PhD Students of Color Reclaiming Their Agency Navigating a Racialized Faculty Job Market Amid COVID-19

• In Event: Exploring the Nuanced Impacts of COVID-19 on Stakeholders in Higher Education: Faculty, Staff, and Students

Abstract

The third paper highlights the expertise of an assistant professor of educational leadership whose research focuses on how college and university practices and policies perpetuate racial inequity and how faculty and administrators can transform such practices and policies to advance racial equity and a PhD candidate. whose scholarship explores the connection between interpersonal and organizational learning towards justice-oriented institutional change in higher education.

Overview: COVID-19 has drastically impacted the operations of higher education. In addition to delaying research productivity and catalyzing a major move to online teaching, COVID-19 also halted the faculty job market (Gonzales & Griffin, 2020). Advanced doctoral students who were planning to apply to faculty positions faced nationwide university hiring freezes, resulting in an especially competitive job market. And for Students of Color who grappled with the realities of an already racialized job market (Liera, 2020), the pandemic also exacerbated an already turbulent faculty hiring process (Gonzales & Griffin, 2020). COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on communities of color (Chowkwanyun & Reed, 2020; Laster Pirtle, 2020), including their experiences in higher education and on the faculty job market, demands attention.

Using testimonios gathered in six focus groups with Black, Latinx, and APIDA men- and women-identified PhD candidates, we share insights about COVID-19’s impact on PhD students of color and their aspirations to pursue faculty careers. Our use of standpoint theory (Collins, 1997) supports our understanding of how our participants' existence at the nexus of raced, classed, and gendered liminality uniquely positions them to provide insight on the faculty job market as a “matrix of domination” (Collins, 1998, p. 553). We found that although COVID-19 has exacerbated the challenges of being on the job market, our participants are navigating the job market in ways that assert and reclaim their agency. Many participants situated their decision-making about faculty careers within the larger context of their individual, familial, and communal lives. For example, participants reported reprioritizing what they wanted from a faculty career and what they were willing to sacrifice. They talked about wanting health insurance, a job with a salary even if it meant a non-faculty position, and being closer to family, especially if they had aging/retired parents. Our findings demonstrate how even within a racialized and constrained system, like faculty hiring amidst COVID-19, students of color dexterously assert their agency and pursue wellness for themselves and their communities. We end by discussing possibilities for the future of faculty hiring.

Authors

• Román Liera, Montclair State University

• Aireale Joi Rodgers, University of Southern California