Race And Careers In Academia

Scott Jaschik’s column at InsideHigherEd today on the laments of minority scholars expressed at a panel of the Modern Language Association is a good example of something I’ve been noticing more and more: it’s getting harder and harder on many occasions to distinguish straight reporting from parody, comedy, or tragedy.

Jaschik’s column is straight reporting, but what he reports is both comedy and tragedy that often sounds like parody.

• A black English professor of Afro-American literature at the University of Michigan who always thought “race didn’t matter” notices after a few years that his white graduate students aren’ getting jobs. He advises to market themselves as “Americanists.”
• When job searching, Lisa Outar, an assistant professor of English at St. Johns University in New York whose “Indianness” is “visible,” sought “a university with a diverse student body, where people would be excited by her interest in Caribbean literature.” The more “diverse,” the more interest in Caribean literature? She noticed that friends who are white “had a much more difficult time getting interviews.” Once at St. Johns she said “she was surprised by the “invisible expectations” that she be available to minority students — even those who are not her advisees or students.” Perhaps she thought she was hired only because of her interest in Caribbean literature.
• When a “black female graduate student … asked how this issue [of race] would play out for her if she wanted to study an ethnic literature that was not her own,” Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui, an associate professor of American Studies at Rutgers, replied that “the issue was tricky.”
  

  He said that many language programs (at other universities, he stressed, not his own) have certain “levels of fetishism” about these things. Scholars of Spain are presumed white and scholars of Latin America are presumed to be from Latin America. When programs get larger, a black person may be hired with a focus on Afro-Hispanic cultures.

• Anne Cheng, a professor of English at Princeton, said that “[i]dentity was the basis by which many ethnic studies programs were created … [b]ut the same identity can be the source of stereotype in minimizing the role of ethnic studies.” Well, yes. I suppose it’s true that if, in response at least in part to demands from black students, you create a Black Studies program that hires black professors to teach black literature, the program will, over time, come to be thought of as, well, black.

  Cheng also said there is “fear … that the ‘codification’ of ethnic studies by universities can lead to the ‘strangulation’ of its creativity and its role as an ‘outside,’ reflective observer. Well, we certainly don’t want that. Perhaps such programs should be un-“codified,” thus releasing the strangle hold on them.

When race defines both individual “identity” and academic specialty, both individuals and their X Studies programs become “codified” by race. Surprise.

CORRECTION

An astute and careful reader has just emailed that “it’s not a good idea to spell “Caribbean” three different ways in the same paragraph.”

She is, of course, entirely write. At first I was going to correct the post, leaving only two different spellings. But then I decided to make it boring, spelling them all the same way.