Women of Color Faculty as Un/Desirable Bodies of Difference in Colleges/Schools of Education: Perspectives From an Asian American Dean

• In Event: Narratives of Resistance and Resilience: The Experiences of Women-of-Color Scholars in Predominantly White Colleges/Schools of Education

Abstract

With nearly 15 years of leadership experience spanning four states and five institutions of higher education (IHEs), I offer firsthand insights about the leadership challenges I have confronted as an Asian/American woman at predominantly white PCSoEs that claim to embrace equity but fall short on their promise. Topics to be discussed include the following enactments of racial biases: (a) biased recruitment strategies that exclude or limit the ability to recruit a racially diverse candidate pool; (b) biased evaluation procedures that disproportionately construct faculty of color in highly deficit frameworks; and (c) problematic interactions in the workplace including gendered and racialized macro and micro-aggressions (Sue et al., 2010).

PCSoEs are situated within a specific sociocultural context: like in K-12 education, White women are the most overrepresented group in teacher education (Milner, 2010). Profiting from intersectional theorists who complicate single-group approaches to theorizing social identities (Landry, 2006), the conceptual framework outlines the various challenges that women of color scholars encounter from the tenure-track through their post-tenure years. I draw from the Third World Feminist notion of “oppositional consciousness” (Sandoval, 1991, p. 11) to articulate how women of color refuse to be subordinated by their White colleagues, especially White females who make efforts to “advocate” or “help” them in ways that represent enactments of colonial maternalism that are also commonly replicated in the K-12 enterprise (i.e., White savior teacher of urban youth of color).

Drawing from auto-ethnographic and interpretive frameworks (Neumann & Peterson, 1997; Yamaguchi, 2005), the primary mode of inquiry was content-analyzing multiple author-generated primary data sources including annual-performance reviews, double-entry journals based on critical incidents/CIs, and redacted exchanges with White administrators around topics of racial inequities that impact faculty of color. The findings revealed that institutionally sanctioned language around the “fit” and “tenure-ability” of faculty of color vis-à-vis White faculty are often classed, gendered, racialized, and sexualized. Two prominent traits commonly associated with the dispositions of White females, the group that is most overrepresented in PCSoEs, are often used as subjective criteria of institutional fit: (a) being a “team player,” and (b) engaging in the workplace through common rituals such as gossip or self-disclosure. Women of color who reject these expectations are not only ostracized, but are often tracked into non-renewal contracts or placed on performance-improvement plans based on irrelevant and racially biased assessments of their contributions and qualifications.

I end by offering insights about how and why predominantly White administrators and faculty members in PCSoEs often draw from deficit frameworks to discipline women of color based on non-performance indicators such as racially insensitive and subjective assessments of their “collegiality” that inappropriately becomes part of the formal or informal evaluation processes. I posit that PCSoEs cannot credibly claim to be concerned about the various disproportionality and equity gaps in the K-12 enterprise ranging from racially imbalanced academic outcomes, disciplinary practices, and tracking (e.g., Blanchett, 2006; Harry & Klingner, 2006) without critically interrogating how their own internal practices perpetuate these very “opportunity gaps” for their own faculty of color.

Author

• Rachel Endo, University of Washington Tacoma