan State University of a different approach in thinking about how better to describe the work being done by faculty and staff.)

Although community-engaged, participatory research is increasingly a mission priority of universities, evaluation structures either fail altogether to recognize the various forms of labor that make such work successful or require scholars to expend time and effort educating their colleagues and advocating for acknowledgement. While traditional modes of research and outreach to communities about the work that may have been done at university are unidirectional, community engagement and team projects are multidirectional. Participatory research and community-engaged scholarship require establishing trusting relationships with partners, deepening connections with communities, and identifying shared goals, all of which take time that our current systems of evaluation and their often rigid timelines are largely unable to accommodate or reward.⁶⁸ Such trust-building and collective work must be welcomed and rewarded from the beginning of a faculty member’s career and must be accounted for in tenure clocks. As we heard in our interviews, often tenure-track faculty either postpone the work they really want to do (often expressed as “when I get tenure, I’ll then do X”) or double their workload by doing traditional work they know will be rewarded while also doing the community-engaged or digital work that they really prize.

Similar to community-engaged work is interdisciplinary or collaborative scholarship, which also is reportedly highly prized by universities (see Appendix E) but that in practice needs to be rewarded differently than it is. Work that bridges more than one discipline requires extra effort on the part of the scholar(s) doing this work, whether that is in developing the expertise needed to be fluent in another discipline or in finding appropriate publication venues for the work produced or in making that work legible to the departmental colleagues who are responsible for determining raises and promotions. Very often interdisciplinary work is also collaborative work, but even when that collaboration is with others within a single discipline, this work is often disincentivized, if not outright discouraged. For most HSS disciplines, single-authored work is more highly prized than collective authorship. Many departments count a co-authored publication as only a partial publication, requiring those who work collaboratively to publish many times more often than the scholar who works alone. Collaborative work is often much more challenging, requiring constant negotiations among collaborators who must rely on each other to get the work done. As with community-engaged work, collaborative projects often require trust-building, and such work, while enriched by collective activity, often takes longer. Rarely is any of this extra effort acknowledged in the recognition and reward process.

To address all of these concerns, we recommend the creation at each institution of a university-level committee designed to support the evaluation of emerging or underrecognized research approaches that are in alignment with the values the university holds. In our analysis of BTAA values compiled from vision and mission statements across the alliance, community engagement, interdisciplinary approaches, and collaborative partnerships are all highly prized. (See Appendix E for a list of these values.) These activities should also therefore be properly recognized and rewarded. A committee charged specifically with evaluating such work will ensure that it is taken seriously. The University of Minnesota’s Review Committee on Community-Engaged Scholarship is an example of the type of committee we have in mind. That committee limits its review of dossiers to those community-engaged scholars who are approaching tenure or promotion. Our recommendation is to expand this concept to include all faculty who are engaged in community-engaged, interdisciplinary, or collaborative work — as well as those who work in emerging fields of study — at any stage in their career.

In a similar effort, Public Philosophy Network has created a mentoring panel to advise faculty in crafting their portfolios in ways that make publicly engaged work recognizable in the RPT process and an External Review Panel of qualified reviewers of public scholarship for interested departments and universities. We encourage other academic societies whose work focuses on community-engaged, interdisciplinary, or collaborative scholarship to develop such mentoring and external review panels.

RECOMMENDATION: Rethink expectations for tenure by aligning achievements with opportunity.

The COVID-19 pandemic has required many universities to adjust expectations for tenure by more intentionally aligning the achievements they expect with the opportunity current conditions afford their faculty to accomplish. As mentioned above, many universities have responded to the undeniable burdens brought on by the pandemic by, among other interventions, inviting faculty to provide COVID Impact Statements, granting automatic extensions to the tenure clock, and elevating the value of teaching as many faculty focused on pivoting in-person teaching to online. Though born of crisis, these interventions demonstrate how creative, flexible, and adaptive the tenure process in higher education can be. Drawing on this experience, we recommend a broader rethinking of expectations for tenure that intentionally and explicitly align achievements with opportunity.

To attain more equitable institutional practices, campuses should ensure that RPT guidelines take into account not only the effects of the pandemic on faculty and staff in the long as well as short term, but also the opportunities each scholar has to thrive in pursuing values-aligned work. Aligning achievement with opportunity requires at least a threefold strategy.

First, it is important to find ways to recognize and reward values-aligned work that has traditionally been undervalued in RPT processes. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic has introduced qualitative and narrative ways for universities to highlight and recognize the important pedagogical development work that went into moving courses online. These strategies need to be sustained and expanded to include mentoring activities, publicly engaged work, contributions to DEI efforts, and other activities aligned with the articulated mission of the university.

A second strategy in aligning achievement with opportunity is to proactively redress bias at all levels of the RPT process. Campuses should institute programs for leaders to receive unconscious bias training directed particularly at providing support for BIPOC, LGBTQ+, disabled, and women faculty in mentoring, supervising, and leadership development. Establishment of a BTAA database of training and sample materials (e.g., external letters, letters of recommendation, offer letters) could be a useful resource, building on work already being done by ADVANCE at the University of Michigan, at Columbia, at Berkeley, and in Georgia Tech’s online training modules. Evaluators must better recognize and give credit for the full range of work that faculty who are minorities do to support students, colleagues, and themselves in managing incidents that range from microaggressions to blatant racism and ableism. Credit for time spent with students and colleagues providing guidance and counsel and acknowledged mental health days are just two examples of the kinds of strategies that institutions need to put in place.

Third, universities need to expand opportunities for meaningful achievement. Recognizing that publicly engaged research, for example, requires time to develop, campuses could adopt systems not dissimilar to that accorded to STEM faculty as they spin up their labs and establish their teams before they are asked to demonstrate tangible outputs. These practices can be adopted for and adapted to those scholars who are engaged in publicly engaged, transdisciplinary, or other values-aligned work. Relatedly, universities can create post-doctoral programs that explicitly transition to tenure-track positions based on certain specified and agreed-upon goals and indicators, as, for example, the College of Social Sciences at Michigan State University has done with their Dean’s Research Associate (Postdoc) Program. Indeed, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many universities found ways to extend the tenure clock for faculty caregivers. Similarly, certain forms of scholarship require more time to develop, and it is important to recognize the connection between time and intentional practice.

RECOMMENDATION: Align clear expectations of faculty assignments with institutional values and with specific outcomes and indicators associated with the aspirations of the new member of the faculty.

At some institutions, the job offer letter serves as a roadmap to tenure and promotion; at others, there are written statements of expectations for faculty assignments. Crafted in dialogue with the candidate, the chair, and the dean, offer letters or statements of expectation that outline the milestone accomplishments and personalized indicators of success that will lead to reappointment and tenure provide both flexibility and clarity. These written documents can become the basis for annual review letters that refine and adjust goals and expectations as faculty research and teaching progress and develop, goals and expectations that in turn should be visited regularly during in-person conversations with the department chair or head. For this recommendation to be successful, mutually agreed-upon written expectations of faculty assignments aligned with institutional values need to be the touchstone to which administrators and faculty return at least annually to ensure that faculty activities align with articulated institutional expectations.

RECOMMENDATION: Develop a rubric and facilitate training to inform annual review conversations between chairs and faculty members.

Annual review conversations can be important moments of mentoring. They can provide chairs with valuable information about how the goals and aspirations of a faculty member are developing over the course of the RPT process. These conversations also afford faculty members with opportunities to tell a textured story about their work. Using a rubric to shape these conversations in ways that support an expanded understanding of scholarship and creative activity offer opportunities both to recognize and document these new and emerging modes of scholarship. For an example, see the Faculty Annual Review Form in Appendix G.

Additionally, there must be recourse for faculty members who are dehumanized and discriminated against by their chairs or other mentors. Chairs must be held accountable on issues of accessibility and accommodation for disabled faculty members and must undergo training on unconscious bias around issues of race, gender, and sexuality before taking the position as chair. Regular training for chairs and other administrators on how to provide formative feedback within the context of regular annual reviews for a wide diversity of faculty members is a critical aspect of a holistic strategy to ensure the annual review process creates a culture in which each member of the faculty is supported and empowered to do work aligned with personal and institutional values.

RECOMMENDATION: Reform the way external review letters are solicited, valued, and evaluated.

So much of the promotion and tenure process depends on the quality of the external letters that are solicited, received, and reviewed. Again and again in our interviews, the importance of this form of peer review was emphasized as critical to the tenure and promotion process. It is crucial, then, that the letters that solicit external reviews be explicit about emphasizing the importance of scholarly activity that aligns with institutional values. Requests for reviewers to comment on and speak to specific modes of less-traditional scholarship — digital scholarship or public scholarship, for example — or to specific kinds of scholarly production, such as films, exhibitions, or curated online content, expand the range of scholarship that might find supportive voices in external review letters. Reviewers, however, need to be explicitly asked to provide feedback about what may appear to be non-traditional modes of scholarship. Intentional strategies must be adopted by chairs and deans who solicit external letters to ensure that external reviews support an expanded understanding of scholarship that aligns with the values of their institutions and faculty. Such strategies should also take into account who might be best positioned to provide such letters. For community-engaged scholarship, for example, community leaders might be solicited for their feedback; for inter-institutional collaborative work, fellow collaborators at other universities might be asked to contribute a letter attesting to the collaboration.

Training is also required to ensure that review committees provide a holistic and unbiased review of the external letters. Too often review committees read too much into the reputational values of the institution whose letterhead is on the letter rather than on the content of the review. A balanced reading of these letters ensures that a broad understanding of scholarly activity and production is affirmed and supported in the review process.

RECOMMENDATION: Participate in values-based workshops at the unit level.

Workshops that afford the faculty opportunities to reflect upon their own personal values and to identify the values that they share with their colleagues position units to articulate strategic goals and to revise governing documents that advance and support the values they have identified. Values-focused workshops can open a space for faculty and administrators to connect with one another around the core goals that shape a shared mission. Facilitated conversations in such spaces can animate transformative change rooted in intentional alignment of values with unit-level policies and practices.

RECOMMENDATION: Revise unit-level governing documents.

Disciplines are policed at the department level. Unit governing documents shape the sort of scholarship that will be pursued and produced. Revising unit-level governing documents to explicitly support emerging and innovative modes of scholarship will then provide faculty within the tenure system with textual support to advance work about which they care most deeply. Explicitly affirming public scholarship, participatory community-engaged work, or interdisciplinary approaches in unit governing documents provides faculty with the institutional support they need to pursue vibrant and dynamic new forms of research and creative activity.

Institutions should establish a regular process of reviewing unit- and campus-level promotion and tenure documents to ensure that they align with institutional priorities and with campus and unit mission and values. For example, if the land-grant mission or community engagement are key aspects of the institutional mission, then promotion and tenure criteria should speak directly to the kind of community-engaged work that counts and how that work is rewarded. Or if innovation or leading-edge approaches to the field is a value, criteria should speak to how work that utilizes innovative or new approaches could be fairly assessed, not dismissed simply because it does not fit traditional modes of production. In addition, if such innovation is valued, promotion and tenure documents should explicitly articulate how faculty are encouraged to take risks and learn from failure. Qualitative and narrative aspects of the dossier can be leveraged to give an account of these risks and learnings, but they need to be explicitly encouraged in official documentation of the process.

RECOMMENDATION: Shift the categories of the tenure and promotion process to the high-impact achievements of sharing knowledge, expanding opportunity, and mentoring/stewardship while moving away from the siloed categories of teaching, research, and service.

Following the Charting Pathways of Intellectual Leadership framework developed in the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University (see Appendix F),⁶⁹ the shift from traditional, siloed categories toward higher order achievements opens the possibility of recognizing, rewarding, and encouraging a broader range of scholarly activities while simultaneously supporting those faculty pursuing traditional modes of scholarly production. By focusing on how they shared knowledge in a given year, scholars are able to draw on activities from across the traditional categories of the RPT process; knowledge can be shared through teaching activities, by publishing, or in service to the profession. Similarly, faculty can expand opportunities for students and colleagues through their teaching, their research, or their service. Finally, by emphasizing the importance of mentoring and stewardship,⁷⁰ this framework values and supports what too often is the invisible intellectual and emotional work of supporting students and colleagues or of contributing to the institutional resources that make scholarly life possible.

RECOMMENDATION: Collaborate with deans and provosts to revise university-level statements on promotion and tenure.

Our conversations with provosts, associate provosts, and deans suggest an openness to recognizing a wide diversity of modes of scholarship and a commitment to putting the values of the university into practice through the university RPT process. Some universities distribute a letter from the provost annually to college deans and department chairs that set the parameters for a successful RPT review process; at other universities, there are standing campus-level guidelines. These documents afford us with a critical opportunity to explicitly align the core values of the university with the practices and policies that shape academic life. In particular, it is important for these documents to encourage innovation, risk-taking, and publicly engaged community-oriented scholarship. In addition, it is critical that these statements and guidelines require documented contributions to DEI as part of the promotion and tenure process. An example can be found in Michigan State University’s current Statement on Faculty Promotion and Tenure (Appendix H).

RECOMMENDATION: Increase opportunities for disciplinary leaders (chairs, directors, senior faculty) to share, learn about, discuss, and exchange evaluation practices and procedures from a wider diversity of disciplines across the mission of the university.

Institutions would enhance their ability to enact a common mission, overcome silos, and create a generally more supportive climate for faculty growth and development if leadership from many different disciplines and parts of the university — especially the arts and sciences core — had enhanced opportunities to explore and share disciplinary values and practices, with the goal of expanding perspectives on the assessment process. Leadership training programs supported by college deans and managed through offices of the associate provost for faculty affairs provide possible mechanisms for implementing such dialogues and discussions. The audience for these workshops would be new and continuing unit heads and members of unit RPT committees. Former members of university-wide tenure and promotion committees who have directly experienced the variety of metrics, values, and tools that are used in assessing a wide range of scholarly practices and approaches could serve as facilitators.

RECOMMENDATION: Break down silos both intra- and inter-institutionally.

A common theme we heard throughout our interviews was how decentralized each university is. While this decentralization can be a strength, in very practical ways it also results in silos across the institution. What we heard in our interviews is that many faculty, administrators, librarians, and staff feel they are going it alone in trying to change the institution, but the reality is quite different. Both within institutions and across several (if not all) the BTAA universities, we heard recurring themes that indicate that these individuals are not at all alone in their endeavors. They simply do not know who their allies are. We recommend developing both formal and informal lines of open communication between and among deans’ offices, offices of faculty affairs, libraries, and those engaged in DEI work, focused on shared values and shared mission(s) and on building alliances across universities among and between these groups.

Happily, our current round of funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provides for the establishment of working groups to facilitate such conversations. These working groups will tackle several pressing issues raised during our interviews, including the challenges of community-engaged work by tenure-track and contingent faculty, social injustices and systemic racism (including addressing head-on the problematic history of land-grant universities), enacting values-based governing documents at the departmental and college level, adopting an approach that looks at impact beyond mere numbers (what is often called “responsible metrics”), and enhancing a shared academy-owned infrastructure that allows for more nuanced stories to be told in evaluating faculty productivity and impact.⁷¹ The activities of these working groups will include (1) a virtual discussion for a every other month; (2) an asynchronous online forum where any member can review the notes of any group’s discussion and provide feedback and comments, the asynchronous nature of which will allow members to participate on a schedule and in a manner that works for them while ensuring contribution from the largest number of voices; (3) various position papers on the topics discussed during the fora; (4) a final convocation that will bring together the members of the working groups to draft recommendations for the BTAA to adopt alliance-wide (with an eye to what others outside the alliance also might do); and (5) a database of supporting materials for use both within and outside the BTAA. Members of the working groups will also be encouraged to meet regularly on their own campuses with other members of the working groups and with additional stakeholders to speak with one another about approaches they might take collectively on their local campus to influence decision-makers at all levels of the university; reporting back on these conversations will be a regular part of the bimonthly discussion fora.

While we are hopeful these working groups will help facilitate intra- and interinstitutional conversations, there is a huge role also to be played by scholarly and learned societies, as well as by consortia of various kinds, who are well positioned to provide fora for conversations, establish standards, recommend good and best practices,⁷² and provide guidance to their members. We are encouraged in particular that the American Council of Learned Societies, through their Intention Foundry, has taken an active role in advancing and coordinating this very important work.

RECOMMENDATION: Create better and more consistent ways to track what is now often invisible labor to ensure equity.

The limitations of our current tools for evaluating important aspects of academic, scholarly, and professorial work renders many important and rewarding activities unseen. Nowhere is this more profound, problematic, and threatening to the goals of inclusivity, diversity, and equity than the invisible labor associated with supporting minorities, whether that is BIPOC faculty and staff in predominantly white institutions, women in predominantly male fields, and disabled and LGBTQ+ faculty and staff across the institution. In fact, as institutions, we often do not invest in the human infrastructure needed to build diverse and welcoming communities, to help our staff and faculty understand the manner in which unconscious bias and microaggressions are manifested in classrooms and in personal interactions, or to acknowledge the emotional work required to navigate an institution in which many are grossly underrepresented and that often does not in any meaningful way acknowledge the systemic barriers to success these employees face. As a result, the work of healing, guidance, support, reassurance, and persistence for these populations falls overwhelmingly upon BIPOC and other minority faculty and staff, who are themselves often in dire need of the support they are providing others. This work is invisible and uncompensated; it is time consuming and emotionally draining; it impacts scholarship and productivity.⁷³

RECOMMENDATION: Dedicate resources toward creating an inclusive, anti-racist campus climate.

“There’s a strong correlation between the strength of the university as a STEM leader and its utter ignorance of the Indigenous possibilities in that place.”

“In the middle of campus there’s a little patch of cornfield — the original first experimental agricultural station, a shrine to science. [Just] try to close that patch, that bastion of research, by calling attention to how it’s stolen. [But] corn gets you to the heart of Indigenous epistemologies, not only knowledge but relation: corn is older kin, not something to be experimented on.”

“Diversity” and “equity” are both terms highlighted repeatedly in most university mission and values statements (see Appendix E), but many institutions are slow to recognize — let alone address — their own history of inequality and racial injustice. To create a genuinely inclusive and anti-racist (not simply diverse) campus environment, institutions of higher education must come to terms with the racist and oppressive relationships their campuses have been built upon — physically as well as historically.⁷⁴ This means, among other things, unearthing and telling the full history of the campus: beginning with how the land was acquired and from whom; through the role of enslaved people and the institution of slavery and indentured and oppressed labor in its construction and establishment; up to its current policies and patterns of inclusion/exclusion of various groups of people in the student body, in the residence halls, on the staff and faculty, and, yes, even in the publication and citation practices that are at the heart of a current evaluation system that privileges some individuals and voices over others.

Steps toward creating an inclusive, anti-racist campus include making the position of chief diversity officer a vice-presidential-level appointment⁷⁵ — with resources, authority, personnel, and a campus-wide network. As discussed earlier, many diversity offices are created with little-to-no job description and very little institutional power. Ensuring DEI practices are prioritized and executed throughout the university requires high-level institutional buy-in and support.⁷⁶ All levels of leadership should be held accountable for developing and achieving anti-racism and equity goals; identifying, recording, and studying inclusivity accomplishments; and working with diversity office staff to build interdepartmental and intercollegiate efforts.

These trainings and accountability strategies should also serve as a part of an overall effort to prepare department chairs for the responsibilities of their position. Department chairs are instrumental in creating a supportive, equitable climate in their department and in making sure the institution is serving the scholars under their care, not only the other way around.⁷⁷

CONCLUSION

In her book Posthuman Knowledge, Rosi Braidotti argues that we ought to approach our shared state of very real exhaustion affirmatively. “Let me dare to suggest,” she writes, “that there is a creative potential here, which means that exhaustion is not a pathological state that needs to be cured, as an actual disorder, but a threshold of transformation of forces, that is to say a virtual state of creative becoming” (17).⁷⁸ The exhaustion we feel in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the reckoning with long legacies of racism and exclusionary practices indicate that we have entered a space of transformative change. The emergence of the Delta and Omicron variants of the virus and the impact of long COVID⁷⁹ among students, staff, and faculty suggest that we remain in the middle or even in early stages of this disruptive period of change.

In the interviews we held over the past 18 months, we experienced the stress, strain, and anxiety of the liminal space we currently inhabit. We heard the exhaustion, the frustration, the exasperation, and the alienation. But we also heard the hope, the creativity, the deep and enduring love of learning, and the abiding commitment to creating a more just and equitable ecosystem of scholarly engagement. Higher education stands at a crossroads. The policies and practices that shape scholarly life are not aligned with the core values for which higher education institutions profess to stand or with the personal values many in higher education hope to enact through their work. The alienation, frustration, exasperation, and exhaustion our colleagues voiced throughout the interviews may have been amplified by the pandemic and the reckoning with racism, but they can ultimately be traced to the misalignment between the values we profess to hold and the practices that shape contemporary academic life. Without direct action to redress this misalignment, we will remain unable to tap into the hope, creativity, and joy that are the catalysts of genuine transformation. Through our conversations we identified opportunities for intervention in quotidian interactions, small policy changes, slight shifts of emphasis, and innovative structural adjustments. We learned that substantive institutional transformation is, in fact, possible — and that each of us involved in the higher education endeavor, however exhausted we may feel, can be an agent of the change we envision if we remain committed to putting our values into intentional practice in every encounter we have, in every decision we make, in every policy we create, and in every practice we undertake.

There is enormous creative potential for transformative change in higher education in the recommendations we have outlined here. Many, as you will note, do not require tectonic shifts in institutional structures but rather adjustments in how we put the values we say we care most deeply about into concrete action in the habits, practices, and policies that shape the way scholarship is pursued. Each intervention moves us closer to living up to the values so many of us sought to embody in our decision to dedicate our lives to higher education; together, over time, the changes we suggest will have a broader transformative effect. Only when higher education lives up to the values for which it has long advocated will the university be in a position to address the grand challenges of our time with new creative energy, integrity, and grace.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are grateful to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the generous support of this research and the work of the HuMetricsHSS Initiative. 

We would like to thank all those Associate Vice Chancellors, Chief Information Officers, Associate Provosts, Vice Provosts, Associate Vice Provosts, Assistant Vice Provosts, Vice Presidents, Senior Vice Presidents, Associate Vice Presidents, Assistant Vice Presidents, Executive Deans, Deans, Senior Associate Deans, Associate Deans, University Librarians, Associate University Librarians, Unit Heads, Professors, Librarians, Executive Directors, Directors, Assistant Directors, Senior Advisors, Strategists, and Data and Business Analysts from across all the Big Ten Academic Alliance universities who gave generously of their time and expertise, talking with us with such openness, frankness, and clarity, as well as sending us additional materials to aid us in our understanding of their particular institutional policies and processes. We also appreciate those interviewees who responded to our draft version of this white paper; their candor and their thoughtful engagement have very much improved this report. 

It is also worth noting that prior to the curtailing of travel that was imposed because of COVID-19, the members of the research team had requested help from the library at each institution to coordinate our research trip planning, asking for their partnership in organizing conversations across their campuses. They all generously agreed to coordinate our interview schedule, sometimes acting as well as the host for the day, and we are most grateful to them for all their help — especially Birdie Beckwith, Melanie Carroll, and Cynthia Vitale. We wish we had had the opportunity to partner with more libraries than we did.

We are particularly grateful for the coordination and unflappable flexibility of Deans Long and Thornton Dill’s assistants, Deanna Thomas and Chant’e Ingram, who overcame the many often complex scheduling challenges along the way. We’d also like to thank Mike Thicke, who helped with some technical issues in the production of the electronic versions of the white paper, and Kelly Sattler, who assisted with Manifold setup.

The PDF version of this white paper is presented in Atkinson Hyperlegible font. The font is provided for free from the Braille Institute and improves readability by increasing character recognition, clearly differentiating between commonly misinterpreted letters and numbers.

ENDNOTES

We have also provided a list of the all the references cited in this white paper, with links to the full text.

Notes

[←1]

Beginning with this publication, we have opted for a collective authorship model. To identify all authors contributing under the collective model in each of our publications, our aim is to select a different way of listing co-authorship. In this case we have chosen ORCID IDs listed in ascending order: Nicky Agate [0000-0001-7624-3779], Christopher P. Long [0000-0001-9932-5689], Bonnie Russell [0000-0002-0374-0384], Rebecca Kennison [0000-0002-1401-9808], Penelope Weber [0000-0002-4542-8989], Simone Sacchi [0000-0002-6635-7059], Jason Rhody [0000-0002-7096-1881], Bonnie Thornton Dill [0000-0002-7450-2412].

[←2]

Agate, Nicky, Rebecca Kennison, Stacy Konkiel, Christopher P. Long, Jason Rhody, Simone Sacchi, Penelope Weber. 2020. “The Transformative Power of Values-Enacted Scholarship.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 7(1): 1–12.

[←3]

We are of course not the only ones or even the first to have made these important points. For a sampling of the discussion and longstanding concerns about HSS work when it is evaluated using criteria developed for STEM, see:

Benneworth, Paul Stephen. 2015. Between Certainty and Comprehensiveness in Evaluating the Societal Impact of Humanities Research: Reflections on a Decade of Dutch Experiences. Enschede, Netherlands: Center for Higher Education Policy Studies.

Blockmans, Wim, Jacques Thomassen. 2005. Judging Research on Its Merits: An Advisory Report by the Council for the Humanities and the Social Sciences Council. Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Bonaccorsi, Andrea. 2020. “Two Decades of Research Assessment in Italy: Addressing the Criticisms.” Scholarly Assessment Reports 2(1): Article 28.

Budtz Pedersen, David, Jonas Følsgaard Grønvad, Rolf Hvidtfeldt. 2020. “Methods for Mapping the Impact of Social Sciences and Humanities — A Literature Review.” Research Evaluation 29(1): 4–21.

Cañibano, Carolina, Immaculada Vilardell, Carmen Corona, Carlos Benito-Amat. 2018. “The Evaluation of Research Excellence and the Dynamics of Knowledge Production in the Humanities: The Case of History in Spain.” Science and Public Policy 45(6): 775–789.

Chou, Chuing Prudence, Hsiao Fang Lin, Yun-ju Chiu. 2013. “The Impact of SSCI and SCI on Taiwan's Academy: An Outcry for Fair Play.” Asia Pacific Education Review 14(1): 23–31.

Colavizza, Giovanni, Matteo Romanello. 2019. “Citation Mining of Humanities Journals: The Progress to Date and the Challenges Ahead.” Journal of European Periodical Studies 4(1): 36–53.

Ferrara, Antonio, Andrea Bonaccorsi. 2016. “How Robust Is Journal Rating in Humanities and Social Sciences?: Evidence from a Large-Scale, Multi-Method Exercise.” Research Evaluation 25(3): 279–291.

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen, Rebecca Kennison. 2017. Altmetrics in Humanities and Social Sciences. New York: Modern Language Association.

Franssen, Thomas, Paul Wouters. 2019. “Science and Its Significant Other: Representing the Humanities in Bibliometric Scholarship.” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 70(10): 1124–1137.

Hammarfelt, Björn. 2012. Following the Footnotes: A Bibliometric Analysis of Citation Patterns in Literary Studies. Ph.D. thesis, Uppsala Universitet.

Hammarfelt, Björn. 2016. “Beyond Coverage: Toward a Bibliometrics for the Humanities.” In Research Assessment in the Humanities: Towards Criteria and Procedures, edited by Michael Ochsner, Sven E. Hug, and Hans-Dieter Daniel, 115–131. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Hammarfelt, Björn. 2017. “Four Claims on Research Assessment and Metric Use in the Humanities.” Bulletin of the Association for Information Science and Technology 43(5): 33–38.

Hammarfelt, Björn, Gaby Haddow. 2018. “Conflicting Measures and Values: How Humanities Scholars in Australia and Sweden Use and React to Bibliometric Indicators.” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 69(7): 924–935.

Hemlin, Sven, Marie Gustafsson. 1996. “Research Production in the Arts and Humanities.” Scientometrics 37(3): 417–432.

Hicks, Diana. 2005. “The Four Literatures of Social Science.” In Handbook of Quantitative Science and Technology Research: The Use of Publication and Patent Statistics in Studies of S&T Systems, edited by Henk F. Moed, Wolfgang Glänzel, and Ulrich Schmoch, 473–496. Dordrecht: Springer.

Huang, Mu-hsuan, Yu-wei Chang. 2008. “Characteristics of Research Output in Social Sciences and Humanities: From a Research Evaluation Perspective.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59(11): 1819–1828.

Hyland, Ken. 1999. “Academic Attribution: Citation and the Construction of Disciplinary Knowledge.” Applied Linguistics 20(3): 341–367.

Larivière, Vincent, Yves Gingras. 2014. “Measuring Interdisciplinarity.” In Beyond Bibliometrics: Harnessing Multidimensional Indicators of Scholarly Impact, edited by Blaise Cronin and Cassidy R. Sugimoto 187–200. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Linkova, Marcela. 2014. “Unable to Resist: Researchers’ Responses to Research Assessment in the Czech Republic.” Human Affairs 24(1): 78–88.

Linmans, A. J. M. 2010. “Why with Bibliometrics the Humanities Does Not Need to Be the Weakest Link.” Scientometrics 83(2): 337–354.

Maryl, Maciej, Marta Błaszczyńska, Agnieszka Szulińska, Paweł Rams. 2020. “The Case for an Inclusive Scholarly Communication Infrastructure for Social Sciences and Humanities.” F1000Research 9: Article 1265.

Nederhof, Anton J., Rolf A. Zwaan, Renger E. De Bruin, P. J. Dekker. 1989. “Assessing the Usefulness of Bibliometric Indicators for the Humanities and the Social and Behavioural Sciences: A Comparative Study.” Scientometrics 15(5): 423–435.

Oancea, Alis. 2013. “Interpretations of Research Impact in Seven Disciplines.” European Educational Research Journal 12(2): 242–250.

Petr, Michal, Tim C. E. Engels, Emanuel Kulczycki, Marta Dušková, Raf Guns, Monika Sieberová, Gunnar Sivertsen. 2021. “Journal Article Publishing in the Social Sciences and Humanities: A Comparison of Web of Science Coverage for Five European Countries.” PLOS ONE 16(4): e0249879.

Pontille, David, Didier Torny. 2010. “The Controversial Policies of Journal Ratings: Evaluating Social Sciences and Humanities.” Research Evaluation 19(5): 347–360.

Reale, Emanuela, Emilia Primeri, Ramon Flecha, Marta Soler, Esther Oliver, Lídia Puigvert, Teresa Sordé, Andràs Schubert, Sàndor Soòs, Judith Mosoni-Fried, Kubra Canhilal, Benedetto Lepori, Dragana Avramov, Paul Holm, Charles Travis, Charles Larkin, Andrea Scharnhorst, Arjan Hogenaar, René Van Horik, Claire Donovan. 2015. State of the Art in the Scientific, Policy and Social Impact of SSH Research and Its Evaluation. Rome: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche.

Severinson, Peter. 2017. Approaches to Assessing Impacts in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Ottawa: Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Thelwall, Mike, Maria M. Delgado. 2015. “Arts and Humanities Research Evaluation: No Metrics Please, Just Data.” Journal of Documentation 71(4): 817–833.

van den Akker, Wiljan. 2016. “Yes We Should; Research Assessment in the Humanities.” In Research Assessment in the Humanities: Towards Criteria and Procedures, edited by Michael Ochsner, Sven E. Hug, and Hans-Dieter Daniel, 23–29. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

van Leeuwen, Thed. 2013. “Bibliometric Research Evaluations, Web of Science and the Social Sciences and Humanities: A Problematic Relationship?” Bibliometrie: Praxis und Forschung 2(8): Article 173.

White, Howard D., Sebastian K. Boell, Hairong Yu, Mari Davis, Concepción S. Wilson, Fletcher T. H. Cole. 2009. “Libcitations: A Measure for Comparative Assessment of Book Publications in the Humanities and Social Sciences.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 60(6): 1083–1096.

Worton, Michael, Bruce Brown, John Caughie, Roger Kain, Halvor Moxnes, Morag Shiach, Paul Slack, Liz Slater. 2006. Use of Research Metrics in the Arts and Humanities: Report of the Expert Group Set Up Jointly by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Higher Education Funding Council for England. Bristol: Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Zuccala, Alesia, Thed N. van Leeuwen. 2011. “Book Reviews in Humanities Research Evaluations.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 62(10): 1979–1991.

[←4]

For an indication of the sorts of values institutions indicate as important to them, see Appendix E.

[←5]

Cooper, Brittney. 2018. Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

[←6]

As Rebecca Givan (2020) observes, the shift of many universities to so-called responsibility-centered management (RCM) budgets only exacerbates the situation, as “even deans and program chairs with the most high-minded values are forced to choose between wretched options. The values baked into the [RCM] system all but require increased use of precarious, contingent faculty members; when an adjunct professor teaches a large, popular class, the program has a little more breathing room to fund faculty research or admit one more doctoral student.” Instead, she argues, “We need an approach to administration that first embraces the highest mission of the university, and then determines financial priorities based on the fulfillment of that mission…. Will [university leaders] move forward with integrity and moral courage, aspiring to the best of higher education?”

Givan, Rebecca Kolins. 2020. “Will the University That Survives Have Been Worth Saving?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 3 June.

Of particular concern among those of us looking to make substantive and transformative change in the academy should be addressing the additional challenges found in an increasingly contingent academy. Contingent faculty, for example, are often not included in departmental or university governance, and the precarity of their employment means they often do not feel empowered to challenge or change the system.

For data on the trend toward adjunctification, see:

American Association of University Professors. 2018a. “Data Snapshot: Contingent Faculty in US Higher Ed.” American Association of University Professors (website), 11 October.

The Chronicle of Higher Education. 2020. “Tenure Status of Full-Time and Part-Time Faculty Members, Fall 2018.” The Almanac, 2020–2021, 16 August.

The Chronicle of Higher Education. 2021. “The Future of Tenure: Rethinking a Beleaguered Institution.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 7 April.

National Center for Education Statistics. 2011. “Table 278. Percentage of Full-Time Instructional Faculty with Tenure for Degree-Granting Institutions with a Tenure System, by Academic Rank, Sex, and Control and Level of Institution: Selected Years, 1993–94 through 2009–10.” Digest of Educational Statistics, February.

For examples of the myriad issues this trend toward adjunctification raises, see:

Belmonte, Courtney Jane Obis. 2020. Adjunct Faculty Job Satisfaction: Intangible and Financial Factors Affecting the Academic Majority. Ph.D. thesis, Old Dominion University.

Bland, Carole J., Bruce A. Center, Deborah A. Finstad, Kelly R. Risbey, Justin Staples. 2006. “The Impact of Appointment Type on the Productivity and Commitment of Full-Time Faculty in Research and Doctoral Institutions.” The Journal of Higher Education 77(1): 89–123.

Chen, Kelly, Zeynep Hansen, Scott Lowe. 2021. “Why Do We Inflate Grades? The Effect of Adjunct Faculty Employment on Instructor Grading Standards.” Journal of Human Resources 56(3); 878–921.

Donoghue, Frank. 2018. The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, 10th anniversary edition. New York: Fordham University Press.

Dowland, Douglas, Annemarie Pérez. 2018. “How to Be a Generous Professor in Precarious Times.” Chronicle Community (blog), 24 September.

Eagan, M. Kevin, Audrey J. Jaeger, Ashley Grantham. 2015. “Supporting the Academic Majority: Policies and Practices Related to Part-Time Faculty's Job Satisfaction.” The Journal of Higher Education 86(3): 448–483.

Feldman, Daniel C., William H. Turnley. 2004. “Contingent Employment in Academic Careers: Relative Deprivation Among Adjunct Faculty.” Journal of Vocational Behavior 64(2): 284–307.

Flaherty, Colleen. 2016. “More Faculty Diversity, Not on Tenure Track.” Inside Higher Ed (blog), 22 August.

Hoyt, Jeff E., Scott L. Howell, Lee J. Glines, Cary Johnson, Jonathan S. Spackman, Carrie Thompson, Chandler Rudd. 2008. “Assessing Part-Time Faculty Job Satisfaction in Continuing Higher Education: Implications for the Profession.” Journal of Continuing Higher Education 56(1): 27–38.

Kraemer, Jordan. 2018. “The Invisible Labor of the Academic Job Market.” Field Sights (blog), 12 February.

Lancaster, Alexander K., Anne E. Thessen, Arika Virapongse. 2018. “A New Paradigm for the Scientific Enterprise: Nurturing the Ecosystem.” F1000Research 7: Article 803.

Mann, Douglas, Heidi Nelson Hochenedel. 2006. “A Manifesto of the Twenty-First-Century Academic Proletariat in North America.” In Academic Ethics, edited by Robin Barrow and Patrick Keeney, 292–304. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Moorehead, Daniel L., Terry J. Russell, Judith J. Pula. 2015. “‘Invisible Faculty’: Department Chairs' Perceptions of Part-Time Faculty Status in Maryland Four-Year Public and Private Higher Education Institutions.” Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin 81(4): 102–119.

Nelson, Gesemia, Melissa J. Monson, Karam Adibifar, Luís Tinoca. 2020. “The Gig Economy Comes to Academia: Job Satisfaction Among Adjunct Faculty.” Cogent Education 7(1): Article 1786338.

Ott, Molly, Jesus Cisneros. 2015. “Understanding the Changing Faculty Workforce in Higher Education: A Comparison of Non-Tenure Track and Tenure Line Experiences.” Education Policy Analysis Archives 23: Article 90.

Parker, Nick. 2011. “The Adjunct Economy.” Boston Globe, 17 April.

Plants, Jen. 2021. “Congratulations! You’re a Replicant! (and Other Great News from the Non-Tenure Track).” Medium (blog), 12 February.

Platzer, David, Anne Allison. 2018. “Academic Precarity in American Anthropology.” Field Sights (blog), 18 February.

Ramsey, Joseph A. 2019. “The Invisible Faculty.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2 January.

Reichman, Hank. 2016. “Adjuncts Are Scholars Too.” Academe (blog), 26 October.

Rhoades, Gary. 2020. “Taking College Teachers' Working Conditions Seriously: Adjunct Faculty and Negotiating a Labor-Based Conception of Quality.” Journal of Higher Education 91(3): 327–352.

Santos, Wilson. 2016. “Contingent Diversity, Contingent Faculty; or, Musings of a Lowly Adjunct.” In Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure, edited by Patricia A. Matthew, 178–198. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Wallis, Todd. 2018. “The Rise of Adjunct Faculty: A Brief History.” Inside Scholar, 11 April.

Wolfinger, Nicholas H., Mary Ann Mason, Marc Goulden. 2009. “Stay in the Game: Gender, Family Formation and Alternative Trajectories in the Academic Life Course.” Social Forces 87(3): 1591–1621.

[←7]

Sylvia Hurtado and Jessica Sharkness capture the problem succinctly: “To gain the freedom to innovate, we must get tenure; yet to get tenure, we must be conformists” (37).

Hurtado, Sylvia, Jessica Sharkness. 2008. “Scholarship Is Changing, and so Must Tenure Review.” Academe 94(5): 37–39.

[←8]

Niles, Meredith T., Lesley A. Schimanski, Erin C. McKiernan, Juan Pablo Alperin. 2020. “Why We Publish Where We Do: Faculty Publishing Values and Their Relationship to Review, Promotion and Tenure Expectations.” PLOS ONE 15(3): e0228914.

See also:

Rabinowitz, Paula. 2021. “The Associate-Professor Trap.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 27 January.

[←9]

In Gérard Roland's (2004) analysis, institutions can either change slowly and continuously (what he calls "slow-moving") or rapidly and irregularly ("fast-moving"). (For Roland, “institutions” are defined as "any form of constraint that human beings devise to shape human interaction," rather than how we use the term in this white paper, to mean colleges and universities.) "What is often called 'culture,' including values, beliefs, and social norms," Roland notes, "can be classified as a slow-moving institution. The evolution of culture is closely related to the evolution of technology and scientific knowledge, which obviously plays an important role in understanding growth. Like culture, technology evolves slowly and continuously, although the pace may vary" (110). Colleges and universities likewise evolve slowly.

Roland, Gérard. 2004. "Understanding Institutional Change: Fast-Moving and Slow-Moving Institutions." Studies in Comparative International Development 38(4): 109–131.

[←10]

Perhaps unsurprisingly among a professoriate that has been socioeconomically, educationally, and demographically homogeneous and self-perpetuating for centuries, not everyone feels that the current system is broken or in need of change. Robert M. Diamond noted in his 2005 essay “Scholarship Reconsidered: Barriers to Change” that “many faculty members in key leadership roles … [are] reluctant to change reward structures or definitions of scholarly work that [have] worked so well for them” (57), and that sentiment has not — for some, anyway — shifted much over time. Job satisfaction surveys, while rarely uniformly rosy, often note that many faculty experience their profession as welcoming and their careers as satisfying. Several of our interviewees likewise expressed admiration for a system in which they have thrived and admitted their desire to maintain the status quo. One observed:

“Tradition is what holds the entire educational enterprise together.”

      Diamond, Robert M. 2005. “Scholarship Reconsidered: Barriers to Change.” In Faculty Priorities Reconsidered: Rewarding Multiple Forms of Scholarship, edited by KerryAnn O’Meara and R. Eugene Rice, 56–59. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

On the demographics of the academic enterprise, see:

Burke, Lilah. 2021. “Faculty with Disabilities Say Academe Can Present Barriers.” Inside Higher Ed (blog), 12 May.

Catalyst Staff. 2020. “Women in Academia (Quick Take).” Catalyst (blog), 23 January.

Griffin, Kimberly A. 2019. “Institutional Barriers, Strategies, and Benefits to Increasing the Representation of Women and Men of Color in the Professoriate Looking — Beyond the Pipeline.” In Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, Volume 35, edited by Laura W. Perna, 1–73. Cham: Springer International.

Ho, Daniel E., Oluchi Mbonu, Anne McDonough. 2021. “Mandatory Retirement and Age, Race, and Gender Diversity of University Faculties.” American Law and Economics Review 23(1): 100–136.

Kim, Grace MyHyun, North Cooc. 2021. “Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Academe: Race and Gender through the Tenure Pipeline from 1993-2017.” Race Ethnicity and Education 24(3): 338–356.

Li, Diyi, Cory Koedel. 2017. “Representation and Salary Gaps by Race-Ethnicity and Gender at Selective Public Universities.” Educational Researcher 46(7): 343–354.

Morgan, Allison, Aaron Clauset, Daniel B. Larremore, Nicholas LaBerge, Mirta Galesic. 2021. “Socioeconomic Roots of Academic Faculty.” SocArXiv, 22 March.

National Center for Education Statistics. 2021. “Table 315.20. Full-time Faculty in Degree-Granting Postsecondary Institutions, by Race/Ethnicity, Sex, and Academic Rank: Fall 2017, Fall 2018, and Fall 2019.” Digest of Education Statistics (website), February.

Shilliam, Robbie. 2014. “Black Academia in Britain.” The Disorder of Things (blog), 28 July.

Stolzenberg, Ellen Bara, Kevin Eagan, Hilary B. Zimmerman, Jennifer Berdan Lozano, Natacha M. Cesar-Davis, Melissa C. Aragon, Cecilia Rios-Aguilar. 2018. Undergraduate Teaching Faculty: The HERI Faculty Survey, 2016–2017. Los Angeles: Higher Education Research Institute.

Taylor, Simone, Susan Spilka, Kristen Monahan, Isabel Mulhern, Jeri Wachter. 2020. “Evaluating Equity in Scholarly Publishing.” Learned Publishing 33(4): 353–367.

Turner, Caroline Sotello Viernes, Juan Carlos González, J. Luke Wood. 2008. “Faculty of Color in Academe: What 20 Years of Literature Tells Us.” Journal of Diversity in Higher Education 1(3): 139–168.

On academic job satisfaction, see:

Ambrose, Susan, Therese Huston, Marie Norman. 2005. “A Qualitative Method for Assessing Faculty Satisfaction.” Research in Higher Education 46(7): 803–830.

August, Louise, Jean Waltman. 2004. “Culture, Climate, and Contribution: Career Satisfaction among Female Faculty.” Research in Higher Education 45(2): 177–192.

Bäker, Agnes, Amanda H. Goodall. 2020. “Feline Followers and ‘Umbrella Carriers’: Department Chairs’ Influence on Faculty Job Satisfaction and Quit Intentions.” Research Policy 49(4): Article 103955.

Barkhuizen, Nicolene, Sebastiaan Rothmann, Fons J. R. van de Vijver. 2013. “Burnout and Work Engagement of Academics in Higher Education Institutions: Effects of Dispositional Optimism.” Stress and Health 30(4): 322–332.

Belmonte (2020), ibid.

Bentley, Peter James, Hamish Coates, Ian R. Dobson, Leo Goedegebuure, V. Lynn Meek. 2012. “Academic Job Satisfaction from an International Comparative Perspective: Factors Associated with Satisfaction across 12 Countries.” In Job Satisfaction around the Academic World, edited by Peter James Bentley, Hamish Coates, Ian R. Dobson, Leo Goedegebuure, and V. Lynn Meek, 239–262. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

Bozeman, Barry, Monica Gaughan. 2011. “Job Satisfaction among University Faculty: Individual, Work, and Institutional Determinants.” The Journal of Higher Education 82(2): 154–186.

Bruce, Duane. 2011. Intent to Leave the Professoriate: The Relationship Between Race/Ethnicity and Job Satisfaction for Pre-Tenured Professors in Doctorate-Granting Universities. Ed.D. thesis, University of Kansas.

Conway, Katharine Griffin. 2012. Faculty Flourishing: Toward Improved Conceptions of Pre-Tenure Professors' Career Construction in the American Research University. Ed.D. thesis, Teachers College, Columbia University.

Daly, Cheryl J., Jay R. Dee. 2006. “Greener Pastures: Faculty Turnover Intent in Urban Public Universities.” The Journal of Higher Education 77(5): 776–803.

Damasco, Ione T., Dracine Hodges. 2012. “Tenure and Promotion Experiences of Academic Librarians of Color.” College and Research Libraries 73(3): 279–301.

Del Priore, Andrea. 2020. Supports Used by Black Women Faculty for Career Advancement at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Ph.D. thesis, Seton Hall University.

Durodoye, Raifu, Marcia Gumpertz, Alyson Wilson, Emily Griffith, Seher Ahmad. 2019. “Tenure and Promotion Outcomes at Four Large Land Grant Universities: Examining the Role of Gender, Race, and Academic Discipline.” Research in Higher Education 61(5): 628–651.

Hagedorn, Linda Serra. 2002. “Conceptualizing Faculty Job Satisfaction: Components, Theories, and Outcomes.” New Directions for Institutional Research 105: 5–20.

Hesli, Vicki L., Jae Mook Lee. 2013. “Job Satisfaction in Academia: Why Are Some Faculty Members Happier Than Others?” PS: Political Science and Politics 46(2): 339–354.

Holmes, Frances Kay. 2013. Native American Perspectives on Educational Experiences from within the Not So Ivory Tower. Ph.D. thesis, University of California at Davis.

Jackson, J. Kasi, Melissa Latimer, Rachel Stoiko. 2017. “The Dynamic between Knowledge Production and Faculty Evaluation: Perceptions of the Promotion and Tenure Process across Disciplines.” Innovative Higher Education 42(3): 193–205.

Jayakumar, Uma M., Tyrone C. Howard, Walter R. Allen, June C. Han. 2009. “Racial Privilege in the Professoriate: An Exploration of Campus Climate, Retention, and Satisfaction.” The Journal of Higher Education 80(5): 538–563.

Johnsrud, Linda K., Vicki J. Rosser. 1999. “College and University Midlevel Administrators: Explaining and Improving Their Morale.” The Review of Higher Education 22(2): 121–141.

Laden, Berta Vigil, Linda Serra Hagedorn. 2000. “Job Satisfaction Among Faculty of Color in Academe: Individual Survivors or Institutional Transformers?” New Directions for Institutional Research 105: 57–66.

Larson, Lisa M., Matthew T. Seipel, Mack C. Shelley, Sandra W. Gahn, Stacy Y. Ko, Mary Schenkenfelder, Diane T. Rover, Beate Schmittmann, Megan M. Heitmann. 2017. “The Academic Environment and Faculty Well-Being: The Role of Psychological Needs.” Journal of Career Assessment 27(1): 167–182.

Lim, Joo Ning. 2021. Racial Representation for Faculty in Higher Education. Honors thesis, Western Michigan University.

Maranto, Cheryl L., Andrea E. C. Griffin. 2010. “The Antecedents of a ‘Chilly Climate’ for Women Faculty in Higher Education.” Human Relations 64(2): 139–159.

Marston, Susan H., Gerald J. Brunetti. 2009. “Job Satisfaction of Experienced Professors at a Liberal Arts College.” Education 130(2): 323–347.

McCoy, Shannon K., Ellen E. Newell, Susan K. Gardner. 2012. “Seeking Balance: The Importance of Environmental Conditions in Men and Women Faculty’s Well-Being.” Innovative Higher Education 38(4): 309–322.

Miller, Rebecca K. 2013. “Helping New Librarians Find Success and Satisfaction in the Academic Library.” In Workplace Culture in Academic Libraries: The Early 21st Century, edited by Kelly Blessinger and Paul Hrycaj, 81–95. Oxford: Chandos Publishing.

O’Meara, KerryAnn. 2006. “Encouraging Multiple Forms of Scholarship in Faculty Reward Systems: Influence on Faculty Work-Life.” Planning for Higher Education 34(2): 43–53.

Ott and Cisneros (2015), ibid.

Rosser, Vicki J. 2004. “Faculty Members' Intentions to Leave: A National Study on Their Worklife and Satisfaction.” Research in Higher Education 45(3): 285–309.

Sabagh, Zaynab. 2019. An Examination of Faculty Well-Being in Canadian Research Universities. Ph.D. thesis, McGill University.

Sabharwal, Meghna, Elizabeth A. Corley. 2009. “Faculty Job Satisfaction Across Gender and Discipline.” The Social Science Journal 46(3): 539–556.

Sadao, Kathleen C. 2003. “Living in Two Worlds: Success and the Bicultural Faculty of Color.” The Review of Higher Education 26(4): 397–418.

Seifert, Tricia A., Paul D. Umbach. 2008. “The Effects of Faculty Demographic Characteristics and Disciplinary Context on Dimensions of Job Satisfaction.” Research in Higher Education 49(4): 357–381.

Settles, Isis H., Martinque K. Jones, NiCole T. Buchanan, Sheila T. Brassel. 2022. “Epistemic Exclusion of Women Faculty and Faculty of Color: Understanding Scholar(ly) Devaluation as a Predictor of Turnover Intentions.” The Journal of Higher Education 93(1): 31–55.

Tugend, Alina. 2020. "On the Verge of Burnout": Covid-19’s Impact on Faculty Well-Being and Career Plans. Washington, D.C.: The Chronicle of Higher Education.

van Anders, Sari M. 2004. “Why the Academic Pipeline Leaks: Fewer Men than Women Perceive Barriers to Becoming Professors.” Sex Roles 51(9–10): 511–521.

Victorino, Christine, Karen Nylund-Gibson, Sharon Conley. 2018. “Prosocial Behavior in the Professoriate: A Multi-Level Analysis of Pretenured Faculty Collegiality and Job Satisfaction.” The International Journal of Educational Management 32(5): 783–798.

Webber, Karen L., Samantha M. Rogers. 2018. “Gender Differences in Faculty Member Job Satisfaction: Equity Forestalled?” Research in Higher Education 59(8): 1105–1132.

Most of our interviewees, however, expressed concerns about the status quo. Their critiques — of a system that seems above all to value elitism, prestige, gatekeeping, and traditional modes of scholarly communication that favor certain scholars over others — are strongly reflected as well in the literature:

Alcoff, Linda Martín. 2012. “Alien and Alienated.” In Reframing the Practice of Philosophy: Bodies of Color, Bodies of Knowledge, edited by George Yancy, 23-43. Albany: SUNY Press.

Alperin, Juan Pablo, Carol Muñoz Nieves, Lesley A. Schimanski, Gustavo E. Fischman, Meredith T. Niles, Erin C. McKiernan. 2019. “How Significant Are the Public Dimensions of Faculty Work in Review, Promotion and Tenure Documents?” eLife 8: e42254.

Alperin, Juan Pablo, Lesley A. Schimanski, Michelle La, Meredith T. Niles, Erin C. McKiernan. 2021. “The Value of Data and Other Non-Traditional Scholarly Outputs in Academic Review, Promotion, and Tenure in Canada and the United States.” In Open Handbook of Linguistic Data Management, edited by Andrea Berez-Kroeker, Bradley McDonnell, Eve Koller, Lauren B. Collister, [n.p.]. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Baffoe, Michael, Lewis Asimeng-Boahene, Buster Buster. 2014. “Their Way or No Way: ‘Whiteness’ as Agent for Marginalizing and Silencing Minority Voices in Academic Research and Publication.” European Journal of Sustainable Development 3(1): 13–32.

Boyer, Ernest L. 1990. Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. Princeton: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Burris, Val. 2004. “The Academic Caste System: Prestige Hierarchies in PhD Exchange Networks.” American Sociological Review 69(2): 239–264.

Ceja Alcalá, Janet, Mónica Colón-Aguirre, Nicole A. Cooke, Brenton Stewart. 2017. “A Critical Dialogue: Faculty of Color in Library and Information Science.” InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies 13(2): [n.p.].

Cronin, Blaise. 2003. “Keynote Address: Scholarly Communication and Epistemic Cultures.” Scholarly Tribes and Tribulations: How Tradition and Technology Are Driving Disciplinary Change. Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries.

Dever, Carolyn, George Justice. 2021. “How to Avoid the Associate-Professor Trap.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 3 February.

Edwards, Willie J., Henry H. Ross. 2018. “What Are They Saying?: Black Faculty at Predominantly White Institutions of Higher Education.” Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment 28(2): 142–161.

Fry, Tony. 2012. “V prihodnost usmerjena univerza / Futuring the University.” Sodobna Pedagogika 63(3): 40–66.

Fyfe, Aileen, Kelly Coate, Stephen Curry, Stuart Lawson, Noah Moxham, Camilla Mørk Røstvik. 2017. Untangling Academic Publishing: A History of the Relationship between Commercial Interests, Academic Prestige and the Circulation of Research. St Andrews: University of St Andrews.

Gracia, Jorge J. E. 2012. “Philosophical Canons and Philosophical Traditions: The Case of Latin American Philosophy.” In Reframing the Practice of Philosophy: Bodies of Color, Bodies of Knowledge, edited by George Yancy, 87–101. Albany: SUNY Press.

Hammarfelt, Björn, Sarah de Rijcke. 2015. “Accountability in Context: Effects of Research Evaluation Systems on Publication Practices, Disciplinary Norms, and Individual Working Routines in the Faculty of Arts at Uppsala University.” Research Evaluation 24(1): 63–77.

Harley, Diane, Sophia Krzys Acord, Sarah Earl-Novell, Shannon Lawrence, C. Judson King. 2010. Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Herlihy-Mera, Jeffrey. 2015. “Academic Imperialism; Or, Replacing Nonrepresentative Elites: Democratizing English Departments at Top-Ranked US Institutions.” The Minnesota Review 85: 80–106.

Hitchcock, Tim. 2018. “Twenty-Five Years of the REF and Me.” Historyonics (blog), 3 April.

Jacobs, Jerry A., Sarah E. Winslow. 2004. “The Academic Life Course, Time Pressures and Gender Inequality.” Community, Work, and Family 7(2): 143–161.

Jenkins, Fiona. 2013. “Singing the Post-Discrimination Blues: Notes for a Critique of Academic Meritocracy.” In Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change?, edited by Katrina Hutchison and Fiona Jenkins, 81–102. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jordan, Cheryl, Karen A. Geiger. 2014. “The Role of Societal Privilege in the Definitions and Practices of Inclusion.” Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal 33(3): 261–274.

Joy, Eileen A. 2020. “Not Self-Indulgence, but Self-Preservation: Open Access and the Ethics of Care.” In Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access, edited by Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray, 317–329. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Kandiko Howson, Camille B. 2018. “Gender and Advancement in Higher Education’s Prestige Economy.” Impact of Social Sciences (blog), 22 May.

Klein, Julie Thompson, Holly J. Falk-Krzesinski. 2017. “Interdisciplinary and Collaborative Work: Framing Promotion and Tenure Practices and Policies.” Research Policy 46(6): 1055–1061.

Lancaster, Alex. 2016. “Given Frustrations with Academic Structures, How Can We Build a More Human-Centered Open Science?” Impact of Social Sciences (blog), 26 July.

Lawrence, Janet H., Sergio Celis, Molly Ott. 2014. “Is the Tenure Process Fair?: What Faculty Think.” The Journal of Higher Education 85(2): 155–192.

Lewis, Lionel S. 1997. Scaling the Ivory Tower: Merit and Its Limits in Academic Careers. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

Mihesuah, Devon Abbott. 2004. “Academic Gatekeepers.” In Indigenizing the Academy: Transforming Scholarship and Empowering Communities, edited by Devon Abbott Mihesuah and Angela Cavender Wilson, 31–47. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Moher, David, Florian Naudet, Ioana A. Cristea, Frank Miedema, John P. A. Ioannidis, Steven N. Goodman. 2018. “Assessing Scientists for Hiring, Promotion, and Tenure.” PLOS Biology 16(3): e2004089.

Monroe, Kristen, Saba Ozyurt, Ted Wrigley, Amy Alexander. 2008. “Gender Equality in Academia: Bad News from the Trenches, and Some Possible Solutions.” Perspectives on Politics 6(2): 215–233.

Morales, Esteban, Erin McKiernan, Meredith T. Niles, Lesley Schimanski, Juan Pablo Alperin. 2021. “How Faculty Define Quality, Prestige, and Impact in Research.” PLOS ONE 16(10): e0257340.

Ndofirepi, Amasa. 2017. “African Universities on a Global Ranking Scale: Legitimation of Knowledge Hierarchies?” South African Journal of Higher Education 31(1): 155–174.

Neylon, Cameron. 2020. “Research Excellence Is a Neo-Colonial Agenda (and What Might Be Done about It).” In Transforming Research Excellence: New Ideas from the Global South, edited by Erika Kraemer-Mbula, Robert J. W. Tijssen, Matthew L. Wallace, and Robert McLean, 92–115. Cape Town: African Minds.

Nixon, Jon. 2020. “Disorderly Identities: University Rankings and the Re-ordering of the Academic Mind.” In World Class Universities: A Contested Concept, edited by Sharon Rider, Michael A. Peters, Mats Hyvönen, and Tina Besley, 11–24. Singapore: Springer.

Ochsner, Michael, Sven E. Hug, Hans-Dieter Daniel. 2013. “Four Types of Research in the Humanities: Setting the Stage for Research Quality Criteria in the Humanities.” Research Evaluation 22(2): 79–92.

Rice, Danielle B., Hana Raffoul, John P. A. Ioannidis, David Moher. 2021. “Academic Criteria for Promotion and Tenure in Faculties of Medicine: A Cross-Sectional Study of the Canadian U15 Universities.” Facets 6(1): 58–70.

Schimanski, Lesley A., Juan Pablo Alperin. 2018. “The Evaluation of Scholarship in Academic Promotion and Tenure Processes: Past, Present, and Future.” F1000Research 7: Article 1605.

Schliesser, Eric. 2015. “Why the Canon Fight Is Different in Analytical Philosophy: On Heroworship.” Digressions and Impressions (blog), 21 April.

Seltzer, Beth. 2018. “Evaluating Digital Humanities Beyond the Tenure Track, Part 2: For Employers.” InfoTech (blog), 29 March.

Settles, Isis H., NiCole T. Buchanan, Kristie Dotson. 2018. “Scrutinized but Not Recognized: (In)Visibility and Hypervisibility Experiences of Faculty of Color.” Journal of Vocational Behavior 113: 62–74.

Smith, Paula M. 2013. “Beyond Diversity: Moving Towards Inclusive Work Environments.” In Workplace Culture in Academic Libraries: The Early 21st Century, edited by Kelly Blessinger and Paul Hrycaj, 99–110. Oxford: Chandos Publishing.

University Wankings. 2021. “Why Are Our Rankings So White?” In Socially Responsible Higher Education: International Perspectives on Knowledge Democracy, edited by Budd L. Hall and Rajesh Tandon, 67–79. Leiden: Brill.

Wellmon, Chad, Andrew Piper. 2017. “Publication, Power, and Patronage: On Inequality and Academic Publishing.” Critical Inquiry (blog), 21 July.

Winslow, Sarah E. 2010. “Gender Inequality and Time Allocations among Academic Faculty.” Gender and Society 24(6): 769–793.

Wolff-Eisenberg, Christine, Danielle Cooper. 2017. “Writing for Wider Audiences: Structural Challenges for Scholars.” Inside Higher Ed (blog), 11 July.

Zimmerman, Carla A., Adrienne R. Carter-Sowell, Xiaohong Xu. 2016. “Examining Workplace Ostracism Experiences in Academia: Understanding How Differences in the Faculty Ranks Influence Inclusive Climates on Campus.” Frontiers in Psychology 7: Article 753.

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For more on competition as a hallmark of neoliberalism, particularly within higher education, and the systemic concerns that raises, see:

Adsit, Janelle, Sue Doe, Marisa Allison, Paula Maggio, Maria Maisto. 2015. “Affective Activism: Answering Institutional Productions of Precarity in the Corporate University.” Feminist Formations 27(3): 21–48.

Balietti, Stefano, Robert L. Goldstone, Dirk Helbing. 2016. “Peer Review and Competition in the Art Exhibition Game.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(30): 8414–8419.

Berg, Lawrence D., Edward H. Huijbens, Henrik Gutzon Larsen. 2016. “Producing Anxiety in the Neoliberal University.” The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien 60(2): 168–180.

Burrows, Roger. 2012. “Living with the h‐Index? Metric Assemblages in the Contemporary Academy.” The Sociological Review 60(2): 355–372.

Chubb, Jennifer, Richard Watermeyer. 2017. “Artifice or Integrity in the Marketization of Research Impact?: Investigating the Moral Economy of (Pathways to) Impact Statements within Research Funding Proposals in the UK and Australia.” Studies in Higher Education 42(12): 2360–2372.

Cruickshank, Justin. 2016. “Putting Business at the Heart of Higher Education: On Neoliberal Interventionism and Audit Culture in UK Universities.” Open Library of Humanities 2(1): e3.

De Angelis, Massimo, David Harvie. 2009. “‘Cognitive Capitalism’ and the Rat-Race: How Capital Measures Immaterial Labour in British Universities.” Historical Materialism 17(3): 3–30.

DeTurk, Sara, Felecia M. Briscoe. 2019. “Equity versus Excellence: Is the Pursuit of ‘Tier-1’ Status Compatible with Social Justice?” Journal of Hispanic Higher Education 20(1): 112–128.

de Wit, Hans, Tony Adams. “Global Competition in Higher Education: A Comparative Study of Policies, Rationales, and Practices in Australia and Europe.” In Higher Education, Policy, and the Global Competition Phenomenon, edited by Laura M. Portnoi, Val D. Rust, and Sylvia S. Bagley, 219–233. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Donoghue (2018), ibid.

Edwards, Marc A., Siddhartha Roy. 2017. “Academic Research in the 21st Century: Maintaining Scientific Integrity in a Climate of Perverse Incentives and Hypercompetition.” Environmental Engineering Science 34(1): 51–61.

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. 2019. Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Gadd, Elizabeth. 2021a. “Love DORA, Hate Rankings?” Impact of Social Sciences (blog), 10 May.

Gadd, Elizabeth. 2021b. “Mis-Measuring Our Universities: Why Global University Rankings Don’t Add Up.” Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics 6: Article 57.

Gadd, Elizabeth. 2022. “A Narrative CV for Universities?” Impact of Social Sciences (blog), 31 January.

Gannon, Susanne, Sarah Powell, Clare Power. 2018. “On the Thresholds of Legitimacy: A Collaborative Exploration of Being and Becoming Academic.” In Feeling Academic in the Neoliberal University: Feminist Flights, Fights and Failures, edited by Yvette Taylor and Kinneret Lahad, 261–280. Cham: Springer International.

Gill, Rosalind. “Beyond Individualism: The Psychosocial Life of the Neoliberal University.” In Dissident Knowledge in Higher Education, edited by Marc Spooner and James McNinch, 193–216. Regina: University of Regina Press.

Giroux, Henry A., Susan Searls Giroux. 2008. “Challenging Neoliberalism's New World Order: The Promise of Critical Pedagogy.” In Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies, edited by Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, 181–190. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.

Hammarfelt, Björn, Sarah de Rijcke, Alexander D. Rushforth. 2016. “Quantified Academic Selves: The Gamification of Research through Social Networking Services.” Information Research 21(2): SM1.

Harris, Suzy. 2005. “Rethinking Academic Identities in Neo-Liberal Times.” Teaching in Higher Education 10(4): 421–433.

Hoofd, Ingrid M. 2010. “The Accelerated University: Activist–Academic Alliances and the Simulation of Thought.” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 10(1): 7–24.

Itzkowitz, Michael. 2022. Out with the Old, in with the New: Rating Higher Ed by Economic Mobility. Washington, DC: Third Way, 27 January.

Lincoln, Yvonna S. 2018. “A Dangerous Accountability: Neoliberalism’s Veer toward Accountancy in Higher Education.” In Dissident Knowledge in Higher Education, edited by Marc Spooner and James McNinch, 3–20. Regina: University of Regina Press.

Littler, Jo. 2013. “Meritocracy as Plutocracy: The Marketising of ‘Equality’ under Neoliberalism.” new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics 80: 52–72.

Locke, William. 2013. “The Intensification of Rankings Logic in an Increasingly Marketised Higher Education Environment.” European Journal of Education 49(1): 77–90.

Luka, Mary Elizabeth, Alison Harvey, Mél Hogan, Tamara Shepherd, Andrea Zeffiro. 2015. “Scholarship as Cultural Production in the Neoliberal University: Working within and against ‘Deliverables.’” Studies in Social Justice 9(2): 176–196.

Marginson, Simon. 2010. “Global Comparisons and the University Knowledge Economy.” In Higher Education, Policy, and the Global Competition Phenomenon, edited by Laura M. Portnoi, Val D. Rust, and Sylvia S. Bagley, 29–41. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Monbiot, George. 2016. “Neoliberalism: The Ideology at the Root of All Our Problems.” The Guardian, 15 April.

Mountz, Alison, Anne Bonds, Becky Mansfield, Jenna Loyd, Jennifer Hyndman, Margaret Walton-Roberts, Ranu Basu, Risa Whitson, Roberta Hawkins, Trina Hamilton, Winifred Curran. 2015. “For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 14(4): 1235–1259.

Münch, Richard. 2014. Academic Capitalism: Universities in the Global Struggle for Excellence. New York: Routledge.

Musselin, Christine. 2018. “New Forms of Competition in Higher Education.” Socio-Economic Review 16(3): 657–683.

Nedeva, Maria, Rebecca Boden, Yanuar Nugroho. 2012. “Rank and File: Managing Individual Performance in University Research.” Higher Education Policy 25(3): 335–360.

Olssen, Mark, Michael A. Peters. 2005. “Neoliberalism, Higher Education and the Knowledge Economy: From the Free Market to Knowledge Capitalism.” Journal of Education Policy 20(3): 313–345.

Peters, Michael A., Tina Besley. 2020. “Contesting the Neoliberal Discourse of the World Class University: ‘Digital Socialism,’ Openness and Academic Publishing.” In World Class Universities: A Contested Concept, edited by Sharon Rider, Michael A. Peters, Mats Hyvönen, and Tina Besley, 235–250. Singapore: Springer.

Redden, Guy. 2008. “From RAE to ERA: Research Evaluation at Work in the Corporate University.” Australian Humanities Review 45: 7–26.

Reed, Matt. 2022. “Rankings and Purposes.” Inside Higher Ed (blog), 31 January.

Shore, Cris, Susan Wright. 2015. “Audit Culture Revisited: Rankings, Ratings, and the Reassembling of Society.” Current Anthropology 56(3): 421–444.

Shore, Cris, Susan Wright. 2020. “The Kafkaesque Pursuit of ‘World Class’: Audit Culture and the Reputational Arms Race in Academia.” In World Class Universities: A Contested Concept, edited by Sharon Rider, Michael A. Peters, Mats Hyvönen, and Tina Besley, 59–76. Singapore: Springer.

Thornton, Margaret. 2009. “Academic Un-Freedom in the New Knowledge Economy.” In Academic Research and Researchers, edited by Angela Brew and Lisa Lucas, 19–34. London: Open University Press.

Verran, Helen. 2012. “The Changing Lives of Measures and Values: From Centre Stage in the Fading ‘Disciplinary’ Society to Pervasive Background Instrument in the Emergent ‘Control’ Society.” The Sociological Review 59(S2): 60–72.

Vessuri, Hebe, Jean-Claude Guédon, Ana María Cetto. 2013. “Excellence or Quality?: Impact of the Current Competition Regime on Science and Scientific Publishing in Latin America and Its Implications for Development.” Current Sociology 62(5): 648–665.

Westheimer, Joel. 2018. “Fatal Distraction: Audit Culture and Accountability in the Corporate University.” In Dissident Knowledge in Higher Education, edited by Marc Spooner and James McNinch, 217–234. Regina: University of Regina Press.

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As Cameron Neylon, Friso Selten, and Paul Groth argue, “While the underlying intent of the rankings is to measure similar things, they do not, and what they do measure is very unclear. If they measure anything at all, it appears to be visibility and prestige, something that feeds on itself, and would be predicted to lead to fixation at the top of the rankings. In fact it is worse than that. By giving these rankings importance and meaning, we concentrate our attention merely on doing well at them. The statistical analysis suggests that they are biased, unstable and unreliable, precisely to those institutions that most rely on them to provide an ‘objective’ view of their performance.”

Neylon, Cameron, Friso Selten, Paul Groth. 2019. “Do University Rankings Measure Anything at All?” Wonkhe (blog), 25 September.

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The (often) unquestioned importance of rankings can be seen in this job ad posted on 28 October 2021 for a “University Ranking Strategist,” whose “primary purpose” is to “[provide] leadership, expertise and support to university-wide activities aimed at improving the university’s reputation, profile, and performance across several domestic and international university rankings. [The position] plays an essential role in yielding noticeable improvements in the university’s recognition for excellence, as measured in academic rankings within disciplines and the university, as well as in strengthening the university’s position in relevant international rankings. It is instrumental for building campus-wide awareness, engagement, and culture of rankings.”

See:

Attar, Gabriel. 2021. Ranking Selected R1 University Doctoral Quantitative Methodology Programs. Ph.D. thesis, Wayne State University.

Beatty, John. 2021. Citation Databases for Legal Scholarship: Ranking the Top 28 Law Faculties. Buffalo Legal Studies Research Paper Series No. 2020-018. Buffalo: University of Buffalo School of Law.

Blackmore, Paul. 2015. Prestige in Academic Life: Excellence and Exclusion. London: Routledge.

Blair, Bryan J., Lesley A. Shawler, Emily A. Debacher, Jill M. Harper, Michael F. Dorsey. 2018. “Ranking Graduate Programs Based on Research Productivity of Faculty: A Replication and Extension.” Education and Treatment of Children 41(3): 299–318.

Bowman, Nicholas A., Michael N. Bastedo. 2009. “Getting on the Front Page: Organizational Reputation, Status Signals, and the Impact of U.S. News and World Report on Student Decisions.” Research in Higher Education 50(5): 415–436.

Chevalier, Arnaud, Xiaoxuan Jia. 2015. “Subject-Specific League Tables and Students' Application Decisions.” The Manchester School 84(5): 600–620.

Diep, Francie, Nell Gluckman. 2021. “Colleges Still Obsess over National Ranking. For Proof, Look at Their Strategic Plans.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 13 September.

Guffey, Daryl M., Nancy L. Harp. 2014. “Ranking Faculties, Ph.D. Programs, Individual Scholars, and Influential Articles in Accounting Information Systems Based on Citations to Publications in the Journal of Information Systems.” Journal of Information Systems 28(1): 111–144.

Hazelkorn, Ellen. 2008. “Learning to Live with League Tables and Ranking: The Experience of Institutional Leaders.” Higher Education Policy 21(2): 193–215.

Kehm, Barbara. 2013. “Global University Rankings — Impacts and Unintended Side Effects.” European Journal of Education 49(1): 102–112.

Khaki Sedigh, Ali. 2017. “Ethics: An Indispensable Dimension in the University Rankings.” Science and Engineering Ethics 23(1): 65–80.

Selten, Friso, Cameron Neylon, Chun-Kai Huang, Paul Groth. 2020. “A Longitudinal Analysis of University Rankings.” Quantitative Science Studies 1(3): 1109–1135.

Shore and Wright (2020), ibid.

Volkwein, J. Fredericks, Kyle V. Sweitzer. 2006. “Institutional Prestige and Reputation among Research Universities and Liberal Arts Colleges.” Research in Higher Education 47(2): 129–148.

[←14]

For studies of the widespread adoption by faculty of rankings and ratings, see:

Clauset, Aaron, Samuel Arbesman, Daniel B. Larremore. 2015. “Systematic Inequality and Hierarchy in Faculty Hiring Networks.” Science Advances 1(1): e1400005.

Gonzales, Leslie D., Anne-Marie Núñez. 2014. “Ranking Regimes and the Production of Knowledge in Academia: (Re)shaping Faculty Work?” Education Policy Analysis Archives 22: 1–10.

Hammarfelt and de Rijcke (2015), ibid.

Haustein, Stefanie, Vincent Larivière. 2015. “The Use of Bibliometrics for Assessing Research: Possibilities, Limitations and Adverse Effects.” In Incentives and Performance: Governance of Research Organizations, edited by Isabell M. Welpe, Jutta Wollersheim, Stefanie Ringelhan, and Margit Osterloh, 121–139. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Hazelkorn, Ellen. 2013. “Reflections on a Decade of Global Rankings: What We've Learned and Outstanding Issues.” European Journal of Education 49(1): 12–28.

Headworth, Spencer, Jeremy Freese. 2015. “Credential Privilege or Cumulative Advantage? Prestige, Productivity, and Placement in the Academic Sociology Job Market.” Social Forces 94(3): 1257–1282.

Kawa, Nicholas C., José A. Clavijo Michelangeli, Jessica L. Clark, Daniel Ginsberg, Christopher McCarty. 2018. “The Social Network of US Academic Anthropology and Its Inequalities.” American Anthropologist 121(1): 14–29.

Lee, Eun, Aaron Clauset, Daniel B. Larremore. 2021. “The Dynamics of Faculty Hiring Networks.” EPJ Data Science 10(1): Article 48.

Melguizo, Tatiana, Myra H. Strober. 2007. “Faculty Salaries and the Maximization of Prestige.” Research in Higher Education 48(6): 633–668.

Meredith, Marc. 2004. “Why Do Universities Compete in the Ratings Game?: An Empirical Analysis of the Effects of the U.S. News and World Report College Rankings.” Research in Higher Education 45(5): 443–461.

Nixon (2020), ibid.

Ntshoe, Isaac, Moeketsi Letseka. 2010. “Quality Assurance and Global Competitiveness in Higher Education.” In Higher Education, Policy, and the Global Competition Phenomenon, edited by Laura M. Portnoi, Val D. Rust, and Sylvia S. Bagley, 59–71. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Oprisko, Robert L., Kirstie Lynn Dobbs, Joseph DiGrazia. 2013. “Pushing Up Ivies: Institutional Prestige and the Academic Caste System.” Georgetown Public Policy Review (blog), 21 August.

Sauder, Michael, Wendy Nelson Espeland. 2009. “The Discipline of Rankings: Tight Coupling and Organizational Change.” American Sociological Review 74(1): 63–82.

Sutter, Matthias, Martin Kocher. 2004. “Patterns of Co-Authorship Among Economics Departments in the USA.” Applied Economics 36(4): 327–333.

[←15]

Blackmore (2015), ibid.

Blackmore, Paul, Camille B. Kandiko. 2011. “Motivation in Academic Life: A Prestige Economy.” Research in Post-Compulsory Education 16(4): 399–411.

Brankovic, Jelena. 2021. “The Absurdity of University Rankings.” Impact of Social Sciences (blog), 22 March.

Espeland, Wendy Nelson, Michael Sauder. 2016. Engines of Anxiety: Academic Rankings, Reputation, and Accountability. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Gadd, Elizabeth, Richard Holmes, Justin Shearer. 2021. “A Method for Evaluating Global University Rankings.” SocArXiv (preprint), 9 February.

Gardner, Susan K., Daniela Véliz. 2014. “Evincing the Ratchet: A Thematic Analysis of the Promotion and Tenure Guidelines at a Striving University.” The Review of Higher Education 38(1): 105–132.

Gutkin, Len, Michael Sandel. 2020. “The Insufferable Hubris of the Well-Credentialed.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 30 September.

Hazelkorn, Ellen. 2007. “The Impact of League Tables and Ranking Systems on Higher Education Decision Making.” Higher Education Management and Policy 19(2): 1–24.

Hazelkorn, Ellen. 2014.”University Rankings Wield Immense Influence over Higher Ed and Society at Large — with Positive and Perverse Effects.” Impact of Social Sciences (blog), 11 April.

Kandiko Howson (2018), ibid.

Morphew, Christopher C., Christopher Swanson. 2011. “On the Efficacy of Raising Your University’s Rankings.” In University Rankings: Theoretical Basis, Methodology and Impacts on Global Higher Education, edited by Jung Cheol Shin, Robert K. Toutkoushian, and Ulrich Teichler, 185–199. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

Morrison, Emory, Elizabeth Rudd, Joseph Picciano, Maresi Nerad. 2011. Are You Satisfied? PhD Education and Faculty Taste for Prestige: Limits of the Prestige Value System.” Research in Higher Education 52(1): 24–46.

Mrva-Montoya, Agata. 2021. “Book Publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences in Australia, Part Two: Author Motivation, Audience, and Publishing Knowledge.” Journal of Scholarly Publishing 52(3): 173–189.

Ndofirepi (2017), ibid.

O'Meara, KerryAnn. 2007. “Striving for What?: Exploring the Pursuit of Prestige.” In Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, Volume 22, edited by John C. Smart, 121–179. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

Rosinger, Kelly Ochs, Barrett J. Taylor, Lindsay Coco, Sheila Slaughter. 2016. “Organizational Segmentation and the Prestige Economy: Deprofessionalization in High- and Low-Resource Departments.” The Journal of Higher Education 87(1): 27–54.

[←16]

As KerryAnn O’Meara (2011) points out, “Many scholars have explored the experiences of tenure track faculty as they are socialized into the traditions and norms of their disciplines and fields, departments, colleges and universities, and academic profession more broadly” (179), with most of those studies concluding that women and faculty of color are considerably less satisfied with their institution’s tenure and promotion process than are white men. But, she cautions, “many studies need to be repeated controlling for variables of institutional type, career stage, discipline, and other key intervening variables,” pointing to a study by Cathy Trower and Jared Bleak (2004), for example, that found that “when career stage and institutional type were controlled, fewer differences emerged in the experiences of white faculty and faculty of color” (180).

O’Meara, KerryAnn. 2011. “Inside the Panopticon: Studying Academic Reward Systems.” In Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research: Volume 26, edited by John C. Smart and Michael B. Paulsen, 161–220. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

Trower, Cathy A., Jared L. Bleak. 2004. Study of New Scholars: Race Statistical Report [Universities]. Cambridge: Harvard Graduate School of Education.

See also:

Bentley et al. (2012), ibid.

Bozeman and Gaughan (2011), ibid.

Jackson, Judy. 2004. “The Story Is Not in the Numbers: Academic Socialization and Diversifying the Faculty.” NWSA Journal 16(1): 172–185.

Jackson et al. (2017), ibid.

Lindholm, Jennifer A. 2003. “Perceived Organizational Fit: Nurturing the Minds, Hearts, and Personal Ambitions of University Faculty.” The Review of Higher Education 27(1): 125–149.

O'Meara (2006), ibid.

Véliz, Daniela, Susan K. Gardner. 2019. “Generational Perceptions of Promotion and Tenure Expectations by Faculty in a Striving University: A Quest for Legitimacy?” Higher Education Quarterly 73(3): 359–373.

[←17]

Garofalo, Daniela. 2021. “Tenure by the Book.” In “The Future of Tenure: Rethinking a Beleaguered Institution.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 21 April.

[←18]

It is perhaps notable within this context that in our conversations, very few of our interviewees — even among librarians — mentioned the decades-long crisis in monograph purchasing that has resulted in fewer presses producing fewer books, thereby increasing the competition among scholars who often depend heavily on this format to achieve tenure or be promoted. That tenure criteria have over time become more demanding, often requiring more than one monograph to achieve tenure, has only exacerbated this problem.

For more on the “monograph crisis,” including its latest open-access iterations, see:

Adema, Janneke. 2021. Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumanities. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Adema, Janneke, Graham Stone. 2017. Changing Publishing Ecologies: A Landscape Study of New University Presses and Academic-Led Publishing. Bristol: JISC.

Alexander, Matthew. 2019. “The Decline of the Scholarly Monograph in the Humanities and Social Sciences.” In Perspectives on Scholarly Communication, edited by Christopher Hollister, 5–20. Buffalo: University at Buffalo Department of Information Science.

Carnochan, W. B. “On the Tyranny of Good Intentions: Some Notes on the MLA Task Force Report.” 2008. Profession [2008]: 194–201.

Cronin, Blaise, Kathryn La Barre. 2004. “Mickey Mouse and Milton: Book Publishing in the Humanities.” Learned Publishing 17(2): 85–98.

Crossick, Geoffrey. 2015. Monographs and Open Access. London: Higher Education Funding Council for England.

Dalton, Margaret Stieg. 2008. “The Publishing Experiences of Historians.” Journal of Scholarly Publishing 39(3): 197–240.

Deegan, Marilyn. 2017. “What Does the Future Hold for Academic Books?” Impact of Social Sciences (blog), 4 July.

Ferwerda, Eelco, Frances Pinter, Niels Stern. 2017. A Landscape Study on Open Access and Monographs: Policies, Funding and Publishing in Eight European Countries. Bristol: Knowledge Exchange.

Fyfe et al. (2017), ibid.

Ganz, Scott. “On Inequality and Academic Publishing (and How Google Scholar Is Like the SAT).” OrgTheory (blog), 22 July.

Grimme, Sara, Cathy Holland, Peter Potter, Mike Taylor, Charles Watkinson, Michael Elliott. 2019. The State of Open Monographs: An Analysis of the Open Access Monograph Landscape and Its Integration into the Digital Scholarly Network. London: Digital Science.

Jones, Elisabeth A., Paul N. Courant. 2014. “Monographic Purchasing Trends in Academic Libraries: Did the ‘Serials Crisis’ Really Destroy the University Press?” Journal of Scholarly Publishing 46(1): 43–70.

Jubb, Michael. 2017. Academic Books and Their Future. London: Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Lewis, Philip. 2004. “The Publishing Crisis and Tenure Criteria: An Issue for Research Universities?” Profession [2004]: 14–24.

Lockett, Andrew. 2018. “Monographs on the Move?: A View on ‘Decoupling’ and Other Prospects.” Insights 31: Article 37.

Maxwell, John W., Alessandra Bordini, Katie Shamash. 2017. “Reassembling Scholarly Communications: An Evaluation of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Monograph Initiative.” Journal of Electronic Publishing 20(1): Article 101.

Okada, Masahiro. 2018. Monographs in Humanities and Social Sciences: Back to the Basics? IDE Discussion Paper No. 721. Chiba: Institute of Developing Economies.

Pochoda, Phil. 2013. “The Big One: The Epistemic System Break in Scholarly Monograph Publishing.” New Media and Society 15(3): 359–378.

Thompson, Jennifer Wolfe. 2002. “The Death of the Scholarly Monograph in the Humanities?: Citation Patterns in Literary Scholarship.” Libri 52(3): 121–136.

Waters, Donald J. 2016. “Monograph Publishing in the Digital Age: A View from the Mellon Foundation.” Against the Grain 28(3): 17–20.

Waters, Lindsay. 2001. “Rescue Tenure from the Tyranny of the Monograph.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 20 April.

Williams, Peter, Iain Stevenson, David Nicholas, Anthony Watkinson, Ian Rowlands. 2009. “The Role and Future of the Monograph in Arts and Humanities Research.” ASLIB Proceedings 61(1): 67–82.

Wright, John. 2018. “Open Access for Monograph Publishing: Operational Thoughts and Speculations.” Journal of Scholarly Publishing 49(2): 175–192.

[←19]

Austin, Ann E. 2002. “Preparing the Next Generation of Faculty: Graduate School as Socialization to the Academic Career.” The Journal of Higher Education 73(1): 94–122.

Becher, Tony, Paul Trowler. 2001. Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Culture of Disciplines, 2nd edition. London: Open University Press.

Butterwick, Shauna, Jane Dawson. 2005. “Undone Business: Examining the Production of Academic Labour.” Women's Studies International Forum 28(1): 51–65.

Corcoran, Mary, Shirley M. Clark. 1984. “Professional Socialization and Contemporary Career Attitudes of Three Faculty Generations.” Research in Higher Education 20(2): 131–153.

Gannon et al. (2018), ibid.

Gonzales, Leslie, Aimee LaPointe Terosky. 2016. “From the Faculty Perspective: Defining, Earning, and Maintaining Legitimacy across Academia.” Teachers College Record 118(7): 1–44.

Harley, Diane, Sarah Earl-Novell, Jennifer Arter, Shannon Lawrence, C. Judson King. 2006. The Influence of Academic Values on Scholarly Publication and Communication Practices. Berkeley: Center for Studies in Higher Education.

Heckman, James J., Sidharth Moktan. 2020. “Publishing and Promotion in Economics: The Tyranny of the Top Five.” Journal of Economic Literature 58(2): 419–470.

Macedo, Denise Silva. 2018. Mercantilização do discurso público: Universidades Brasileiras [Mercantilization of Public Discourse: Brazilian Universities]. Ph.D. thesis, Universidade de Brasília.

O’Meara (2011), ibid.

Sugimoto, Cassidy R. 2014. “Academic Genealogy.” In Beyond Bibliometrics: Harnessing Multidimensional Indicators of Scholarly Impact, edited by Blaise Cronin and Cassidy R. Sugimoto, 365–382. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Tierney, William G., Estela Mara Bensimon. 1996. Promotion and Tenure: Community and Socialization in Academe. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Trower, Cathy A. 2010. “A New Generation of Faculty: Similar Core Values in a Different World.” Peer Review 12(3): 27–30.

Véliz and Gardner (2019), ibid.

[←20]

Budtz Pedersen, David, Frederik Stjernfelt, Claus Emmeche. 2016. “Disciplinary Knowledge Production and Interdisciplinary Humanities.” In Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities, edited by Claus Emmeche, David Budtz Pedersen, and Frederik Stjernfelt, 3–16. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Dzeng, Elizabeth. 2014. “Entrenched Biases and Structural Incentives Limit the Influence of Interdisciplinary Research.” Impact of Social Sciences (blog), 18 February.

Fulda, Joseph S. 1998. “Multiple Publication Reconsidered.” Journal of Information Ethics 7(2): 47–53.

Haley, Usha C. V., Melanie C. Page, Tyrone S. Pitsis, José Luis Rivas, Kuo Frank Yu. 2017. Measuring and Achieving Scholarly Impact: A Report from the Academy of Management’s Practice Theme Committee. Briarcliff Manor, NY: Academy of Management.

Lewandowska, Kamila, Paweł Mirosław Stano. 2018. “Evaluation of Research in the Arts: Evidence from Poland.” Research Evaluation 27(4): 323–334.

Lugosi, Peter. 2020. “Developing and Publishing Interdisciplinary Research: Creating Dialogue, Taking Risks.” Hospitality and Society 10(2): 217–230.

Ràfols, Ismael, Loet Leydesdorff, Alice O’Hare, Paul Nightingale, Andy Stirling. 2012. “How Journal Rankings Can Suppress Interdisciplinary Research: A Comparison between Innovation Studies and Business & Management.” Research Policy 41(7): 1262–1282.

Rosales, José María. 2021. “Interdisciplinary Research, from Modularity to Integration: Humanities on the Horizon 2020 Agenda.” Global Intellectual History 6(1): 34–46.

Sugimoto, Cassidy R., Vincent Larivière. 2018. Measuring Research: What Everyone Needs to Know. New York: Oxford University Press.

[←21]

Prorating co-authored publications is a long-standing but highly contested practice — accused by some of inspiring gaming the system through false authorship claims, by others of creating inequities among team members by crediting all contributors equally even if all contributions were not equivalent in terms of time and effort, and by still others of disincentivizing collaboration by encouraging limited or even single authorship. A related concern about co-authored works is authorship order, which is perceived to favor the first author — and may actually do so, in both symbolic and real terms — regardless of the method used to decide that order.

See:

Burroughs, Jennie M. 2017. “No Uniform Culture: Patterns of Collaborative Research in the Humanities.” portal: Libraries and the Academy 17(3): 507–527.

Endersby, James W. 1996. “Collaborative Research in the Social Sciences: Multiple Authorship and Publication Credit.” Social Science Quarterly 77(2): 375–392.

Fine, Mark A., Lawrence A. Kurdek. 1993. “Reflections on Determining Authorship Credit and Authorship Order on Faculty-Student Collaborations.” American Psychologist 48(11): 1141–1147.

Fox, Mary Frank, and Catherine A. Faver. 1984. “Independence and Cooperation in Research: The Motivations and Costs of Collaboration.” The Journal of Higher Education 55(3): 347–359.

Hollis, Aidan. 2001. “Co-Authorship and the Output of Academic Economists.” Labour Economics 8(4): 503–530.

Katz, J. Sylvan, Ben R. Martin. 1997. “What Is Research Collaboration?” Research Policy 26(1): 1–18.

Kim, Do Han, Hee-Je Bak. 2016. “Incentivizing Research Collaboration Using Performance-Based Reward Systems.” Science and Public Policy 44(2): 186–198.

Levitt, Jonathan M., Mike Thelwall. 2013. “Alphabetization and the Skewing of First Authorship Towards Last Names Early in the Alphabet.” Journal of Informetrics 7(3): 575–582.

Liebowitz, Stan J. 2013. “Willful Blindness: The Inefficient Reward Structure in Academic Research.” Economic Inquiry 52(4): 1267–1283.

Lindsey, Duncan. 1980. “Production and Citation Measures in the Sociology of Science: The Problem of Multiple Authorship.” Social Studies of Science 10(2): 145–162.

Long, J. Scott, Robert McGinnis. 1982. “On Adjusting Productivity Measures for Multiple Authorship.” Scientometrics 4(5): 379–387.

Louder, Elena, Carina Wyborn, Christopher Cvitanovic, Angela T. Bednarek. 2021. “Four Guiding Principles for Choosing Frameworks and Indicators to Assess Research Impact.” Impact of Social Sciences (blog), 15 January.

Nudelman, Arthur E., Clifford E. Landers. 1972. “The Failure of 100 Divided by 3 to Equal 33⅓.” The American Sociologist 7(9): 9.

Sarsons, Heather. 2017. “Recognition for Group Work: Gender Differences in Academia.” The American Economic Review 107(5): 141–145.

Schinski, Michael, Anne Kugler, Wendy Wick. 1998. “Perceptions of the Academic Finance Profession Regarding Publishing and the Allocation of Credit in Coauthorship Situations.” Financial Practice and Education 8(1): 60–68.

Stokes, Terry D., James A. Hartley. 1989. “Coauthorship, Social Structure and Influence within Specialties.” Social Studies of Science 19(1): 101–125.

West, Jevin D., Jennifer Jacquet, Molly M. King, Shelley J. Correll, Carl T. Bergstrom. 2013. “The Role of Gender in Scholarly Authorship.” PLOS ONE 8(7): e66212.

[←22]

Alperin et al. (2021), ibid.

Antonijević, Smiljana, Stefan Dormans, Sally Wyatt. 2012. “Working in Virtual Knowledge: Affective Labor in Scholarly Collaboration.” In Virtual Knowledge: Experimenting in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, edited by Paul Wouters, Anne Beaulieu, Andrea Scharnhorst, and Sally Wyatt, 57–88. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Braunstein, Laura. 2017. “Open Stacks: Making DH Labor Visible.” dh+lib (blog), 12 April.

Budd, John W. 2016. “The Eye Sees What the Mind Knows: The Conceptual Foundations of Invisible Work.” In Invisible Labor: Hidden Work in the Contemporary World, edited by Marion Crain, Winifred S. Poster, and Miriam A. Cherry, 28–46. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Budtz Pedersen, David. 2015. “Collaborative Knowledge: The Future of the Academy in the Knowledge-Based Economy.” In On the Facilitation of the Academy, edited by Elias Westergaard and Joachim S. Wiewiura, 57–70. Leiden: Brill.

Callard, Felicity, Des Fitzgerald, Angela Woods. 2015. “Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Action: Tracking the Signal, Tracing the Noise.” Palgrave Communications 1(1): Article 15019.

Chuk, Eric, Rama Hoetzlein, David Kim, Julia Panko. 2011. “Creating Socially Networked Knowledge through Interdisciplinary Collaboration.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 11(1–2): 93–108.

Crain, Marion. 2016. “Consuming Work.” In Invisible Labor: Hidden Work in the Contemporary World, edited by Marion Crain, Winifred S. Poster, and Miriam A. Cherry, 257–278. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cronin, Blaise, Debora Shaw, Kathryn La Barre. 2004. “Visible, Less Visible, and Invisible Work: Patterns of Collaboration in 20th Century Chemistry.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 55(2): 160–168.

D’Ignazio, Catherine, Lauren F. Klein. 2020a. Data Feminism. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Ede, Lisa, Andrea A. Lunsford. 2001. “Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship.” PMLA 116(2): 354-369.

Ellison, Julie, Timothy K. Eatman. 2008. Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University — A Resource on Promotion and Tenure in the Arts, Humanities, and Design. Davis: Imagining America.

Fox and Faver (1984), ibid.

Jamir, Tiatoshi. 2016. “Decolonizing Archaeological Practice in Northeast India: Towards a Community-Based Archaeology at Chungliyimti, Nagaland.” Savage Minds (blog), 24 October.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew. 2012. “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold, 3–11. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Laudel, Grit. 2002. “What Do We Measure by Co-Authorships?” Research Evaluation 11(1): 3–15.

Leahey, Erin. 2018. “The Perks and Perils of Interdisciplinary Research.” European Review 26(S2): S55–S67.

McGinn, Michelle K., Carmen Shields, Michael Manley-Casimir, Annabelle L. Grundy, Nancy Fenton. 2005. “Living Ethics: A Narrative of Collaboration and Belonging in a Research Team.” Reflective Practice 6(4): 551–567.

Modern Language Association Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion. 2006. “Report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion.” Profession [2007]: 9–71.

Nowviskie, Bethany. 2009. “Monopolies of Invention.” Bethany Nowviskie (blog), 30 December.

Nowviskie, Bethany. 2011. “Where Credit Is Due: Preconditions for the Evaluation of Collaborative Digital Scholarship.” Profession [2011]: 169-181.

O'Meara, KerryAnn. 2010. “Rewarding Multiple Forms of Scholarship: Promotion and Tenure.” In Handbook of Engaged Scholarship: Contemporary Landscapes, Future Directions — Volume 1: Institutional Change, edited by Hiram E. Fitzgerald, Cathy Burack, and Sarena D. Seifer, 271–294. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.

O'Meara, KerryAnn, R. Eugene Rice, eds. 2005. Faculty Priorities Reconsidered: Rewarding Multiple Forms of Scholarship. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Orange, Carolyn. 2015. “Connecting to Our Stakeholders: How Faculty Research Can Engage the Community.” In Priorities of the Professoriate: Engaging Multiple Forms of Scholarship Across Rural and Urban Institutions, edited by Fred A. Bonner II, Rosa M. Banda, Petra A. Robinson, Chance W. Lewis, Barbara Lofton, 121–136. Charlotte: Information Age Publishing.

Quan-Haase, Anabel, Juan Luis Suarez, David M. Brown. 2014. “Collaborating, Connecting, and Clustering in the Humanities: A Case Study of Networked Scholarship in an Interdisciplinary, Dispersed Team.” American Behavioral Scientist 59(5): 565–581.

Seifer, Sarena D., Lynn W. Blanchard, Catherine Jordan, Sherril Gelmon, Piper McGinley. 2012. “Faculty for the Engaged Campus: Advancing Community-Engaged Careers in the Academy.” Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement 16(1): 5–20.

Seltzer (2018), ibid.

Shirazi, Roxanne. 2014. “Reproducing the Academy: Librarians and the Question of Service in the Digital Humanities.” Roxanne Shirazi (blog), 15 July.

Siemens, Lynne. 2015. “‘More Hands’ Means ‘More Ideas’: Collaboration in the Humanities.” Humanities 4(3): 353–368.

Spiro, Lisa. 2012. “‘This Is Why We Fight’: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold, 16–35. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Working Group on Evaluating Public History Scholarship. 2017. Tenure, Promotion, and the Publicly Engaged Academic Historian. Washington, DC: American Historical Association.

[←23]

Diversity consultant Carmen Morris cautions, “We are all equal, in the sense that we are human beings, but we are not all the same, having different needs and particular concerns relative to the diversity and inclusion plan.... Don’t make the mistake of lumping as many aspects of diversity and inclusion as possible into your diversity and inclusion agenda in a haphazard way. Make sure that you focus on aspects, individually as well as holistically, so that intersectionality is fully covered. Remember, this goes far beyond ticking boxes and quick fixes.”

Morris, Carmen. 2020. “Diversity and Inclusion: Why You Should Never Ever Make These Six Mistakes.” Forbes, 2 September.

[←24]

In Jeffrey L. Wilson’s 2013 study looking at seven chief diversity officers (CDOs) and their impact on campus climate, he observed, “The CDOs at the institutions differed in how they ascended to that role, their titles, who they reported to, and areas of responsibilities. Some cited near perfect harmony among members of the campus community around diversity issues, while others had met with challenges” (433). Our interviews confirmed that where CDOs are concerned, not much seems to have changed in the past decade.

Wilson, Jeffery L. 2013. “Emerging Trend: The Chief Diversity Officer Phenomenon within Higher Education.” The Journal of Negro Education 82(4): 433–445.

See:

Green, Birgit Barbara. 2008. Increasing Faculty Diversity in Higher Education: A Case Study of the Role of the Chief Diversity Officer at Three Public Universities in Texas. Ph.D. thesis, Texas Tech University.

Harvey, William B. 2014. “Chief Diversity Officers and the Wonderful World of Academe.” Journal of Diversity in Higher Education 7(2): 92–100.

Johnson, Erica NicCole. 2010. Lifting as We Climb: Experiences of Black Diversity Officers at Three Predominantly White Institutions in Kentucky. Ph.D. thesis, University of Kentucky.

Leon, Raul A. 2014. “The Chief Diversity Officer: An Examination of CDO Models and Strategies.” Journal of Diversity in Higher Education 7(2): 77–91.

Parker, Eugene T., III. 2015. Exploring the Establishment of the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer in Higher Education: A Multisite Case Study. Ph.D. thesis, University of Iowa.

Stanley, Christine A. 2014. “Commentary: The Chief Diversity Officer: An Examination of CDO Models and Strategies.” Journal of Diversity in Higher Education 7(2): 101–108.

Williams, Damon A., Katrina C. Wade-Golden. 2013. The Chief Diversity Officer: Strategy, Structure, and Change Management. Sterling: Stylus Publishing.

[←25]

Bradley, Steven W., James R. Garven, Wilson W. Law, James E. West. 2018. The Impact of Chief Diversity Officers on Diverse Faculty Hiring. Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research.

[←26]

Clark, Christine, Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner, Mark Brimhall-Vargas, eds. 2012. Occupying the Academy: Just How Important Is Diversity Work in Higher Education? Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.

Pittard, Lesley-Anne. 2010. Select Higher Education Chief Diversity Officers: Roles, Realities, and Reflections. Ph.D. thesis, University of Virginia.

Robinson, Charles. 2014. “Clashing with Tradition: The Chief Diversity Officer at White Public Institutions.” In Racial Battle Fatigue in Higher Education: Exposing the Myth of Post-Racial America, edited by Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner, Katrice A. Albert, Roland W. Mitchell, and Chaunda M. Allen, 217–223. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.

Worthington, Roger L., Christine A. Stanley, Daryl G. Smith. 2020. “Advancing the Professionalization of Diversity Officers in Higher Education: Report of the Presidential Task Force on the Revision of the NADOHE Standards of Professional Practice.” Journal of Diversity in Higher Education 13(1): 1–22.

[←27]

As Sara Ahmed has argued, “When things become institutional, they recede. To institutionalize x is for x to become routine or ordinary such that x becomes part of the background for those who are part of an institution” (21).

Ahmed, Sara. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke University Press.

See also:

Davalos, Cynthia D. 2014. The Role of Chief Diversity Officers in Institutionalizing Diversity and Inclusion: A Multiple Case Study of Three Exemplar Universities. Ph.D. thesis, University of San Diego.

Durodoye et al. (2019), ibid.

Fenstermaker, Sarah. 2011. “Ivory Towers, Playing Fields and Glass Ceilings: Beyond Metaphor to Best Practices.” Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's and Gender Studies 9: 8–24.

Frederick, Jennifer K., Christine Wolff-Eisenberg. 2021. National Movements for Racial Justice and Academic Library Leadership: Results from the Ithaka S+R US Library Survey 2020. New York: Ithaka S+R.

Fryberg, Stephanie A., Ernesto Javier Martínez, eds. 2014. The Truly Diverse Faculty: New Dialogues in American Higher Education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Griffin (2019), ibid.

Johnson, Amy Wagoner. 2020. “Institutional Mixed Messaging.” Inside Higher Ed (blog), 30 June.

Stanley, Christine A., Karan L. Watson, Jennifer M. Reyes, Kay S. Varela. 2019. “Organizational Change and the Chief Diversity Officer: A Case Study of Institutionalizing a Diversity Plan.” Journal of Diversity in Higher Education 12(3): 255–265.

Stewart, Abigail J., Virginia Valian. 2018. An Inclusive Academy: Achieving Diversity and Excellence. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Stewart, Dafina-Lazarus. 2017. “Language of Appeasement.” Inside Higher Ed (blog), 30 March.

Stockdill, Brett C., Mary Yu Danico, eds. 2012. Transforming the Ivory Tower: Challenging Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia in the Academy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Tierney, William G., Margaret W. Sallee. 2008. “Do Organizational Structures and Strategies Increase Faculty Diversity?: A Cultural Analysis.” American Academic 4: 159–184.

[←28]

Riffing on the term “cultural taxation” originally coined by Amado M. Padilla (1994), Derrick E. White (2021) has referred to the activities undertaken by minoritized faculty to ensure diversity, equity, and inclusion as a “service tax,” because the time spent mentoring students and colleagues, serving on diversity committees, recruiting minority colleagues, planning and leading workshops, and participating in local communities is time not being spent on the activities — particularly research and publishing — that are rewarded in RPT evaluation.

Padilla, Amado M. 1994. “Ethnic Minority Scholars, Research, and Mentoring: Current and Future Issues.” Educational Researcher 23(4): 24–27.

White, Derrick E. 2021. “Diversity, Inclusion, and Tenure.” In “The Future of Tenure: Rethinking a Beleaguered Institution.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 7 April.

See:

Baez, Benjamin. 2000. “Race-Related Service and Faculty of Color: Conceptualizing Critical Agency in Academe.” Higher Education 39(3): 363–391.

Brayboy, Bryan McKinley Jones. 2003. “The Implementation of Diversity in Predominantly White Colleges and Universities.” Journal of Black Studies 34(1): 72–86.

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Arnold, Noelle Witherspoon. 2014. “Psychological Heuristics: Mental/Emotional Designs of Racial Battle Fatigue and the Tenure/Promotion Terrain for Faculty of Color.” In Racial Battle Fatigue in Higher Education: Exposing the Myth of Post-Racial America, edited by Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner, Katrice A. Albert, Roland W. Mitchell, and Chaunda M. Allen, 77–89. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.

Beagan, Brenda L., Tameera Mohamed, Kim Brooks, Bea Waterfield, Merlinda Weinberg. 2021. “Microaggressions Experienced by LGBTQ Academics in Canada: ‘Just Not Fitting in… It Does Take a Toll.’” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 34(3): 197–212.

Britton, Dana M. 2016. “Beyond the Chilly Climate: The Salience of Gender in Women’s Academic Careers.” Gender and Society 31(1): 5–27.

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Holmes (2013), ibid.

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Burke (2021), ibid.

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Kattari (2020), ibid.

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Erica Pinto’s short film, “Structural Discrimination: The Unequal Opportunity Race,” created for the African American Policy Forum, dramatically makes this point.

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Unlike elitism, which by its very nature is exclusionary and therefore at its heart inequitable, “excellence” is sometimes cast as entirely compatible with equity, as it is in the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ framework for DEI, Making Excellence Inclusive: A Framework for Embedding Diversity and Inclusion into Colleges and Universities’ Academic Excellence Mission. Abigail J. Stewart and Virginia Valian (2018) make a similar argument that the two concepts go hand in hand. There are many scholars, however, who find “excellence” to be as problematic as “elitism” — and for much the same reason.

Clayton-Pedersen, Alma R., Nancy O’Neill, Caryn McTighe Musil. 2017. Making Excellence Inclusive: A Framework for Embedding Diversity and Inclusion into Colleges and Universities’ Academic Excellence Mission. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Stewart and Valian (2018), ibid.

See:

Allen, Liz, Elizabeth Marincola. 2020. “Rethinking Scholarly Publishing: How New Models Can Facilitate Transparency, Equity, Efficiency and the Impact of Science.” In Transforming Research Excellence: New Ideas from the Global South, edited by Erika Kraemer-Mbula, Robert J. W. Tijssen, Matthew L. Wallace, and Robert McLean, 92–115. Cape Town: African Minds.

Baker, Kelly J. 2018. Sexism Ed: Essays on Gender and Labor in Academia. Chapel Hill: Raven Books.

Blackmore (2015), ibid.

Carnevale, Anthony P., Jeff Strohl. 2013. Separate and Unequal: How Higher Education Reinforces the Intergenerational Reproduction of White Racial Privilege. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

Clauset et al. (2015), ibid.

Connell, Raewyn. 2007. Southern Theory: Social Science and the Global Dynamics of Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity.

Cruickshank (2016), ibid.

De Fraja, Gianni, Giovanni Facchini, John Gathergood. 2019. “Academic Salaries and Public Evaluation of University Research: Evidence from the UK Research Excellence Framework.” Economic Policy 34(99): 523–583.

DeTurk and Briscoe (2019), ibid.

Fitzpatrick (2019), ibid.

Herlihy-Mera (2015), ibid.

Hicks, Diana. 2012. “Performance-Based University Research Funding Systems.” Research Policy 41(2): 251–261.

Hitchcock (2018), ibid.

Jenkins (2013), ibid.

Kraemer-Mbula, Erika. 2020. “Gender Diversity and the Transformation of Research Excellence.” In Transforming Research Excellence: New Ideas from the Global South, edited by Erika Kraemer-Mbula, Robert J. W. Tijssen, Matthew L. Wallace, and Robert McLean, 79–91. Cape Town: African Minds.

Last, Angela. 2018. “Internationalisation and Interdisciplinarity: Sharing across Boundaries?” In Decolonising the University: Understanding and Transforming the Universities' Colonial Foundations, edited by Gurminder K. Bhambra, Kerem Nişancıoğlu, and Dalia Gebrial, 208–230. London: Pluto Press.

Littler (2013), ibid.

Markovits, Daniel. 2019. “American Universities Must Choose: Do They Want to Be Equal or Elite?” Time, 12 September.

Moore, Samuel, Cameron Neylon, Martin Paul Eve, Daniel Paul O'Donnell, Damian Pattinson. 2017. “‘Excellence R Us’: University Research and the Fetishisation of Excellence.” Palgrave Communications 3(1): Article 16105.

Morley, Louise. 2003. Quality and Power in Higher Education. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Morley, Louise, Sarah Aynsley. 2007. “Employers, Quality and Standards in Higher Education: Shared Values and Vocabularies or Elitism and Inequalities?” Higher Education Quarterly 61(3): 229-249.

Nevin, Andrew D. 2019. “Academic Hiring Networks and Institutional Prestige: A Case Study of Canadian Sociology.” Canadian Review of Sociology / Revue canadienne de sociologie 56(3): 389-420.

Neylon (2020), ibid.

O’Meara, KerryAnn, Lindsey Templeton, Gudrun Nyunt. 2018. “Earning Professional Legitimacy: Challenges Faced by Women, Underrepresented Minority, and Non-Tenure-Track Faculty.” Teachers College Record 120(12): 1–38.

O’Rand, Angela. 1989. “Scientific Thought Style and the Construction of Gender Inequality.” In Women and a New Academy: Gender and Cultural Contexts, edited by Jean O’Barr, 103–121. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Platzer and Allison (2018), ibid.

Rucks-Ahidiana, Zawadi. 2019. “The Inequities of the Tenure-Track System.” Inside Higher Ed (blog), 7 June.

Schutte, Ofelia. 2012. “Attracting Latinos/as to Philosophy: Today’s Challenges.” In Reframing the Practice of Philosophy: Bodies of Color, Bodies of Knowledge, edited by George Yancy, 71–85. Albany: SUNY Press.

Sherbany, Alex. 2011. “The False Diversity of Elite Universities.” Harvard Political Review (blog), 29 April.

Shields, Stephanie A. 2012. “Waking Up to Privilege: Intersectionality and Opportunity.” In Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia, edited by Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. González, and Angela P. Harris, 29–39. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.

Tijssen, Robert J. W. 2020. “Re-Valuing Research Excellence: From Excellentism to Responsible Assessment.” In Transforming Research Excellence: New Ideas from the Global South, edited by Erika Kraemer-Mbula, Robert J. W. Tijssen, Matthew L. Wallace, and Robert McLean, 59–78. Cape Town: African Minds.

van den Brink, Marieke, Yvonne Benschop. 2011. “Gender Practices in the Construction of Academic Excellence: Sheep with Five Legs.” Organization 19(4): 507–524.

Wallace, Sherri L., Sharon E. Moore, Linda L. Wilson, Brenda G. Hart. 2012. “African American Women in the Academy: Quelling the Myth of Presumed Incompetence.” In Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia, edited by Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. González, and Angela P. Harris, 421–438. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.

Wermund, Benjamin. 2017. “How U.S. News College Rankings Promote Economic Inequality on Campus.” Politico, 10 September.

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Albornoz, Denisse, Angela Okune, Leslie Chan. 2020. “Can Open Scholarly Practices Redress Epistemic Injustice?” In Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access, edited by Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray, 65–79. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Alexander, Bryant Keith. 2008. “Queer(y)ing the Postcolonial through the West(ern).” In Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies, edited by Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, 101–134. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.

Alldred, Pam, Tina Miller. 2007. “Measuring What’s Valued or Valuing What’s Measured?: Knowledge Production and the Research Assessment Exercise.” In Power, Knowledge and the Academy: The Institutional Is Political, edited by Val Gillies and Helen Lucey, 147–167. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Antonio, Anthony Lising. 2002. “Faculty of Color Reconsidered: Reassessing Contributions to Scholarship.” The Journal of Higher Education 73(5): 582–602.

Arocena, Rodrigo, Bo Göransson, Judith Sutz. 2017. Developmental Universities in Inclusive Innovation Systems: Alternatives for Knowledge Democratization in the Global South. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Baker (2018), ibid.

Bonaccorso, Elisa, Reneta Bozhankova, Carlos D. Cadena, Veronika Čapská, Laura Czerniewicz, Ada Emmett, Folorunso F. Oludayo, Natalia Glukhova, Marc L. Greenberg, Miran Hladnik, María E. Grillet, Mochamad Indrawan, Mate Kapović, Yuri Kleiner, Marek Łaziński, Rafael D. Loyola, Shaily Menon, Luis G. Morales, Clara Ocampo, Jorge Pérez-Emán, A. Townsend Peterson, Dimitar Poposki, Ajadi A. Rasheed, Kathryn M. Rodríguez-Clark, Jon P. Rodríguez, Brian Rosenblum, Victor Sánchez-Cordero, Filip Smolík, Marko Snoj, Imre Szilágyi, Orlando Torres, Piotr Tykarski. 2014. “Bottlenecks in the Open-Access System: Voices from around the Globe.” Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication 2(2): eP1126.

Bunda, Tracey, Lew Zipin, Marie Brennan. 2011. “Negotiating University ‘Equity’ from Indigenous Standpoints: A Shaky Bridge.” International Journal of Inclusive Education 16(9): 941–957.

Burden-Stelly, Charisse. 2018. “The Capitalist Foundations of Racialization.” Black Perspectives (blog), 30 April.

Carrigan, Mark. 2020. “Are We All Digital Scholars Now?: How the Lockdown Will Reshape the Post-Pandemic Digital Structure of Academia.” Impact of Social Sciences (blog), 10 April.

Clauset et al. (2015), ibid.

Collyer, Fran M. 2018. “Global Patterns in the Publishing of Academic Knowledge: Global North, Global South.” Current Sociology 66(1): 56–73.

Czerniewicz, Laura. 2013. “Inequitable Power Dynamics of Global Knowledge Production and Exchange Must Be Confronted Head On.” Impact of Social Sciences (blog), 29 April.

Dei, George J. Sefa. 2000. “Rethinking the Role of Indigenous Knowledges in the Academy.” International Journal of Inclusive Education 4(2): 111–132.

Delgado Bernal, Dolores, Octavio Villalpando. 2002. “An Apartheid of Knowledge in Academia: The Struggle over the ‘Legitimate’ Knowledge of Faculty of Color.” Equity and Excellence in Education 35(2): 169–180.

Dennis, Carol Azumah. 2018. “Decolonising Education: A Pedagogic Intervention.” In Decolonising the University: Understanding and Transforming the Universities' Colonial Foundations, edited by Gurminder K. Bhambra, Kerem Nişancıoğlu, and Dalia Gebrial, 190–207. London: Pluto Press.

Descarries, Francine. 2003. “The Hegemony of the English Language in the Academy: The Damaging Impact of the Sociocultural and Linguistic Barriers on the Development of Feminist Sociological Knowledge, Theories and Strategies.” Current Sociology 51(6): 625–636.

Dotson, Kristie. 2014. “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression.” Social Epistemology 28(2): 115–138.

Eble, Michelle F., Tracy Ann Morse, Wendy Sharer, William P. Banks. 2019. “Valuing Editorial Collaborations as Scholarship: A Survey of Tenure and Promotion Documents.” College English 81(4): 339–366.

Fenelon, James. 2003. “Race, Research, and Tenure: Institutional Credibility and the Incorporation of African, Latino, and American Indian Faculty.” Journal of Black Studies 34(1): 87–100.

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Ganz (2017), ibid.

Gordon, Lewis R. 2014. “Disciplinary Decadence and the Decolonisation of Knowledge.” Africa Development / Afrique et Développement 39(1): 81–92.

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Hamraie (2016), ibid.

Hitchcock (2018), ibid.

Hunter, Margaret. 2002. “Rethinking Epistemology, Methodology, and Racism; or, Is White Sociology Really Dead?” Race and Society 5(2): 119–138.

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Jacobs and Winslow (2004), ibid.

Jenkins (2013), ibid.

Kanji, Azeezah. 2017. “Ignoring Non-European Thinkers Leaves Us Half-Blind.” Toronto Star, 12 January.

Kawa et al., (2018), ibid.

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Kuokkanen, Rauna. 2008. “What Is Hospitality in the Academy?: Epistemic Ignorance and the (Im)Possible Gift.” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 30(1): 60–82.

Last (2018), ibid.

Lee et al. (2021), ibid.

Meyer, Manulani Aluli. 2008. “Indigenous and Authentic: Hawaiian Epistemology and the Triangulation of Meaning.” In Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies, edited by Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, 217–232. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.

Morley and Aynsley (2007), ibid.

Mott, Carrie, Daniel Cockayne. 2017. “Citation Matters: Mobilizing the Politics of Citation Toward a Practice of ‘Conscientious Engagement.’” Gender, Place and Culture 24(7): 954–973.

Ndofirepi (2017), ibid.

O’Rand (1989), ibid.

Pia, Andrea E., Simon Batterbury, Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi, Marcel LaFlamme, Gerda Wielander, Filippo M. Zerilli, Melissa Nolas, Jon Schubert, Nicholas Loubere, Ivan Franceschini, Casey Walsh, Agathe Mora, Christos Varvantakis. 2020. “Labour of Love: An Open Access Manifesto for Freedom, Integrity, and Creativity in the Humanities and Interpretive Social Sciences.” Commonplace (blog), 16 July.

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Restrepo, Paula. 2014. “Legitimation of Knowledge, Epistemic Justice and the Intercultural University: Towards an Epistemology of ‘Living Well.’” Postcolonial Studies 17(2): 140–154.

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Saul, Jennifer. 2012. “Ranking Exercises in Philosophy and Implicit Bias.” Journal of Social Philosophy 43(3): 256–273.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2018. “The Art of the Impossible — Defining and Measuring Indigenous Research?” In Dissident Knowledge in Higher Education, edited by Marc Spooner and James McNinch, 21–40. Regina: University of Regina Press.

Stonebanks, Christopher Darius. 2008. “An Islamic Perspective on Knowledge, Knowing, and Methodology.” In Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies, edited by Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, 293–322. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.

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Tomlinson, Barbara. 2018. “Category Anxiety and the Invisible White Woman: Managing Intersectionality at the Scene of Argument.” Feminist Theory 19(2): 145–164.

Tuck, Eve. 2018. “Biting the University That Feeds Us.” In Dissident Knowledge in Higher Education, edited by Marc Spooner and James McNinch, 149–167. Regina: University of Regina Press.

University Wankings (2021), ibid.

van den Brink and Benschop (2011), ibid.

Wellmon and Piper (2017), ibid.

West et al. (2013), ibid.

Wingfield, Adia Harvey, Renée Skeete. 2016. “Maintaining Hierarchies in Predominantly White Organizations: A Theory of Racial Tasks as Invisible Labor.” In Invisible Labor: Hidden Work in the Contemporary World, edited by Marion Crain, Winifred S. Poster, and Miriam A. Cherry, 47–67. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Winslow (2010), ibid.

[←34]

Cantwell, Brendan. 2021. “The Culture War Has Come for Higher Ed.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 12 July.

See also:

Ahmed (2012), ibid.

Andrews, Nicola. 2018. “Reflections on Resistance, Decolonization, and the Historical Trauma of Libraries and Academia.” In The Politics of Theory and the Practice of Critical Librarianship, edited by Karen P. Nicholson and Maura Seale, 181–191. Sacramento: Library Juice Press.

Bailey, Moya, Izetta Autumn Mobley. 2018. “Work in the Intersections: A Black Feminist Disability Framework.” Gender and Society 33(1): 19–40.

Benjamin, Ruha. 2019. Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Medford: Polity.

Brook, Freeda, Dave Ellenwood, Althea Eannace Lazzaro. 2015. “In Pursuit of Antiracist Social Justice: Denaturalizing Whiteness in the Academic Library.” Library Trends 64(2): 246–284.

Coleman, Nathaniel Adam Tobias. 2014. “Eugenics: The Academy's Complicity.” Times Higher Education, 9 October.

Collins, Leslie V. 2014. “Examining Intragroup Racism and Racial Battle Fatigue in Historically Black Colleges and Universities.” In Racial Battle Fatigue in Higher Education: Exposing the Myth of Post-Racial America, edited by Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner, Katrice A. Albert, Roland W. Mitchell, and Chaunda M. Allen, 91–102. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.

Curley, Andrew, Sara Smith. 2020. “Against Colonial Grounds: Geography on Indigenous Lands.” Dialogues in Human Geography 10(1): 37–40.

De La Torre, Miguel A. 2018. “Academic Racism: The Repression of Marginalized Voices in Academia.” The Activist History Review (blog), 29 August.

de Leeuw, Sarah, Margo Greenwood, Nicole Lindsay. 2013. “Troubling Good Intentions.” Settler Colonial Studies 3(3–4): 381–394.

Fenelon (2003), ibid.

Finley, Stephen C., Biko M. Gray, Lori Latrice Martin. 2018. “‘Affirming Our Values’: African American Scholars, White Virtual Mobs, and the Complicity of White University Administrators.” Journal of Academic Freedom 9: [n.p.]

Frederick and Wolff-Eisenberg (2021), ibid.

Gillborn, David. 2005. “Education Policy as an Act of White Supremacy: Whiteness, Critical Race Theory and Education Reform.” Journal of Education Policy 20(4): 485–505.

Grande, Sandy. 2018. “Refusing the University.” In Dissident Knowledge in Higher Education, edited by Marc Spooner and James McNinch, 168–189. Regina: University of Regina Press.

Grosfoguel, Ramón. 2013. “The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemic Racism/Sexism and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 11(1): 73–90.

Gusa (2011), ibid.

Hall (2018), ibid.

Harper (2012), ibid.

Hathcock, April. 2016. “Making the Local Global: The Colonialism of Scholarly Communication.” At the Intersection (blog), 27 September.

Holmes (2013), ibid.

Holmwood, John. 2018. “Race and the Neoliberal University: Lessons from the Public University.” In Decolonising the University: Understanding and Transforming the Universities' Colonial Foundations, edited by Gurminder K. Bhambra, Kerem Nişancıoğlu, and Dalia Gebrial, 37–52. London: Pluto Press.

Jayakumar et al. (2009), ibid.

Jones, Alison, Kuni Jenkins. 2008. “Rethinking Collaboration: Working the Indigene–Colonizer Hyphen.” In Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies, edited by Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, 471–486. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.

Lumley, Risa Maureen. 2016. The Academic Library and Social Justice: A Q-Study of Librarian Attitudes. Ed.D. thesis, California State University – San Bernardino.

Magubane, Zine. 2016. “American Sociology’s Racial Ontology: Remembering Slavery, Deconstructing Modernity, and Charting the Future of Global Historical Sociology.” Cultural Sociology 10(3): 369–384.

McLaughlin, Brenna. 2021. “Reckoning with Whiteness in Scholarly Publishing.” The Scholarly Kitchen (blog), 18 March.

Minthorn, Robin Starr, Christine A. Nelson. 2019. “Colonized and Racist Indigenous Campus Tour.” Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Education and Student Affairs 4(2): 7–11.

Mosqueda, Lawrence J., Dennis R. Judd, Philip Meranto, Matthew Lippman. 1981. “The Persistence of Institutional Racism in Higher Education: Its Roots and Remedies.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York, 5 September.

Muñoz, Frank Michael. 2009. “Critical Race Theory and the Landscapes of Higher Education.” The Vermont Connection 31(1): 53–62.

Museus, Samuel D., María C. Ledesma, Tara L. Parker. 2015. “Racism and Racial Equity in Higher Education.” ASHE Higher Education Report 42(1): 1–112.

Nelson, Christina. 2020. "They're Protecting Whiteness and Their Fragility Is Showing": How Feminist Praxis Disrupts White Supremacy in Neoliberal Predominately White Institutions. M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee.

Patel, Leigh. 2015. “Desiring Diversity and Backlash: White Property Rights in Higher Education.” The Urban Review 47(4): 657–675.

Pérez Huber, Lindsay, Corina Benavides López, Maria C. Malagón, Verónica Vélez, Daniel G. Solórzano. 2008. “Getting Beyond the ‘Symptom,’ Acknowledging the ‘Disease’: Theorizing Racist Nativism.” Contemporary Justice Review 11(1): 39–51.

Richardson, William Jamal. 2018. “Understanding Eurocentrism as a Structural Problem of Undone Science.” In Decolonising the University: Understanding and Transforming the Universities' Colonial Foundations, edited by Gurminder K. Bhambra, Kerem Nişancıoğlu, and Dalia Gebrial, 231–247. London: Pluto Press.

Rodríguez, Dylan. 2012. “Racial/Colonial Genocide and the ‘Neoliberal Academy’: In Excess of a Problematic.” American Quarterly 64(4): 809–813.

Roh, Charlotte, Vanessa Gabler. 2020. “Systemic Barriers and Allyship in Library Publishing: A Case Study Reminder That No One Is Safe from Racism.” College and Research Libraries News 81(3): 141–144.

See (2016), ibid.

Shilliam, Robbie. 2018. “Black/Academia.” In Decolonising the University: Understanding and Transforming the Universities' Colonial Foundations, edited by Gurminder K. Bhambra, Kerem Nişancıoğlu, and Dalia Gebrial, 53–63. London: Pluto Press.

Smith, W. A. (2004), ibid.

Stanley, Christine A. 2007. “When Counter Narratives Meet Master Narratives in the Journal Editorial-Review Process.” Educational Researcher 36(1): 14–24.

Stein, Sharon. 2018. “Confronting the Racial-Colonial Foundations of US Higher Education.” Journal for the Study of Postsecondary and Tertiary Education 3: 77–98.

Sultana, Farhana. 2018. “The False Equivalence of Academic Freedom and Free Speech: Defending Academic Integrity in the Age of White Supremacy, Colonial Nostalgia, and Anti-Intellectualism.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 17(2): 228–257.

Todd, Zoe. 2016. “What Does It Mean to Decolonize Anthropology in Canada?” Savage Minds (blog), 17 August.

Uperesa, Lisa. 2016. “A Decolonial Turn in Anthropology?: A View from the Pacific.” Savage Minds (blog), 7 June.

Wilder, Craig Steven. 2013. Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities. New York: Bloomsbury Press.

[←35]

Zambrana, Ruth Enid. 2018. Toxic Ivory Towers: The Consequences of Work Stress on Underrepresented Minority Faculty. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

See also:

Alfred, Mary V. 2001. “Reconceptualizing Marginality from the Margins: Perspectives of African American Tenured Female Faculty at a White Research University.” The Western Journal of Black Studies 25(1): 1–11.

Almeida (2014), ibid.

Arnold (2014), ibid.

Dumitrescu, Irina. 2019. “Ten Rules for Succeeding in Academia Through Upward Toxicity.” Times Higher Education, 21 November.

Edwards and Ross (2018), ibid.

Giles, Mark S. 2014. “Behind Enemy Lines: Critical Race Theory, Racial Battle Fatigue, and Higher Education.” In Racial Battle Fatigue in Higher Education: Exposing the Myth of Post-Racial America, edited by Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner, Katrice A. Albert, Roland W. Mitchell, and Chaunda M. Allen, 169–177. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.

Gonzalez-Smith, Isabel, Juleah Swanson, Azusa Tanaka. 2014. “Unpacking Identity: Racial, Ethnic, and Professional Identity and Academic Librarians of Color.” In The Librarian Stereotype: Deconstructing Perceptions and Presentations of Information Work, edited by Nicole Pagowsky and Miriam Rigby, 149–173. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries.

Harley (2018), ibid.

Harper (2012), ibid.

Iverson, Susan VanDeventer. 2007. “Camouflaging Power and Privilege: A Critical Race Analysis of University Diversity Policies.” Educational Administration Quarterly 43(5): 586–611.

Miller, Ryan A., Cathy D. Howell, Laura Struve. 2018. “‘Constantly, Excessively, and All the Time’: The Emotional Labor of Teaching Diversity Courses.” International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education 31(3): 491–502.

Niemann, Yolanda Flores. 2012. “Lessons from the Experiences of Women of Color Working in Academia.” In Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia, edited by Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Yolanda Flores Niemann, and Angela P. Harris, 446–499. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.

Oswal (2015), ibid.

Pittman (2012), ibid.

Riley-Reid (2017), ibid.

Robinson (2014), ibid.

Sensoy, Özlem, Robin DiAngelo. 2017. “‘We Are All for Diversity, but...’: How Faculty Hiring Committees Reproduce Whiteness and Practical Suggestions for How They Can Change.” Harvard Educational Review 87(4): 557–580, 593–595.

Settles et al. (2018), ibid.

Shavers et al. (2014), ibid.

Smith, W. A. (2004), ibid.

Smith, William A., Tara J. Yosso, Daniel G. Solórzano. 2006. “Challenging Racial Battle Fatigue on Historically White Campuses: A Critical Race Examination of Race-Related Stress.” In Faculty of Color: Teaching in Predominantly White Colleges and Universities, edited by Christine A. Stanley, 299–327. Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing.

Stanley (2006), ibid.

Stevenson (2012), ibid.

Titchkosky (2008), ibid.

Ward Randolph, Adah, Mary E. Weems. 2010. “Speak Truth and Shame the Devil: An Ethnodrama in Response to Racism in the Academy.” Qualitative Inquiry 16(5): 310–313.

Wingfield and Skeete (2016), ibid.

Zambrana et al. (2016), ibid.

[←36]

Among the challenges faced by administrators, particularly at the decanal level, that drives such rapid turnover is a general distrust by faculty of administrators. Ejner J. Jensen (2006) makes this wry observation: “Ambition and leadership skills, key values in other areas of our society, are suspect qualities in academe. Thus, by virtue of their appointment different from the colleagues with whom only a while ago they shared office space, students, and commitment to a discipline, administrators are widely regarded as having abandoned the intellectual enterprise they are supposed to conduct…. The desire to run an enterprise, to exert leadership, to make decisions that can reshape a life or redirect an organization is shut off, frustrated, and in its stead one finds only the familiar round” (486, 488).

Joan V. Gallos (2002) has termed this dilemma the “dean’s squeeze”: “Squeezed from above and below as well as from inside and outside the university, deans are caught in the jaws of conflicting cultures, pressures, and priorities. Constrained by traditions and tensions inherent in the role, they are increasingly accountable for outcomes over which they have little influence and less control.... Deans are, in essence, classic middle managers: They have enormous responsibilities, little positional power, insufficient resources, and limited authority. They navigate daily the circular rhythms of life in the organizational middle — pleasing up to secure the resources needed to please those below who do the work that leads to unit success. The realities of a dean's life, as I know them, lie in stark contrast to the common perceptions of those who see power, grandeur, and glory — and to the naive images of the job often held by those who aspire to the position” (174).

Gallos, Joan V. 2002. “The Dean's Squeeze: The Myths and Realities of Academic Leadership in the Middle.” Academy of Management Learning and Education 1(2): 174–184.

Jensen, Ejner J. 2006. “The Bitter Groves of Academe.” In Academic Ethics, edited by Robin Barrow and Patrick Keeney, 485-488. Aldershot: Ashgate.

See also:

Bateh, Justin, Wilton Heyliger. “Academic Administrator Leadership Styles and the Impact on Faculty Job Satisfaction.” Journal of Leadership Education 13(3): 34–49.

Bray, Nathaniel J. 2008. “Proscriptive Norms for Academic Deans: Comparing Faculty Expectations across Institutional and Disciplinary Boundaries.” The Journal of Higher Education 79(6): 692–721.

Cantrell, Pat. 2016. “Leadership in Academia: Dean's Disease — Its Sources, Seductions, and Solutions.” The Journal of Values-Based Leadership 9(2): 143–150.

Justice, George. 2019. How to Be a Dean. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

White-Hurst, Elizabeth Marshall. 2011. First Among Equals: A Study of Faculty Trust Levels and Influencing Factors Related to New Deans in Transition Periods. Ph.D. thesis, University of South Carolina.

Wolverton, Mimi, Walter H. Gmelch. 2002. College Deans: Leading from Within. Westport: Rowman and Littlefield.

Wolverton, Mimi, Marvin L. Wolverton, Walter H. Gmelch. 1999. “The Impact of Role Conflict and Ambiguity on Academic Deans.” The Journal of Higher Education 70(1): 80–106.

[←37]

Although much of the focus in the literature is on the traits of a successful dean, the greatest single predictor of longevity in a dean’s tenure is not personality or training, but institutional fit — a match between worldview and university context.

See:

Bradshaw, Della. 2015. “Short Tenure of Deans Signals a Leadership Void.” Financial Times, 26 April.

Bruner, Robert F. 2017. “The Three Qualities That Make a Good Dean.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 15 January.

Cassady, Sandra. 2014. “Preparing for an Academic Deanship.” In Career Moves: Mentoring for Women Advancing Their Career and Leadership in Academia, edited by Athena Vongalis-Macrow, 95–107. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Del Favero, Marietta. 2006. “An Examination of the Relationship between Academic Discipline and Cognitive Complexity in Academic Deans' Administrative Behavior.” Research in Higher Education 47(3): 281–315.

Elroy, Elenora. 2020. “Seven Essential Qualities in a Great Academic Dean.” The European Business Review (blog), 10 June.

Harvey, Michael, James B. Shaw, Ruth McPhail, Anthony Erickson. 2013. “The Selection of a Dean in an Academic Environment: Are We Getting What We Deserve?” The International Journal of Educational Management 27(1): 19–37.

Jacobson, Jennifer. 2002. “Can a Dean Really Go Back to Being a Professor?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 14 February.

Krahenbuhl, Gary S. 2004. Building the Academic Deanship: Strategies for Success. Westport: Rowman and Littlefield.

Montez, Joni Mina, Mimi Wolverton, Walter H. Gmelch. 2003. “The Roles and Challenges of Deans.” Review of Higher Education 26(2): 241–266.

Morris, Tracy L., Joseph S. Laipple. 2015. “How Prepared Are Academic Administrators? Leadership and Job Satisfaction within US Research Universities.” Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 37(2): 241–251.

Parrish, Dominique Rene. 2015. “The Relevance of Emotional Intelligence for Leadership in a Higher Education Context.” Studies in Higher Education 40(5): 821–837.

Strathe, Marlene I., Vicki W. Wilson. 2006. “Academic Leadership: The Pathway to and From.” New Directions for Higher Education 134: 5–13.

Vogeler, William. 2017. “When Will Your Law Dean Step Down?” FindLaw (blog), 26 September.

Walker, Brian D. 2019. Personality and Preparation: Factors Impacting the Tenure of Business School Deans. Ed.D. thesis, American College of Education.

Wepner, Shelley B., William A. Henk, Virginia Clark Johnson, Sharon Lovell. 2014. “The Importance of Academic Deans' Interpersonal/Negotiating Skills as Leaders.” Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education 18(4): 124–130.

Wolverton, Mimi, Walter Gmelch, Marvin L. Wolverton. 2000. Finding a Better Person–Environment Fit in the Academic Deanship.” Innovative Higher Education 24(3): 203–226.

[←38]

Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that it is departmental leadership, more so than decanal or provostial leadership, that faculty look to for guidance. As Janet Lawrence, Sergio Celis, and Molly Ott report from their study on whether pre-tenure faculty believe they will be treated fairly throughout the tenure process, “Equitable treatment of junior faculty at the department level and effectiveness of feedback have the strongest relationships with beliefs about the equity of tenure decision-making” (155).

Lawrence et al. (2014), ibid.

See also:

August and Waltman (2004), ibid.

Campbell, Corbin M., KerryAnn O’Meara. 2014. “Faculty Agency: Departmental Contexts That Matter in Faculty Careers.” Research in Higher Education 55(1): 49–74.

Drange, Susan, Kristen Barnes. 2019. Improving Department Climate: Tools and Resources for Departments and Department Chairs. New York: Columbia University Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Eddy, Pamela L., Joy L. Gaston-Gayles. 2008. “New Faculty on the Block: Issues of Stress and Support.” Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment 17(1-2): 89–106.

Hearn, James C., Melissa S. Anderson. 2002. “Conflict in Academic Departments: An Analysis of Disputes over Faculty Promotion and Tenure.” Research in Higher Education 43(5): 503–529.

Kruse, Sharon D. 2020. “Department Chair Leadership: Exploring the Role’s Demands and Tensions.” Educational Management Administration and Leadership, 4 September.

Lisnic, Rodica, Anna Zajicek, Shauna Morimoto. 2018. “Gender and Race Differences in Faculty Assessment of Tenure Clarity: The Influence of Departmental Relationships and Practices.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 5(2): 244–260.

Maranto and Griffin (2010), ibid.

MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion (2006), ibid.

Napier, Nancy K. 1993. “Alice in Academia: The Department Chairman Role from Both Sides of the Mirror.” Journal of Management Inquiry 2(3): 299–305.

Ndandala, Saturnin Espoir Ntamba. 2016. Tenure and Promotion Evaluations: Academics' Perceptions at Canadian Universities' Faculties of Education. Ph.D. thesis, McGill University.

Ponjuan, Luis, Valerie Martin Conley, Cathy A. Trower. 2011. “Career Stage Differences in Pre-Tenure Track Faculty Perceptions of Professional and Personal Relationships with Colleagues.” The Journal of Higher Education 82(3): 319–346.

Rowley, Daniel James, Herbert Sherman. 2003. “The Special Challenges of Academic Leadership.” Management Decision 41(10): 1058–1063.

Sheridan, Jennifer, Julia N. Savoy, Anna Kaatz, You-Geon Lee, Amarette Filut, Molly Carnes. 2017. “Write More Articles, Get More Grants: The Impact of Department Climate on Faculty Research Productivity.” Journal of Women's Health 26(5): 587–596.

Skachkova (2007), ibid.

Tierney and Bensimon (1996), ibid.

Trower, Cathy A. 2009. “Toward a Greater Understanding of the Tenure Track for Minorities.” Change 41(5): 38–45.

Zimmerman et al. (2016), ibid.

[←39]

Nevertheless, there are many scholars fighting against this entrenched thinking.

See, for example:

Arbuckle, Alyssa. 2019. “Opportunities for Social Knowledge Creation in the Digital Humanities.” In Doing More Digital Humanities: Open Approaches to Creation, Growth, and Development, edited by Constance Siemens, Richard J. Lane, and Ray Siemens, 290–300. London: Routledge.

Babeu, Alison, David Bamman, Lisa Cerrato, Gregory Crane, Amy Friedlander, Bernard A. Huberman, Caroline Levander, Stephen Murray, Douglas W. Oard, Rashmi Singhal, Maureen Stone, Diane M. Zorich. 2009. Working Together or Apart: Promoting the Next Generation of Digital Scholarship. Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources.

Benneworth, Paul, Bojana Ćulum, Thomas Farnell, Frans Kaiser, Marco Seeber, Ninoslav Šćukanec, Hans Vossensteyn, Don Westerheijden. 2018. A European Framework for Community Engagement in Higher Education: Why and How? Zagreb: Institute for the Development of Education.

Bloomgarden, Allen. 2008. Prestige Culture and Community-Based Faculty Work. Ed.D. thesis, University of Massachusetts – Amherst.

Braunstein (2017), ibid.

Ćulum, Bojana. 2014. “Academics and Service to the Community: An International (European) Perspective.” In The Relevance of Academic Work in Comparative Perspective, edited by William K. Cummings and Ulrich Teichler, 139–162. Cham: Springer International.

Dali, Keren, Nadia Caidi. 2017. “Diversity by Design.” The Library Quarterly 87(2): 88–98.

Dvorakova, Antonie. 2018. “Relational Individuality among Native American Academics: Popular Dichotomies Reconsidered.” Culture and Psychology 25(1): 75–98.

Eatman, Timothy K., Gaelle Ivory, John Saltmarsh, Michael Middleton, Amanda Wittman, Corey Dolgon. 2018. “Co-Constructing Knowledge Spheres in the Academy: Developing Frameworks and Tools for Advancing Publicly Engaged Scholarship.” Urban Education 53(4): 532–561.

Eble et al. (2019), ibid.

Ellison and Eatman (2008), ibid.

Fitzpatrick (2019), ibid.

Harley et al. (2010), ibid.

Hoffman, Andrew J. 2021. The Engaged Scholar: Expanding the Impact of Academic Research in Today’s World. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Kandiko Howson (2018), ibid.

Kehm (2013), ibid.

Klein and Falk-Krzesinski (2017), ibid.

Kruss, Glenda, Genevieve Haupt, Mariette Visser. 2016. “‘Luring the Academic Soul’: Promoting Academic Engagement in South African Universities.” Higher Education Research and Development 35(4): 755–771.

MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion (2006), ibid.

Montgomery, Lucy, John Hartley, Cameron Neylon, Malcolm Gillies, Eve Gray, Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, Chun-Kai (Karl) Huang, Joan Leach, Jason Potts, Xiang Ren, Katherine Skinner, Cassidy R. Sugimoto, Katie Wilson. 2021. Open Knowledge Institutions: Reinventing Universities. Cambridge: MIT Press.

O’Meara, KerryAnn, Lorilee R. Sandmann, John Saltmarsh, Dwight E. Giles, Jr. 2011. “Studying the Professional Lives and Work of Faculty Involved in Community Engagement.” Innovative Higher Education 36(2): 83–96.

Orange (2015), ibid.

Renwick, Kerry, Mark Selkrig, Catherine Manathunga, Ron "Kim" Keamy. 2020. “Community Engagement Is … : Revisiting Boyer’s Model of Scholarship.” Higher Education Research and Development 39(6): 1232–1246.

Saltmarsh, John, Dwight E. Giles, Jr., Elaine Ward, Suzanne M. Buglione. 2009. “Rewarding Community-Engaged Scholarship.” New Directions for Higher Education 147: 25–35.

Tremblay, Crystal. 2017. Recognizing Excellence in Community-Engaged Scholarship at the University of Victoria: Peer Review Guidelines for Faculty Promotion and Tenure and Impact Rubric. Victoria, BC: University of Victoria.

Watermeyer, Richard. 2015. “Lost in the ‘Third Space’: The Impact of Public Engagement in Higher Education on Academic Identity, Research Practice and Career Progression.” European Journal of Higher Education 5(3): 331–347.

Woolcott, Geoff, Robyn Keast, David Pickernell. 2020. “Deep Impact: Re-Conceptualising University Research Impact Using Human Cultural Accumulation Theory.” Studies in Higher Education 45(6): 1197–1216.

Working Group on Evaluating Public History Scholarship (2017), ibid.

[←40]

American College Testing. 2021. Summary Findings: Survey of Higher Education Enrollment and Admissions Officers. Iowa City: ACT, Inc.

Marcus, Jon. 2021. “A Test for the Test Makers.” Education Next, 13 April.

Ross, Kelly Mae, Ilana Kowarski, Josh Moody. 2021. "21 Top Colleges That Are Flexible with Test Scores." U.S. News and World Report, 29 October.

Schultz, Laura, Brian Backstrom. 2021. Test-Optional Admissions Policies: Evidence from Implementations Pre- and Post-COVID-19. Albany: Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government.

[←41]

Such factors include the financial impact of the pandemic on families, the perceived value of online vs. in-person instruction, the location or prestige of the college or university, and a desire for the “college experience,” study-abroad opportunities, and in-person sports activities.

See:

Aucejo, Esteban M., Jacob French, Maria Paola Ugalde Araya, Basit Zafar. 2020. “The Impact of COVID-19 on Student Experiences and Expectations: Evidence from a Survey.” Journal of Public Economics 191: Article 104271.

Dickler, Jessica. 2021. “Another Wave of Students May Opt Out of College This Fall.” CNBC Personal Finance (blog), 30 July.

Hoevelmann, Kaitlyn. 2020. “How COVID-19 Is Affecting Students' College Decisions.” Open Vault (blog), 1 September.

Jaschik, Scott. 2021. “Admissions Have and Have-Nots.” Inside Higher Ed (blog), 11 January.

Meraji, Shereen Marisol. 2020. “Here's How to Pick a College during Coronavirus.” Interview with Elissa Nadworny. National Public Radio Life Kit. Podcast audio, 2 April.

[←42]

Buitendijk, Simone. 2021. “Confessions of a Leader in a Time of Crisis.” Medium (blog), 25 January.

Griffith, Launey Patton. 2021. Faculty Perspectives of Institutional Expectations at a University Seeking to Rise in Research Ranking: A Grounded Theory Study. Ed.D. thesis, University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Nature Editors. 2021. “Editorial: COVID Is Amplifying the Inadequacy of Research-Evaluation Processes.” Nature 591(7848): 7.

Oleschuk, Merin. 2020. “Gender Equity Considerations for Tenure and Promotion during COVID-19.” Canadian Review of Sociology / Revue canadienne de sociologie 57(3): 502–515.

[←43]

Agate et al. (2020), ibid.

[←44]

For the increasing challenges faced by editors to find reviewers, see:

Dean, Kathy Lund, Jeanie M. Forray. 2018. “The Long Goodbye: Can Academic Citizenship Sustain Academic Scholarship?” Journal of Management Inquiry 27(2): 164–168.

Havergal, Chris. 2015. "Is ‘Academic Citizenship’ under Strain?" Times Higher Education, 29 January.

Jubb, Michael. 2016. “Peer Review: The Current Landscape and Future Trends.” Learned Publishing 29(1): 13–21.

Warne, Verity. 2016. “Rewarding Reviewers — Sense or Sensibility?: A Wiley Study Explained.” Learned Publishing 29(1): 41–50.

Ideas to rectify the problem of finding qualified reviewers often center on tangible rewards, such as credit mechanisms or financial payments offered by the publisher, rather than on shifting the current evaluation system, as we suggest here. David Crotty (2016) takes umbrage at the idea of peer reviewers being rewarded in some way: “Many activities of a researcher are done as a service to one’s community, not out of an expectation that they will lead to financial reward or career advancement. Do we really need to turn philanthropic volunteerism into a carefully tracked and rated competitive exercise?” Most reviewers, however, prefer our approach — although we hope it is needless to say that we ourselves are not in favor of adding yet another metric per se. A survey conducted in July 2015 by the publisher John Wiley & Sons found that “Reviewers strongly believe that reviewing is inadequately acknowledged at present and should carry more weight in their institutions’ evaluation process,” with respondents saying that “Reviewing should be acknowledged as a measurable research output" and arguing that "I would spend more time reviewing if it was recognised as a measurable research activity” (Warne, 47).

Crotty, David. 2016. “Revisiting: The Problem(s) with Credit for Peer Review.” The Scholarly Kitchen (blog), 28 January.

Warne (2016), ibid.

See also:

Cochran, Angela. 2016. “Is More Recognition the Key to Peer Review Success?” The Scholarly Kitchen (blog), 19 September.

Crotty, David. 2015. “The Problem(s) with Credit for Peer Review.” The Scholarly Kitchen (blog), 17 June.

Davis, Phil. 2013. “Rewarding Reviewers: Money, Prestige, or Some of Both?” The Scholarly Kitchen (blog), 22 February.

Jubb (2016), ibid.

[←45]

Decades ago Ernest L. Boyer (1990) urged a now-famous rethinking of faculty reward, arguing:

It seems clear that while research is crucial, we need a renewed commitment to service, too. Thus, the most important obligation now confronting the nation’s colleges and universities is to break out of the tired old teaching versus research debate and define, in more creative ways, what it means to be a scholar. It’s time to recognize the full range of faculty talent and the great diversity of functions higher education must perform. For American higher education to remain vital we urgently need a more creative view of the work of the professoriate. In response to this challenge, we propose in this report four general views of scholarship: discovery, integration, application, and teaching.... Let’s agree that the 1990s will be the decade of undergraduate education. But let’s also candidly acknowledge that the degree to which this push for better education is achieved will be determined, in large measure, by the way scholarship is defined and, ultimately, rewarded. (xii–xiii)

While this broader concept of scholarship was much discussed at the time and the piece has (ironically, given its stance against lionization) become canonical in the literature, the more traditional view of scholarship — as research that results in specific outputs — remains entrenched.

Boyer (1990), ibid.

See also:

Alperin et al. (2021), ibid.

Cronin and La Barre (2004), ibid.

Lewis (2004), ibid.

Lisnic et al. (2018), ibid.

McKinney, Andrew, Amanda Coolidge. 2021. “Opinion: Work on Open Educational Resources Should Be Valued in Tenure Review.” Inside Higher Ed (blog), 10 August.

MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion (2007), ibid.

Risam, Roopika. 2014. “Rethinking Peer Review in the Age of Digital Humanities.” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 4: Article N3WQ0220.

Ruíz, Elena Flores. 2014. “Spectral Phenomenologies: Dwelling Poetically in Professional Philosophy.” Hypatia 29(1): 196–204.

Schimanski and Alperin (2018), ibid.

Seltzer (2018), ibid.

Tierney and Bensimon (1996), ibid.

Trower (2009), ibid.

Véliz and Gardner (2019), ibid.

[←46]

For arguments in favor of rethinking “service” as scholarship, see:

Alperin et al. (2019), ibid.

Bond, Sarah E., Kevin Gannon. 2019. “Public Writing and the Junior Scholar.” Chronicle Community (blog), 16 October.

Calhoun (2003), ibid.

Meyers, Christopher. 2014. “Public Philosophy and Tenure/Promotion: Rethinking ‘Teaching, Scholarship and Service.’” Essays in Philosophy 15(1): 58–76.

O'Meara, KerryAnn. 2002. “Uncovering the Values in Faculty Evaluation of Service as Scholarship.” The Review of Higher Education 26(1): 57–80.

O'Meara, KerryAnn. 2005. “Encouraging Multiple Forms of Scholarship in Faculty Reward Systems: Does It Make a Difference?” Research in Higher Education 46(5): 479–510.

Park (1996), ibid.

Saltmarsh et al. (2009), ibid.

Valdes, Peggy. 2020. Faculty Service Work: Perceptions, Influences and Performance. Ph.D. thesis, University of Iowa.

Working Group on Evaluating Public History Scholarship (2017), ibid.

[←47]

Highlighting many of these inequities are the data and storytelling at the heart of COVID Black, led by Kim Gallon, “an organization that recognizes the power of health data and information combined with critical and justice-oriented theoretical frameworks … to tell empowering stories about Black life that address racial health disparities.”

See also:

Adler, Laura. 2021. “The ‘Long Covid’ of American Higher Education.” SASE Blog, 1 July.

Bauman, Dan. 2020. “The Pandemic Has Pushed Hundreds of Thousands of Workers Out of Higher Education.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 October.

D'Ignazio, Catherine, Lauren F. Klein. 2020b. “Seven Intersectional Feminist Principles for Equitable and Actionable COVID-19 Data.” Big Data and Society 7(2): 1–6.

[←48]

For studies of how these stresses have particularly impacted scholars of color, see:

Feldman, Simon, Afshan Jafar. 2021. “Equity beyond COVID-19: Revising Tenure and Promotion Standards.” Academe 107(1): 27–31.

Levine, Felice, Na'ilah Suad Nasir, Cecilia Rios-Aguilar, Ryan Gildersleeve, Katherine Rosich, Megan Bang, Nathan Bell, Matthew Holsapple. 2021. Voices from the Field: The Impact of COVID-19 on Early Career Scholars and Doctoral Students. Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.

Staniscuaski, Fernanda, Livia Kmetzsch, Rossana C. Soletti, Fernanda Reichert, Eugenia Zandonà, Zelia M. C. Ludwig, Eliade F. Lima, Adriana Neumann, Ida V. D. Schwartz, Pamela B. Mello-Carpes, Alessandra S. K. Tamajusuku, Fernanda P. Werneck, Felipe K. Ricachenevsky, Camila Infanger, Adriana Seixas, Charley C. Staats, Leticia de Oliveira. 2021. “Gender, Race and Parenthood Impact Academic Productivity During the COVID-19 Pandemic: From Survey to Action.” Frontiers in Psychology 12: Article 1640.

Tugend (2020), ibid.

[←49]

That tenure clock extensions have only seemed “family friendly” has long been acknowledged, well before the pandemic. As with many aspects of academe, the pandemic made the problem only more obvious. Jessica Malisch et al. (2020) list a number of reasons why a tenure clock extension is “not a panacea to accommodate faculty experiencing challenges and delays in the research domain” (15380) — not least because of an extension’s effect on long-term earning potential. They instead argue for “strategies to promote equity [that] extend to … any academic affected by COVID-19” (15380).

Malisch, Jessica L., Breanna N. Harris, Shanen M. Sherrer, Kristy A. Lewis, Stephanie L. Shepherd, Pumtiwitt C. McCarthy, Jessica L. Spott, Elizabeth P. Karam, Naima Moustaid-Moussa, Jessica McCrory Calarco, Latha Ramalingam, Amelia E. Talley, Jaclyn E. Cañas-Carrell, Karin Ardon-Dryer, Dana A. Weiser, Ximena E. Bernal, Jennifer Deitloff. 2020. “Opinion: In the Wake of COVID-19, Academia Needs New Solutions to Ensure Gender Equity.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117(27): 15378–15381.

In an excellent Twitter thread, Ainsley Lambert-Swain underlines this point: “Universities choosing to offer an irrevocable delay for promotion & tenure to junior TT faculty in light of COVID is not supportive. Support would look like: a course release(s), more research funds, a jr sabbatical, a RA, a TA, and/or adjustments to tenure requirements. But these forms of support cost money, while optional delays to P&T potentially saves money. This is an important consideration for universities, given that higher ed budgets have taken a hit as a result of the pandemic. One of the things I keep thinking about is how gender, family, and work expectations will collide to shape who takes these delays and how this will shape gender inequity in pay and career advancement in the longterm in higher ed.”

Lambert-Swain, Ainsley [@_SocSpecialist_]. 2022. Universities choosing to offer an irrevocable delay for promotion & tenure to junior TT faculty in light of COVID is [Tweet]. Twitter, 19 January.

See:

American Association of University Professors. 2006. Statement of Principles on Family Responsibilities and Academic Work. Washington, DC: American Association of University Professors.

Antecol, Heather, Kelly Bedard, Jenna Stearns. 2018. “Equal but Inequitable: Who Benefits from Gender-Neutral Tenure Clock Stopping Policies?” American Economic Review 108(9): 2420–2441.

June, Audrey Williams. 2010. “Family-Friendly Policies Fall Short When Professors Worry about Backlash.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 14 February.

Manchester, Colleen Flaherty, Lisa M. Leslie, Amit Kramer. 2013. “Is the Clock Still Ticking? An Evaluation of the Consequences of Stopping the Tenure Clock.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 66(1): 3–31.

Thornton, Saranna R. 2005. “Implementing Flexible Tenure Clock Policies.” New Directions for Higher Education 130: 81–90.

Thornton, Saranna R. 2009. “An Examination of the Implementation and Utilization of Stop the Tenure Clock Policies in Canadian and U.S. Economics Departments.” Paper presented at the American Social Sciences Association Conference, San Francisco, 5 January.

Wolfers, Justin. 2016. “A Family-Friendly Policy That’s Friendliest to Male Professors.” The New York Times, 24 June.

[←50]

Lee, Rachel, Sarah Tindal Kareem, Marissa López, Safiya Noble, Louise Hornby, Michael Rothberg, Yasemin Yildiz, Veronica J. Santos, Aradhna Tripati, Matthew Fisher, Anahid Nersessian, Tzung Hsiai, Meredith Cohen, Kathryn Norberg, Ananya Roy, Yifang Zhu, Victoria Marks, Nina Eidsheim, Jessica D. Gipson, Jessica Rett, David D. Kim, Kirsten Schwarz, Suzanne E. Paulson, Vilma Ortiz, Robin D. G. Kelley, Shana L. Redmond, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Sharon Gerstel, Grace Kyungwon Hong, Shanna Shaked, Jessica Cattelino, Aslı Ü. Bâli, Noah Zatz, Sarah Haley, Ondine von Ehrenstein, Randall Kuhn, Elisa Franco, Wendie Robbins, Ann R. Karagozian, Jasper Kok, Marissa Seamans, Andrea M. Kasko. 2020. “Open Letter on Research Productivity and Childcare.” UCLA Center for the Study of Women, 6 July.

[←51]

Throughout 2020, 2021, and now into 2022, Colleen Flaherty authored a number of posts for Inside Higher Ed documenting a series of studies showing a slide in women’s research productivity as a result of COVID-19: “Working from Home during COVID-19 Proves Challenging for Faculty Members” (24 March 2020), “No Room of One's Own” (21 April 2020), “More Bad News on Women's Research Productivity” (20 May 2020), “Babar in the Room” (11 August 2020), “Women Are Falling Behind” (20 October 2020), “COVID-19 and Beyond: Solutions for Academic Mothers” (11 March 2021), “Where Caregiving and Gender Intersect” (31 March 2021), “More Support for COVID-19–Affected Professors” (27 January 2022).

See also:

Ahn, Sun Joo (Grace), Emily T. Cripe, Brooke Foucault Welles, Shannon C. McGregor, Katy E. Pearce, Nikki Usher, Jessica Vitak. 2021. “Academic Caregivers on Organizational and Community Resilience in Academia (Fuck Individual Resilience).” Communication, Culture, and Critique 14(2): 301–305.

Barber, Brad M., Wei Jiang, Adair Morse, Manju Puri, Heather Tookes, Ingrid M. Werner. 2021. “What Explains Differences in Finance Research Productivity during the Pandemic?” The Journal of Finance 76(4): 1655–1697.

Bender, Sara. Kristina S. Brown, Deanna L. Hensley Kasitz, Olga Vega. 2021. "Academic Women and Their Children: Parenting During COVID-19 and the Impact on Scholarly Productivity." Family Relations [30 December].

Carrigan (2020), ibid.

Cui, Ruomeng, Hao Ding, Feng Zhu. 2021. “Gender Inequality in Research Productivity during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Manufacturing and Service Operations Management [16 June]: Article 991.

Deryugina, Tatyana, Olga Shurchkov, Jenna Stearns. 2021. “COVID-19 Disruptions Disproportionately Affect Female Academics.” AEA Papers and Proceedings 111: 164–168.

Docka-Filipek, Danielle, Lindsey B. Stone. 2021. “‘Twice a ‘Housewife’: On Academic Precarity, ‘Hysterical’ Women, Faculty Mental Health, and Service as Gendered Care Work for the ‘University Family’ in Pandemic Times.” Gender, Work and Organization 28(6): 2158–2179.

Feldman and Jafar (2021), ibid.

Fulweiler, Robinson W., Sarah W. Davies, Jennifer F. Biddle, Amy J. Burgin, Emily H. G. Cooperdock, Torrance C. Hanley, Carly D. Kenkel, Amy M. Marcarelli, Catherine M. Matassa, Talea L. Mayo, Lory Z. Santiago-Vázquez, Nikki Traylor-Knowles, Maren Ziegler. “Rebuild the Academy: Supporting Academic Mothers during COVID-19 and Beyond.” PLOS Biology 19(3): e3001100.

Kim, Eunji, Shawn Patterson Jr. 2022. “The Pandemic and Gender Inequality in Academia.” PS: Political Science and Politics 55.1: 109–116 .

Levine et al. (2021), ibid.

Oleschuk (2020), ibid.

Skinner, Makala, Nicole Betancourt, Christine Wolff-Eisenberg. 2021. The Disproportionate Impact of the Pandemic on Women and Caregivers in Academia. New York: Ithaka S+R.

Squazzoni, Flaminio, Giangiacomo Bravo, Francisco Grimaldo, Daniel Garcıa-Costa, Mike Farjam, Bahar Mehmani. 2021. “Gender Gap in Journal Submissions and Peer Review During the First Wave of the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Study on 2329 Elsevier Journals.” PLOS ONE 16(10): e0257919.

Staniscuaski et al. (2021), ibid.

Sutherland, Georgina, Martha Vazquez Corona, Meghan Bohren, Tania King, Lila Moosad, Humaira Maheen, Anna Scovelle, Cathy Vaughan. 2021. “A Rapid Gender Impact Assessment of Australian University Responses to COVID-19.” Higher Education Research and Development [31 August].

[←52]

Nicholas, David. 2021. “A Lost Generation?: Early Career Researchers and the Pandemic.” Impact of Social Sciences (blog), 14 December.

Tugend (2020), ibid.

[←53]

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explains the condition this way: “Although most people with COVID-19 get better within weeks of illness, some people experience post-COVID conditions. Post-COVID conditions are a wide range of new, returning, or ongoing health problems people can experience four or more weeks after first being infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. Even people who did not have COVID-19 symptoms in the days or weeks after they were infected can have post-COVID conditions. These conditions can present as different types and combinations of health problems for different lengths of time. These post-COVID conditions may also be known as long COVID, long-haul COVID, post-acute COVID-19, long-term effects of COVID, or chronic COVID.”

More information about post-COVID conditions can be found on the CDC website.

See also:

Nalbandian, Ali, Kartik Sehgal, Aakriti Gupta, Mahesh V. Madhavan, Claire McGroder, Jacob S. Stevens, Joshua R. Cook, Anna S. Nordvig, Daniel Shalev, Tejasav S. Sehrawat, Neha Ahluwalia, Behnood Bikdeli, Donald Dietz, Caroline Der-Nigoghossian, Nadia Liyanage-Don, Gregg F. Rosner, Elana J. Bernstein, Sumit Mohan, Akinpelumi A. Beckley, David S. Seres, Toni K. Choueiri, Nir Uriel, John C. Ausiello, Domenico Accili, Daniel E. Freedberg, Matthew Baldwin, Allan Schwartz, Daniel Brodie, Christine Kim Garcia, Mitchell S. V. Elkind, Jean M. Connors, John P. Bilezikian, Donald W. Landry, Elaine Y. Wan. 2021. “Post-Acute COVID-19 Syndrome.” Nature Medicine 27: 601–615.

Phillips, Steven, Michelle A. Williams. 2021. “Confronting Our Next National Health Disaster — Long-Haul Covid.” New England Journal of Medicine 385: 577–579.

[←54]

Asimov, Nanette. 2021. “Here’s What Bay Area Doctors Say about How COVID Affects the Brain.” San Francisco Chronicle, 10 October.

Bernard, Jessica. 2021. “Preliminary Research Finds That Even Mild Cases of COVID-19 Leave a Mark on the Brain — but It’s Not Yet Clear How Long It Lasts.” The Conversation, 24 September.

Hugon, Jacques, Eva-Flore Msika, Mathieu Queneau, Karim Farid, Claire Paquet. 2022. “Long COVID: Cognitive Complaints (Brain Fog) and Dysfunction of the Cingulate Cortex.” Journal of Neurology 269: 44–46.

Nasserie, Tahmina, Michael Hittle, Steven N. Goodman. 2021. “Assessment of the Frequency and Variety of Persistent Symptoms among Patients with COVID-19: A Systematic Review.” JAMA Network Open 4(5): e2111417.

[←55]

Neuman, Scott. 2021. “New Study Finds More Than a Third of COVID-19 Patients Have Symptoms Months Later.” NPR, 29 September. Original study: Taquet, Maxime, Quentin Dercon, Sierra Luciano, John R. Geddes, Masud Husain, Paul J. Harrison. 2021. “Incidence, Co-Occurrence, and Evolution of Long-COVID Features: A 6-Month Retrospective Cohort Study of 273,618 Survivors of COVID-19." PLOS Medicine 18(9): e1003773.

See also:

Bach, Katie. 2022. Is "Long Covid" Worsening the Labor Shortage? Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 11 January.

Cohen, Gabe. 2021. “COVID ‘Long Haulers’ Struggle to Work Amid Labor Shortage.” CNN, 4 November.

Doheny, Kathleen. 2021. “Long COVID: More Clues Coming, but No ‘Aha’ Moments Yet.” WebMD, 12 November.

Ledford, Heidi. 2021. “Do Vaccines Protect against Long COVID?: What the Data Say.” Nature 599: 546–548.

Ungar, Laura. 2022. “Can You Get Long COVID after an Infection with Omicron?” AP News, 9 February.

[←56]

Office for Civil Rights. 2021. "Guidance on ‘Long COVID’ as a Disability Under the ADA, Section 504, and Section 1557." Health and Human Services (website), 26 July.

[←57]

See, for example:

Burke (2021), ibid.

Grigely (2017), ibid.

Leigh, Jennifer, Nicole Brown. 2020. “Afterword.” In Ableism in Academia: Theorising Experiences of Disabilities and Chronic Illnesses in Higher Education, edited by Nicole Brown and Jennifer Leigh, 237–238. London: UCL Press.

Price et al (2017), ibid.

Titchkosky (2008), ibid.

Warner, John. 2022. “Surrender Is Not Adaptation.” Inside Higher Ed (blog), 3 January.

[←58]

Ali, Safia Samee. 2021. “Covid Long-Haulers Face New Challenges as They Head to College. Universities Are Listening.” NBC News, 9 September.

Gose, Ben. 2021. Covid-19’s Impact on Learning Accommodations. Washington, DC: The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Redden, Elizabeth. 2021b. “Supporting Students with Long COVID.” Inside Higher Ed (blog), 22 October.

[←59]

At the start of the pandemic, as national- and state-imposed lockdowns were becoming the norm and colleges and universities followed suit, there was much discussion of safety and care for the campus community. In March 2020 the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors issued a joint statement of principles addressing the needs of students, staff, and faculty of whatever status and urging, among other guidelines, that “Every employee should be held harmless economically and professionally” and “all staff members should be provided the authority to telework” throughout the course of the pandemic, noting in particular that “Decisions to continue teaching a course online after the COVID-19 crisis has abated should follow the principles laid out in AAUP’s Statement on Online and Distance Education, which requires consultation with appropriate faculty decision-making bodies.”

American Federation of Teachers, American Association of University Professors. 2020. AFT and AAUP Principles for Higher Education Response to COVID-19. Washington, DC: American Association of University Professors.

In the “Afterword” to their collected volume Ableism in Academia: Theorising Experiences of Disabilities and Chronic Illnesses in Higher Education, also written in March 2020 as COVID lockdowns had just begun, Jennifer Leigh and Nicole Brown (2020) (ibid.) optimistically hope:

Physical presence may no longer be seen as a requirement for teaching, learning, research and the dissemination of research. The barriers around lack of accessibility that those with chronic illness, disability and neurodiversity have encountered may be tumbling down. Inability to attend physically may no longer be seen as a barrier to promotion and progression. Institutions are rolling out technology and guidance to ease access, and it is hard to see that these will be taken away once we have ridden out this current crisis. (237)

Commenting as well on the sudden and complete shift to online instruction in March 2020, when “it is as if we have awoken in a parallel universe to find, like magic, we can all successfully telecommute for work and studies,” Mia Ocean observes:

This says something about who we value. We could not grant accommodations for individuals with dis/abilities, but we can complete an overhaul of the system for people without dis/abilities. While flexible attendance and telework are convenient examples given our current circumstances, my argument is not limited to them. My goal is to shift our view of reasonable accommodations processes in our own institutions — which can ironically be rather unreasonable. Additionally, I want to draw attention to the arbitrary nature with which we make decisions that disproportionately impact the dis/ability community, keep individuals with dis/abilities from fully participating in the workplace and higher education, and reproduce historical inequities. (1546)

Ocean, Mia. 2021. “Telework during COVID-19: Exposing Ableism in U.S. Higher Education.” Disability and Society 36(9): 1543–1548.

As we now know from the vantage point of 18 months later, much of the academy — at least in the United States — has returned to “business as usual,” even with the spread of the much more virulent Delta variant; it has been a rare case for faculty and staff to have been consulted in any meaningful way.

See, for example:

Felson, Jacob, Amy Adamczyk. 2021. “Online or in Person? Examining College Decisions to Reopen during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Fall 2020.” Socius 7(1): Article 2378023120988203.

Flaherty, Colleen. 2021. "Autistic Professor Denied Accommodation over Mask." Inside Higher Ed (blog), 15 September.

Flaherty, Colleen. 2021. “‘Crazy Catch-22.’” Inside Higher Ed (blog), 9 September.

Flaherty, Colleen. 2021. “Seeing Themselves Out.” Inside Higher Ed (blog), 24 August.

Marsicano, Christopher, Kathleen Felten, Luis Toledo, Madeline Buitendorp. 2020. Tracking Campus Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Davidson, NC: Davidson College.

Meyerhofer, Kelly. 2021. “UW-Madison Faculty Want Answers on Remote Teaching Requests for Vulnerable Instructors.” Wisconsin State Journal, 29 August.

Moore, Matthew. 2021. “Some U[niversity] of A[rkansas] Students and Professors Being Denied Remote Learning Accommodations.” Ozarks at Large. KUAF 91.3 Public Radio. Fayetteville, AR: KUAF, 7 September.

Mousavizadeh, Philip. 2021. “Some Faculty with COVID-19-Related Health Concerns Criticize In-Person Teaching Mandate, Accommodations Policy.” Yale News, 24 September.

Pierce, Joseph F. 2021. “Opinion: How Can We Trust Administrators?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 14 September.

Redden, Elizabeth. 2021a. “Cornell Says No Remote Teaching as COVID Fears Persist.” Inside Higher Ed (blog), 13 August.

Stripling, Jack. 2021. “Lower Pay. Less Job Security. More Covid-19 Risk?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 25 February.

Weineck, Silke-Maria. 2021. “The Dystopian Delta University.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 23 September.

[←60]

American Association of University Professors. 2018b. Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Washington, DC: American Association of University Professors.

Michigan State University’s current Appointment, Reappointment, Tenure, and Promotion Recommendations can be found as Appendix H.

See also:

American Council on Education, American Association of University Professors, United Educators Insurance Risk Retention Group. 2000. Good Practice in Tenure Evaluation: Advice for Tenured Faculty, Department Chairs, and Academic Administrators. Washington, DC: American Council on Education.

Jackson et al. (2017), ibid.

MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion (2006), ibid.

Rice, R. Eugene, Mary Deane Sorcinelli. 2005. “Can the Tenure Process Be Improved?” In The Questions of Tenure, edited by Richard P. Chait, 101–124. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Tierney and Bensimon (1996), ibid.

Trower, Cathy A. 2005. “What Is Current Policy?” In The Questions of Tenure, edited by Richard P. Chait, 32–68. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Trower, Cathy Ann. 2012. Success on the Tenure Track: Five Keys to Faculty Job Satisfaction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Youn, Ted I. K., Tanya M. Price. 2009. “Learning from the Experience of Others: The Evolution of Faculty Tenure and Promotion Rules in Comprehensive Institutions.” The Journal of Higher Education 80(2): 204-237.

[←61]

Several studies have shown that although most pre-tenure faculty believe they are clear as to their departmental criteria for tenure, their perceptions of the fairness of the process can differ widely owing to what Patricia Matthew (2016b, xv) calls the “unwritten codes” of tenure. Underrepresented minority women in particular are more likely to report inconsistent and even contradictory messaging about expectations, ineffective or nonexistent mentoring within their department, strained relationships with peers, and a lack of regard for their work, any or all of which may negatively affect the outcome of their tenure case. These do not seem to be simply perceptions. Women of color — particularly Black and Indigenous women — are in reality the least likely of all demographic groups to achieve tenure. Even when they do achieve tenure, women of color are also least likely to be promoted to the rank of full professor.

Matthew, Patricia A. 2016b. “It’s Not Just Us. This Is Happening Everywhere: On CVs and the Michigan Women.” In Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure, edited by Patricia A. Matthew, xi–xvii. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

See:

Agathangelou, Anna M., L. H. M. Ling. 2002. “An Unten(ur)able Position: The Politics of Teaching for Women of Color in the US.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 4(3): 368–398.

Ambrose et al. (2005), ibid.

Beloney-Morrison, Tonetta. 2003. Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine: Exploring the Promotion and Tenure Process of African American Female Professors at Select Research I Universities in the South. Ph.D. thesis, Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College.

Boyd, Tammy, Rosa Cintrón, Mia Alexander-Snow. 2010. “The Experience of Being a Junior Minority Female Faculty Member.” Forum on Public Policy: A Journal of the Oxford Round Table 2010(2): [n.p.]

Carlson, Julie A. 2008. “If I Had Only Known: Challenges Experienced by Women New to the Professoriate.” Advancing Women in Leadership 28: [n.p.]

Damasco and Hodges (2012), ibid.

Diggs et al. (2009), ibid.

Griffin et al. (2011), ibid.

Herbert, Sharnine S.. 2012. “What Have You Done for Me Lately?: Black Female Faculty and ‘Talking Back’ to the Tenure Process at PWIs.” Women and Language 35(2): 99–102.

Jayakumar et al. (2009), ibid.

Johnsrud and Sadao (1998), ibid.

Jones, Brandolyn, Eunjin Hwang, Rebecca M. Bustamante. 2015. “African American Female Professors’ Strategies for Successful Attainment of Tenure and Promotion at Predominately White Institutions: It Can Happen.” Education, Citizenship and Social Justice 10(2): 133–151.

June, Audrey Williams. 2008. “On the Road to Tenure, Minority Professors Report Frustrations.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 December.

Kelly, Bridget Turner, Kristin I. McCann. “Women Faculty of Color: Stories Behind the Statistics.” The Urban Review 46(4): 681–702.

Lawrence et al. (2014), ibid.

Lee, Laura J., Curtis A. Leonard. 2001. “Violence in Predominantly White Institutions of Higher Education: Tenure and Victim Blaming.” In Violence as Seen through a Prism of Color, edited by Letha A. See and Coramae Richey Mann, 167–186. New York: Routledge.

Lisnic, Rodica. 2016. Reasonableness and Clarity of Tenure Expectations: Gender and Race Differences in Faculty Perceptions. Ph.D. thesis, University of Arkansas.

Lisnic et al. (2018), ibid.

Medina, Catherine, Gaye Luna. 2000. “Narratives from Latina Professors in Higher Education.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 31(1): 47–66.

Mitchell, Natasha A., Jaronda J. Miller. 2011. “The Unwritten Rules of the Academy: A Balancing Act for Women of Color.” In Women of Color in Higher Education: Changing Directions and New Perspectives, edited by Gaëtane Jean-Marie and Brenda Lloyd-Jones, 193–218. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing.

Ponjuan et al. (2011), ibid.

Price, Jammie, Shelia R. Cotten. 2006. “Teaching, Research, and Service: Expectations of Assistant Professors.” The American Sociologist 37(1): 5–21.

Prottas, David J., Rita J. Shea-Van Fossen, Catherine M. Cleaver, Jeanine K. Andreassi. 2017. “Relationships among Faculty Perceptions of Their Tenure Process and Their Commitment and Engagement.” Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education 9(2): 242–254.

Roos and Gatta (2009), ibid.

Smooth, Wendy G. 2016. “Intersectionality and Women’s Advancement in the Discipline and across the Academy.” Politics, Groups, and Identities 4(3): 513–528.

Stanley (2006), ibid.

Thomas and Hollenshead (2001), ibid.

Tillman, Linda C. 2001. “Mentoring African American Faculty in Predominantly White Institutions.” Research in Higher Education 42(3): 295–325.

Trower (2009), ibid.

Turner, Caroline Sotello Viernes. 2002. “Women of Color in Academe: Living with Multiple Marginality.” The Journal of Higher Education 73(1): 74–93.

Turner et al. (2008), ibid.

Zambrana, Ruth Enid, Rashawn Ray, Michelle M. Espino, Corinne Castro, Beth Douthirt Cohen, Jennifer Eliason. 2015. “‘Don't Leave Us Behind’: The Importance of Mentoring for Underrepresented Minority Faculty.” American Educational Research Journal 52(1): 40–72.

[←62]

As Diane Dawson and colleagues (2022) point out, ”While collegiality plays a role in the morale and effectiveness of academic departments, it is amorphic and difficult to assess, and could be misused to stifle dissent or enforce homogeneity” (1). Nevertheless, they note, ”collegiality likely plays an important role in RPT processes, whether it is explicitly acknowledged in policies and guidelines or not” (1), and, following Agate et al. (2020; ibid.), argue, in light of this trend, that ”While none of the institutions that defined or assessed collegiality used a value-centric approach, there is ample opportunity for them to do so, especially as momentum continues to build towards research assessment reform” (16).

Dawson, Diane, Esteban Morales, Erin C. McKiernan, Lesley A. Schimanski, Meredith T. Niles, Juan Pablo Alperin. 2022. “The Role of Collegiality in Academic Review, Promotion, and Tenure.” bioRxiv (preprint), 5 January.

See:

Alger, Jonathan B. 1998. “Minority Faculty and Measuring Merit: Start by Playing Fair.” Academe 84(4): 71.

Ambrose et al. (2005), ibid.

Bruce (2011), ibid.

Campbell and O’Meara (2014), ibid.

Cho (2006), ibid.

Croom, Natasha N. 2017. “Promotion Beyond Tenure: Unpacking Racism and Sexism in the Experiences of Black Womyn Professors.” The Review of Higher Education 40(4): 557–583.

Frazier (2011), ibid.

Gray, Aysa. “The Bias of ‘Professionalism’ Standards.” Stanford Social Innovation Review, 4 June.

Griffin, K. L. (2013), ibid.

Haag, Pamela. 2005. “Is Collegiality Code for Hating Ethnic, Racial, and Female Faculty at Tenure Time?” The Education Digest 71(1): 57–62.

Mawdsley, Ralph D. 1999. “Collegiality as a Factor in Tenure Decisions.” Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education 13(2): 167–177.

MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion (2006), ibid.

Morley (2003), ibid.

O'Meara, KerryAnn. 2004. “Beliefs about Post-Tenure Review: The Influence of Autonomy, Collegiality, Career Stage, and Institutional Context.” The Journal of Higher Education 75(2): 178–202.

Ray, Victor. 2019. “Why So Many Organizations Stay White.” Harvard Business Review, 19 November.

Romano, Carlin. 2000. “On Collegiality, College Style.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 26 May.

Stanley (2006), ibid.

Trower (2009), ibid.

[←63]

See, for example:

Baffoe (2014), ibid.

Belcher, Brian, Katherine E. Rasmussen, Matthew R. Kemshaw, Deborah A. Zornes. 2015. “Defining and Assessing Research Quality in a Transdisciplinary Context.” Research Evaluation 25(1): 1-17.

De Cruz, Helen. 2018. “Prestige Bias: An Obstacle to a Just Academic Philosophy.” Ergo 5: Article 10.

Delgado Bernal and Villalpando (2002), ibid.

Ede and Lunsford (2001), ibid.

Gonzales and LaPointe Terosky (2016), ibid.

Hengel, Erin. 2017. Publishing While Female: Are Women Held to Higher Standards? Evidence from Peer Review. Cambridge Working Papers in Economics. Report 1753. Cambridge: Cambridge University.

Hurtado and Sharkness (2008), ibid.

Jackson et al. (2017), ibid.

Jenkins (2013), ibid.

Morales et al. (2021), ibid.

O’Meara et al. (2018), ibid.

Pereira, Maria do Mar. 2012. “‘Feminist Theory Is Proper Knowledge, but …’: The Status of Feminist Scholarship in the Academy.” Feminist Theory 13(3): 283–303.

Richardson (2018), ibid.

Ruíz (2014), ibid.

Spender, Dale. 1981. “The Gatekeepers: A Feminist Critique of Academic Publishing.” In Doing Feminist Research, edited by Helen Roberts, 186–202. New York: Routledge.

[←64]

Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. 2016. On Collegiality as a Criterion for Faculty Evaluation. Washington, DC: American Association of University Professors.

[←65]

Miles, Corey. 2021. “Are Tenure and Social Justice Compatible?” In “The Future of Tenure: Rethinking a Beleaguered Institution.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 7 April.

See also:

De La Torre (2018), ibid.

Gillberg (2020), ibid.

Hester, Jacqueline. 2020. The Battlefield of the Academy: The Resilience and Resistance of Black Women Faculty. Ph.D. thesis, Illinois State University.

Jimerson, Randall. 2007. “Archives for All: Professional Responsibility and Social Justice.” The American Archivist 70(2): 252–281.

Kumbier and Starkey (2016), ibid.

Nagar, Richa. 2014. Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms across Scholarship and Activism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Namaste, Viviane. 2009. “Undoing Theory: The ‘Transgender Question’ and the Epistemic Violence of Anglo-American Feminist Theory.” Hypatia 24(3): 11–32.

Saltmarsh et al. (2009), ibid.

Seifer et al. (2012), ibid.

Urrieta, Luis, Lina R. Méndez Benavídez. 2007. “Community Commitment and Activist Scholarship: Chicana/o Professors and the Practice of Consciousness.” Journal of Hispanic Higher Education 6(3): 222–236.

Zambrana et al. (2015), ibid.

[←66]

Not much seems to have changed since Joseph Raben made this observation in the inaugural issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly in 2007:

The time it will take for the academic establishment to recognize the value of online publication is a function of its willingness to accept the replacement of a system that has seemed to operate relatively well until now. Books and print articles have been the stairs leading to the tenure, promotion, higher salaries and reduced teaching loads that are the system’s rewards for scholarly industry. When deans and even chairs are incapable of evaluating the content of such publications, they have been able to rely on the number of a candidate’s publications, their substance, the prestige of their publishers and (to a limited extent in the humanities) the number of times they are cited elsewhere. With understandable ergophobia, these administrators do not eagerly anticipate learning a new system without these comforting means of measuring accomplishment.

Raben, Joseph. 2007. “Tenure, Promotion and Digital Publication.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 1(1); Article 6.

See also:

Greetham, David. “The Resistance to Digital Humanities.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold, 438–451. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Seltzer (2018), ibid.

[←67]

Public scholarship” is an umbrella term that covers two distinct but complementary aspects.

Community-engaged work is scholarship that — as the name implies — is embedded within a community. Collaborators are members of that community. And while many of the goals and priorities of the community will be shared, most or even all of the non-academic community members may not be particularly interested in producing the traditional outputs that will get their academic colleagues rewarded. (For case studies highlighting this aspect of public scholarship in the humanities, see the 2021 working paper Public Humanities and Publication by Kath Burton, Catherine Cocks, Darcy Cullen, Daniel Fisher, Barry M Goldenberg, Janneken Smucker, Friederike Sundaram, Dave Tell, Anne Valks, and Rebecca Wingo.)

The second aspect of public scholarship is that of communicating scholarship to the public, e.g., such as the role public intellectuals play. While most higher education institutions value this work — especially those working in public affairs offices — such efforts are not recognized and rewarded in the same way as traditional outputs, but rather most often fall into the category of “service,” the least prestigious and least well recognized of the three activities faculty regularly track and report, thereby reducing any incentive to spend the considerable time and effort required to communicate scholarship in public fora.

One notable attempt at bringing these two aspects of public scholarship together is the Public Philosophy Journal.

For more on the challenges and opportunities of public scholarship, see:

Alperin et al. (2019), ibid.

Arbuckle (2019), ibid.

Belfiore, Eleonora. 2015. “‘Impact,’ ‘Value’ and ‘Bad Economics’: Making Sense of the Problem of Value in the Arts and Humanities.” Review of Communication 19(2): 127–146.

Benneworth et al. (2018a), ibid.

Benneworth, Paul, Bojana Ćulum, Thomas Farnell, Frans Kaiser, Marco Seeber, Ninoslav Šćukanec, Hans Vossensteyn, Don Westerheijden. 2018b. Mapping and Critical Synthesis of Current State-of-the-Art on Community Engagement in Higher Education. Zagreb: Institute for the Development of Education.

Bloomgarden (2008), ibid.

Brewer, John D. 2013. The Public Value of the Social Sciences: An Interpretive Essay. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Callard et al. (2015), ibid.

Cox, Jordana, Lauren Tilton. 2019. “The Digital Public Humanities: Giving New Arguments and New Ways to Argue.” Review of Communication 19(2): 127–146.

Ćulum (2014), ibid.

Dallyn, Sam, Mike Marinetto, Carl Cederström. 2015. “The Academic as Public Intellectual: Examining Public Engagement in the Professionalised Academy.” Sociology 49(6): 1031–1046.

Derrick, Gemma E., Vincenzo Pavone. 2013. “Democratising Research Evaluation: Achieving Greater Public Engagement with Bibliometrics-Informed Peer Review.” Science and Public Policy 40(5): 563–575.

Eatman et al. (2018), ibid.

Ellison and Eatman (2008), ibid.

Fleerackers, Alice, Carina Albrecht. 2019. “You-niversity?: Perceptions on the Public Effectiveness of University Knowledge Production.” Public Philosophy Journal 2(1): Article 2.

Franklin, Brinley. 2012. “Surviving to Thriving: Advancing the Institutional Mission.” Journal of Library Administration 52(1): 94–107.

Harley et al. (2010), ibid.

Hoffman (2021), ibid.

Kirschenbaum (2012), ibid.

Kruss et al. (2016), ibid.

Langdridge, Darren, Jacqui Gabb, Jamie Lawson. 2019. “Art as a Pathway to Impact: Understanding the Affective Experience of Public Engagement with Film.” The Sociological Review 67(3): 585–601.

Luckman, Susan. 2004. “More than the Sum of Its Parts: The Humanities and Communicating the ‘Hidden Work’ of Research.” In Innovation and Tradition: The Arts, Humanities and the Knowledge Economy, edited by Jane Kenway, Elizabeth Bullen, and Simon Robb, 82–90. New York: Peter Lang.

Middlemass, Rachel. 2020. “What Is the Role of the Social Sciences in the Response to COVID-19? Four Priorities for Shaping the Post-Pandemic World.” Impact of Social Sciences (blog), 25 August.

O’Meara et al. (2011), ibid.

Orange (2015), ibid.

Renwick et al. (2020), ibid.

Saltmarsh et al. (2009), ibid.

Slack, Kristen. 2022. "What Is Engaged Scholarship and How Can It Improve Your Research?" Inside Higher Ed (blog), 3 January.

Tremblay (2017), ibid.

Watermeyer (2015), ibid.

Weitkamp, Emma. 2015. “Between Ambition and Evidence.” Journal of Science Communication 14(2): Article 14020501.

Woods, Leah, Jamie Willis, D. C. Wright, Tim Knapp. 2013. “Building Community Engagement in Higher Education: Public Sociology at Missouri State University.” Journal of Public Scholarship in Higher Education 3: 67–90.

Woolcott et al. (2020), ibid.

Working Group on Evaluating Public History Scholarship (2017), ibid.

Zaloom, Caitlin. 2021. “Bringing the Humanities to the Public — and the Public to the Humanities.” In “The Future of Tenure: Rethinking a Beleaguered Institution.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 7 April.

Zvyagintseva, Lydia. 2015. Articulating a Vision for Community-Engaged Data Curation in the Digital Humanities. M.L.I.S. thesis, University of Alberta.

[←68]

On concerns about rigid timelines and pressures to produce “on the clock” that may not be conducive to thoughtful — much less engaged — scholarship, see:

Bastian, Michelle. 2013. “Finding Time for Philosophy.” In Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change?, edited by Katrina Hutchison and Fiona Jenkins, 215–230. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Berg, Maggie, Barbara K. Seeber. 2016. The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Conesa, Ester. 2018. “How Are Academic Lives Sustained?: Gender and the Ethics of Care in the Neoliberal Accelerated Academy.” Impact of Social Sciences, 27 March.

Felt, Ulrike. 2017. “More Work Is Required to Make Academic ‘Timescapes’ Worth Inhabiting and to Open Up Space for Creative Work.” Impact of Social Sciences (blog), 29 May.

Kremakova, Milena. 2016. “Mathematicians against the Clock: Accelerated Work and Accelerated Careers in the Neoliberal University.” Impact of Social Sciences (blog), 3 March.

Martell, Luke. 2014. “The Slow University: Inequality, Power and Alternatives.” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung 15(3): Article 10.

Mitterle, Alexander, Carsten Würmann, Roland Bloch. 2016. “It's Time to Teach — but Which Time Is It?: Tracing Academic Practices through More Appropriate Time Metrics.” Impact of Social Sciences (blog), 24 May.

Mountz et al. (2015), ibid.

Müller, Ruth. 2016. “A Culture of Speed: Anticipation, Acceleration and Individualization in Academic Science.” Impact of Social Sciences (blog), 11 May.

Ocampo, Anthony C. 2021. “Junior Faculty Don’t Need More Time, Senior Faculty Need More Imagination.” In “The Future of Tenure: Rethinking a Beleaguered Institution.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 7 April.

Pels, Dick. 2017. “Lies Are Fast, Truth Is Slow: The Importance of Mastering the Rhythms of Academic Life and Work.” Impact of Social Sciences (blog), 14 March.

Read and Bradley (2018), ibid.

Rizvi, Uzma Z. 2016. “Decolonization as Care.” Savage Minds (blog), 19 September.

Vostal, Filip. 2013. “In Search of Scholarly Time: Should Academics Adopt an Ethic of Slowness or Ninja-Like Productivity?” Impact of Social Sciences (blog), 20 November.

Vostal, Filip. 2016. Accelerating Academia: The Changing Structure of Academic Time. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Vostal, Filip, ed. 2021. Inquiring into Academic Timescapes. Bingley: Emerald Publishing.

[←69]

Cilano, Cara, Sonja Fritzsche, Bill Hart-Davidson, Christopher P. Long. 2020. “Staying with the Trouble: Designing a Values-Enacted Academy.” Impact of Social Sciences (blog) 23 April.

[←70]

For more on the importance of mentoring, no matter what the career stage, see:

Blau, Francine D., Janet M. Currie, Rachel T. A. Croson, Donna K. Ginther. 2010. “Can Mentoring Help Female Assistant Professors? Interim Results from a Randomized Trial.” American Economic Review 100(2): 348–352.

Brown, Elisha, Darrick Hamilton, Sandy Darity. 2017. “Mentorship without Hierarchy.” The Atlantic, 6 September.

Bruxvoort, Diane. 2013. “Mentoring in Academic Libraries.” In Workplace Culture in Academic Libraries: The Early 21st Century, edited by Kelly Blessinger and Paul Hrycaj, 251–261. Oxford: Chandos Publishing.

Canale, Anne Marie, Cheryl Herdklotz, Lynn Wild. 2013. Mid-Career Faculty Support: The Middle Years of the Academic Profession. Rochester: Rochester Institute of Technology.

Curtin, Nicola, Janet Malley, Abigail J. Stewart. 2016. “Mentoring the Next Generation of Faculty: Supporting Academic Career Aspirations among Doctoral Students.” Research in Higher Education 57(6): 714–738.

de Janasz, Suzanne C., Sherry E. Sullivan. 2004. “Multiple Mentoring in Academe: Developing the Professorial Network.” Journal of Vocational Behavior 64(2): 263–283.

de Janasz, Suzanne C., Sherry E. Sullivan, Vicki Whiting, Elaine Biech. 2003. “Mentor Networks and Career Success: Lessons for Turbulent Times.” The Academy of Management Executive 17(4): 78–93.

Eby, Lillian T., Tammy D. Allen, Sarah C. Evans, Thomas Ng, David L. DuBois. 2008. “Does Mentoring Matter? A Multidisciplinary Meta-Analysis Comparing Mentored and Non-Mentored Individuals.” Journal of Vocational Behavior 72(2): 254–267.

Espino, Michelle M., Ruth Enid Zambrana. 2019. “‘How Do You Advance Here? How Do You Survive?’: An Exploration of Under-Represented Minority Faculty Perceptions of Mentoring Modalities.” Review of Higher Education 42(2): 457–484.

Lechuga, Vicente M. 2011. “Faculty-Graduate Student Mentoring Relationships: Mentors' Perceived Roles and Responsibilities.” Higher Education 62(6): 757–771.

Neumann, Anna. 2009. Professing to Learn: Creating Tenured Lives and Careers in the American Research University. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Patton, Lori D. 2009. “My Sister's Keeper: A Qualitative Examination of Mentoring Experiences among African American Women in Graduate and Professional Schools.” The Journal of Higher Education 80(5): 510–537.

Phillips, Susan L., Susan T. Dennison, Mark A. Davenport. 2016. “High Retention of Minority and International Faculty Through a Formal Mentoring Program.” To Improve the Academy 35(1): 153–179.

Poole, Alex H. 2017. “Pinkett's Charges: Recruiting, Retaining, and Mentoring Archivists of Color in the Twenty-First Century.” The American Archivist 81(1): 103–134.

Riley-Reid (2017), ibid.

Salinas, Cristobal, Patrick Riley, Lazaro Camacho, Deborah L. Floyd. 2020. “Mentoring Experiences and Perceptions of Latino Male Faculty in Higher Education.” Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences 42(1): 117–140.

Stanley (2006), ibid.

Sugimoto (2014), ibid.

Thomas and Hollenshead (2001), ibid.

Tierney and Bensimon (1996), ibid.

Tillman (2001), ibid.

Tillman, Linda C. 1995. Mentoring African American Faculty in Predominantly White Institutions: An Investigation of Assigned and Informal Mentoring Relationships. Ph.D. thesis, The Ohio State University.

Williams, Brian N., Sheneka M. Williams. 2006. “Perceptions of African American Male Junior Faculty on Promotion and Tenure: Implications for Community Building and Social Capital.” Teachers College Record 108(2): 287–315.

Zambrana et al. (2015), ibid.

[←71]

One idea floated by several of our interviewees was the establishment of intra- and inter-institutional collaborations focused on shared infrastructure (e.g., open source solutions with support for those who do not have the resources, such as that offered by Humanities Commons and the publishing platform Manifold), standardized metadata (including the integration of ORCID across systems), and interoperability of platforms (including commercial ones), particularly those used across campus to track faculty productivity.

[←72]

One example is the American Philosophical Association’s Good Practices Guide, written by Peter Railton, Mi-Kyoung Lee, Diane Michelfelder, Robin Zheng, which is “intended to serve as a set of recommendations to help philosophers create and maintain an academic community based on mutual respect, fairness, inclusivity, and a commitment to scholarship and learning.”

[←73]

This point has been made from a number of different angles throughout this white paper. For more through this particular lens — that of academic care-giving and the emotional labor it requires — see:

Ahn et al. (2021), ibid.

Ashencaen Crabtree, Sara, Chris Shiel. 2019. “‘Playing Mother’: Channeled Careers and the Construction of Gender in Academia.” SAGE Open 9(3): 1–14.

Bellas, Marcia L. 1999. “Emotional Labor in Academia: The Case of Professors.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 561(1): 96–110.

Conesa (2018), ibid.

Docka-Filipek and Stone (2021), ibid.

El-Alayli, Amani, Ashley A. Hansen-Brown, Michelle Ceynar. 2018. “Dancing Backwards in High Heels: Female Professors Experience More Work Demands and Special Favor Requests, Particularly from Academically Entitled Students.” Sex Roles 79(3): 136–150.

Gaudet, Stéphanie, Isabelle Marchand, Merridee Bujaki, Ivy Lynn Bourgeault. 2022. “Women and Gender Equity in Academia through the Conceptual Lens of Care.” Journal of Gender Studies 31(1): 74–86.

Guarino and Borden (2017), ibid.

Harley (2018), ibid.

June, Audrey Williams. 2015. “The Invisible Labor of Minority Professors.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 9 November.

Kafka, Alexander C. 2018. “Instructors Spend ‘Emotional Labor’ in Diversity Courses, and Deserve Credit for It.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 15 November.

Matthew, Patricia A. 2016c. “What Is Faculty Diversity Worth to a University?” The Atlantic, 23 November.

Miller et al. (2018), ibid.

Moore, Helen A., Katherine Acosta, Gary Perry, Crystal Edwards. 2010. “Splitting the Academy: The Emotions of Intersectionality at Work.” The Sociological Quarterly 51(2): 179–204.

Wingfield and Skeete (2016), ibid.

[←74]

For more on the history of land-grant universities as a direct result of colonization, see:

Čhaŋtémaza (Neil McKay), Monica Siems McKay. 2020. “Where We Stand: The University of Minnesota and Dakhóta Treaty Lands.” Open Rivers: Rethinking Water, Place, and Community 17: 7–22.

Gavazzi, Stephen M. 2020. “The Original Sin of Our Nation’s First Public Universities.” Forbes, 20 April.

Key, Scott. 1996. “Economics or Education: The Establishment of American Land-Grant Universities.” The Journal of Higher Education 67(2): 196–220.

Lee, Robert, Tristan Ahtone. 2020. “Land-Grab Universities.” High Country News 52(4): Article 1.

Martin, Michael V., Janie Simms Hipp. 2018. “A Time for Substance: Confronting Funding Inequities at Land Grant Institutions.” Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education 29(3): [n.p.]

Nash, Margaret A. 2019. “Entangled Pasts: Land-Grant Colleges and American Indian Dispossession.” History of Education Quarterly 59(4): 437–467.

Patel (2015), ibid.

Rodríguez (2012), ibid.

Sorber, Nathan M., Roger L. Geiger. 2014. “The Welding of Opposite Views: Land-Grant Historiography at 150 Years.” In Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, Volume 29, edited by Michael B. Paulsen, 385–422. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

Stein, Sharon. 2020. “A Colonial History of the Higher Education Present: Rethinking Land-Grant Institutions Through Processes of Accumulation and Relations of Conquest.” Critical Studies in Education 62(2): 212–228.

For more on decolonizing the academy and creating an anti-racist campus, see:

Alfred, Taiaiake. 2004. “Warrior Scholarship: Seeing the University as a Ground of Contention.” In Indigenizing the Academy: Transforming Scholarship and Empowering Communities, edited by Devon Abbott Mihesuah and Angela Cavender Wilson, 88–99. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Alvares, Claude Alphonso, Shad Saleem Faruqui, eds. 2014. Decolonising the University: The Emerging Quest for Non-Eurocentric Paradigms. Pulau Pinang: University Sains Malaysia Press.

Andreotti, Vanessa de Oliveira, Sharon Stein, Cash Ahenakew, Dallas Hunt. 2015. “Mapping Interpretations of Decolonization in the Context of Higher Education.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society 4(1): 21–40.

Andrews (2018), ibid.

Ault, Elizabeth, Mike Baccam, Brielle Bennett, Peter Berkery, Amy Ruth Buchanan, Ellen C. Bush, Niccole Leilanionapaeʻaina Coggins, Jocelyn Dawson, Melanie Dolechek, Gisela Fosado, Catherine Harding-Wiltshire, Christie Henry, Wesley Hogan, Sylvia Izzo Hunter, Sandra Korn, Dennis Lloyd, Joel T. Luber, Brenna McLaughlin, Alejandra Mejía, Melanie S. Morrison, Hanni Nabahe, Jill Petty, Karen Phillips, Mark A. Puente, Cathy Rimer-Surles, Damita Snow, Cecilia Sorochin, Susan Spilka, Simone Taylor, Camille Wright. 2020. Antiracism Toolkit for Allies. Wheat Ridge, CO: Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications.

Baffoe (2014), ibid.

Basham, Kathryn K., Susan Donner, Ruth M. Killough, Lisa Werkmeister Rozas. 1997. “Becoming an Anti‐Racist Institution.” Smith College Studies in Social Work 67(3): 564–585.

Battiste, Marie. 2013. Decolonizing Education: Nourishing the Learning Spirit. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

Bhambra, Gurminder K., Kerem Nişancıoğlu, Dalia Gebrial, eds. 2018. Decolonising the University: Understanding and Transforming the Universities' Colonial Foundations. London: Pluto Press.

Boidin, Capucine, James Cohen, Ramón Grosfoguel. 2012. “Introduction: From University to Pluriversity: A Decolonial Approach to the Present Crisis of Western Universities.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 10(1): 1–6.

Brook et al. (2015), ibid.

Bunda et al. (2011), ibid.

Burden-Stelly (2018), ibid.

Charles, Elizabeth. 2019. “Decolonizing the Curriculum.” Insights 32(1): Article 475.

Connell, Raewyn. 2016. “Decolonising Knowledge, Democratising Curriculum.” Paper presented at Decolonisation of Knowledge conference, Johannesburg, 14 March.

Córdova, Teresa. 1998. “Power and Knowledge: Colonialism in the Academy.” In Living Chicana Theory, edited by Carla Trujillo, 17–45. Berkeley: Third Woman Press.

Curley and Smith (2020), ibid.

DeChavez, Yvette. 2018. “It's Time to Decolonize That Syllabus.” Los Angeles Times, 8 October.

Dei (2000), ibid.

de Leeuw et al. (2013), ibid.

Dennis (2018), ibid.

de Sousa Santos, Boaventura. 2017. Decolonising the University: The Challenge of Deep Cognitive Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Dotson, Kristie. 2018. “On the Way to Decolonization in a Settler Colony: Re-Introducing Black Feminist Identity Politics.” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 14(3): 190–199.

Fosado, Gisela Concepción, Cathy Rimer-Surles. 2019. “Equity Is Possible: Forging Paths Toward Equity and Anti-Racism in Scholarly Publishing.” The Scholarly Kitchen (blog), 14 August.

Gebrial, Dalia. 2018. “Rhodes Must Fall: Oxford and Movements for Change.” In Decolonising the University: Understanding and Transforming the Universities' Colonial Foundations, edited by Gurminder K. Bhambra, Kerem Nişancıoğlu, and Dalia Gebrial, 19–36. London: Pluto Books.

Gordon (2014), ibid.

Grande (2018), ibid.

Graness, Anke. 2015. “Questions of Canon Formation in Philosophy: The History of Philosophy in Africa.” Phronimon 16(2): 78–96.

Hall (2018), ibid.

Harris, Carmen V. 2016. “Still Eating in the Kitchen: The Marginalization of African American Faculty in Majority White Academic Governance.” In Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure, edited by Patricia A. Matthew, 165–177. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Hathcock (2016), ibid.

Heleta, Savo. 2016. “Decolonisation of Higher Education: Dismantling Epistemic Violence and Eurocentrism in South Africa.” Transformation in Higher Education 1(1): a9.

Holmes (2013), ibid.

Icaza, Rosalba, Rolando Vázquez. 2018. “Diversity or Decolonisation?: Researching Diversity at the University of Amsterdam.” In Decolonising the University: Understanding and Transforming the Universities' Colonial Foundations, edited by Gurminder K. Bhambra, Kerem Nişancıoğlu, and Dalia Gebrial, 108–128. London: Pluto Press.

Jones and Jenkins (2008), ibid.

la paperperson [K. Wayne Yang]. 2017. A Third University Is Possible. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Lawrence, Bonita, Enakshi Dua. 2005. “Decolonizing Antiracism.” Social Justice 32(4): 120–143.

Le Grange, Lesley. 2016. “Decolonising the University Curriculum.” South African Journal of Higher Education 30(2): 1–12.

Lockley, Pat. 2018. “Open Initiatives for Decolonising the Curriculum.” In Decolonising the University: Understanding and Transforming the Universities' Colonial Foundations, edited by Gurminder K. Bhambra, Kerem Nişancıoğlu, and Dalia Gebrial, 145–170. London: Pluto Press.

Mbembe, Achille Joseph. 2016. “Decolonizing the University: New Directions.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 15(1): 29–45.

McGranahan, Carole, Uzma Z. Rizvi. 2016. “Decolonizing Anthropology” [introduction and part 1 of a 20-part series]. Savage Minds (blog), 19 April.

Méndez, Xhercis. 2020. “Beyond Nassar: A Transformative Justice and Decolonial Feminist Approach to Campus Sexual Assault.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 42(2): 82–104.

Minthorn and Nelson (2019), ibid.

Mott and Cockayne (2017), ibid.

Muñoz (2009), ibid.

Nelson, C. (2020), ibid.

Neylon (2020), ibid.

Niemann (2012), ibid.

Nishida (2015), ibid.

Pete, Shauneen. 2018. “Meschachakanis, a Coyote Narrative: Decolonising Higher Education.” In Decolonising the University: Understanding and Transforming the Universities' Colonial Foundations, edited by Gurminder K. Bhambra, Kerem Nişancıoğlu, and Dalia Gebrial, 173–189. London: Pluto Press.

Peters, Michael A. 2018. “Why Is My Curriculum White?: A Brief Genealogy of Resistance.” In Dismantling Race in Higher Education: Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising the Academy, edited by Jason Arday and Heidi Safia Mirza, 253–270. Cham: Springer International.

Pilipchuk, Miranda. 2018. “The Ethical Call to Decolonize the Philosophical Canon.” Women in Philosophy (blog), 20 June.

Richardson (2018), ibid.

Roh, Charlotte, Harrison W. Inefuku, Emily Drabinski. 2020. “Scholarly Communications and Social Justice.” In Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access, edited by Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray, 41–52. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Rouhi (2017), ibid.

Small, Alex. 2020. “Opinion: Why Land Acknowledgments Aren't Worth Much.” Inside Higher Ed (blog), 9 January.

Smith, Andrea. 2009. “Native Studies and Critical Pedagogy: Beyond the Academic–Industrial Complex.” In Activist Scholarship: Antiracism, Feminism, and Social Change, edited by Julia Sudbury and Margo Okazawa-Rey, 37–54. New York: Routledge.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2021. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 3^rd edition. London: Bloomsbury.

Stein (2018), ibid.

Stockdill and Danico (eds.) (2012), ibid.

Sultana (2018), ibid.

Swadener, Beth Blue, Kagendo Mutua. 2008. “Decolonizing Performances: Deconstructing the Global Postcolonial.” In Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies, edited by Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, 31–44. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.

Todd, Zoe. 2014. “An Indigenous Feminist's Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word for Colonialism.” Journal of Historical Sociology 29(1): 4–22.

Todd (2016), ibid.

Tuck (2018), ibid.

Tuck, Eve, K. Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1(1): 1–40.

Uperesa (2016), ibid.

Wilson, Angela Cavender. 2004. “Reclaiming Our Humanity: Decolonization and the Recovery of Indigenous Knowledge.” In Indigenizing the Academy: Transforming Scholarship and Empowering Communities, edited by Devon Abbott Mihesuah and Angela Cavender Wilson, 69–87. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

[←75]

We are of course not alone in making this recommendation. As Edward T. Parker III (2020) argues, “The CDO must be in the C-suite. The chief diversity officer ought to sit at the president’s table. While CDOs who are organizationally positioned under the provost or chief academic officer are common, the CDO must have access to the president.” Thankfully, many of them already do. According to a 2019 survey by Russell Reynolds Associates, nearly 80% of the 60 CDOs in their sample reported to either the president (70%) or chancellor (10%); 15% reported to the provost. This is a considerable improvement over the sample of 94 CDOs surveyed in 2011 by the search firm WittKieffer, in which only 36% reported to the president (Leske and Tomlin, 2011), a number not much changed in their 2017 survey of 81 CDOs, in which the percentage of those reporting to the president, chancellor, or CEO had only risen to 40%. Admittedly all three surveys are fairly small samples and may not be reflective of the larger higher education landscape.

Leske, Lucy A., Oliver B. Tomlin III. 2011. Chief Diversity Officers Assume Larger Leadership Role. Oak Brook, IL: WittKieffer.

Parker, Eugene T., III. 2020. “Do Colleges Need a Chief Diversity Officer?” Inside Higher Ed (blog), 20 August.

Pihakis, Jett, Tina Shah Paikeday, Katherine Armstrong. 2019. The Emergence of the Chief Diversity Officer Role in Higher Education. New York: Russell Reynolds Associates.

WittKieffer. 2017. The Critical First Year: What New Chief Diversity Officers Need to Succeed. Oak Brook, IL: WittKieffer.

[←76]

As Margaret-Mary Sulentic Dowell observes, “When senior campus leaders have robust understandings of the depth and breadth of diversity in all its dimensions, its centrality to the mission of public higher education becomes crystal clear. When this happens, the entire campus infrastructure shifts so that the positional authority and resource allocation necessary to realize equity and live diversity can be established. Leadership surfaces as central to the struggle for equity, and essential for the cause of equity” (200).

Dowell, Margaret-Mary Sulentic. 2012. “So What? Who Cares? And What’s Our Point about Diversity?” In Occupying the Academy: Just How Important Is Diversity Work in Higher Education?, edited by Christine Clark, Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner, and Mark Brimhall-Vargas, 194–201. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.

See:

Stanley et al. (2019), ibid.

[←77]

Among the many fine resources developed to address campus climate issues is “Improving Department Climate: Tools and Resources for Departments and Department Chairs,” created by Susan Drange and Kristen Barnes for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University.

See:

Williams and Williams (2006), ibid.

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Braidotti, Rosi. 2019. Posthuman Knowledge. Medford: Polity.

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Walton, Alice G. 2021. “How Common Is ‘Long Covid’? New Studies Suggest More Than Previously Thought.” Forbes, 11 April.