1465 - Professional Workshop. Feelings about Equal Treatment, Support, and Experiences: Hearing from Black and Hispanic Faculty in Historically White Institutions

Session Submission Type: Invited Session

Description

Under-represented minority (URM) faculty can expand the range of perspectives, paradigms, and experiences taught to students, but only if they are hired, granted tenure, promoted, and encouraged to move up the hierarchical academic career ladder. This process often occurs within a non-meritocratic stratification system where white male values and rules govern. Our research examines the feelings, perceptions, and experiences of sociology and economics faculty regarding racial/ethnic inequality in historically white institutions, as they move through the ranks. It also looks at the institutional factors that are related to these feelings, perceptions, and experiences. We examine URM faculty in these two disciplines because they have some concepts in common (including human and social capital), both sociologists and “stratification” economists claim W.E.B. DuBois as their disciplinary founder, and URM faculty in both disciplines have created organizations that create safe spaces to present current work. We use an online survey of the universe of black and Hispanic faculty who obtained their PhDs in either discipline between 1995 and 2006. Of the 254 respondents, 51 percent are women, 63 percent are black and 37 percent are Hispanic, and the modal group (46 percent) are current in the rank of associate professor. Many of these URM faculty members examine racial stratification and inequalities in their scholarly work.

Based on the online survey, scales are developed that measure equality in department climate; experiences and mentoring support; department attachment and values; and day to day treatment in terms of extra scrutiny, hostility, and verbal abuse/ridicule. For example, the departmental climate scale includes feelings about equal treatment in terms of hiring and promotion, voice in department decisions, career advice, and requests for collaboration compared to white faculty colleagues. We find significant differences between sociologists and economists, with sociologists feeling having more negative perceptions and more negative experiences. We originally hypothesized that this difference of sociologists having more negative feelings would not be the case because URM economists are a smaller segment of the population, they are more isolated, and work on race/ethnicity is less welcomed. This was not the case, and we suggest that sociologists have more networks to discuss racial/ethnic inequities in the academy. Further, we originally hypothesized that women would have more negative experiences than men. This hypothesis was correct. The scales we created are also viewed as dependent variables. Based on a great deal of unobtrusive information gathered from curriculum vitae and internet searches, we examine the relationship between the experiences and feelings from the survey with institutional factors from the unobtrusive data collection such as faculty rank, type of institution of higher education, number of publications, participation in URM networks outside the department, and work on race/ethnicity or gender. These relational findings may give clues as to institutional changes that could help to lessen negative URM faculty experiences.

Sub Unit

• Minority Fellowship Program

Session Organizers

• Jean H. Shin, American Sociological Association

• Rebekah Smith, American Sociological Association

Leader

• Roberta M. Spalter-Roth, American Sociological Association

Co-Leaders

• Jason A. Smith, George Mason University

• Jean H. Shin, American Sociological Association

Panelists

• Willie Pearson, Georgia Institute of Technology

• Cheryl B. Leggon, Georgia Institute of Technology