Month: November 2013

Our introduction’s title, “Facing the Data,” signals the twofold aim of this special section of Profession: to assess the statistics documenting people of color in humanities doctoral programs, given in the MLA report Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity, and to bring into focus the faces of those composing the report’s data. Initial engagement with the report began with meetings of the MLA Committee on the Literatures of People of Color in the United States and Canada (CLPC) and continued in Seattle with the 2012 MLA convention panel “The Faces behind the Data,” sponsored by the CLPC (of which we are both former cochairs). Inspired to continue the dialogue begun in Seattle, we invited a number of respected scholars to “face the data” while speaking to the faces behind the report in short responses thematically fashioned by their own design. This section is indeed part and parcel of the report as “a call and a context for textured anecdotal reports from faculty members and campuses” (1).

The three essays that follow thus make a range of critical arguments about underrepresented communities in the humanities and in the profession more broadly. In her contribution, Dana A. Williams offers an insightful view of the interrelation between the humanities and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Answering what she considers the report’s call for “more contextualized and textured narratives to accompany the data as text,” she proposes that we take seriously the curricular strategies offered at HBCUs to help “lead the way to critical reforms of American higher education.”

Although HBCUs are clearly accounted for in the data, Robert Warrior ponders the lack of Native American representation in them, a lack symbolized by “double crosses” or “double daggers.” He sees in the report an alarming reflection of Native American “statistical insignificance” in United States government data. In response to the discouraging data with regard to Native scholars, Warrior offers recommendations (such as allocating resources specifically dedicated to studies on Native participation) to ensure those scholars’ continued representation in literary studies. The anecdotal information he tenders counterbalances the glaring numerical absence and thus bolsters his insistence that statistical insignificance must not “limit the extent to which MLA refers to diversity in the profession.”

Despite the minimal gains made in diversifying the ranks of the academy, indicated in the report, Frances R. Aparicio challenges us to consider the delicacy of encouraging students of color to pursue doctoral work by asking, “How can we, scholars in the humanities and foreign languages, urge minority students to join us at a time when the economic crisis steers students toward more lucrative fields?” She has worked with students who, notwithstanding the challenges faced in the academy, aspire to “become producers of humanistic knowledge” and whose careers we have a hand in building.

Each essay, although distinct in concern and approach, is linked to the others by the anecdotal impulse its author embraces in addressing the data. Where do those people of color who go on to become faculty members earn their undergraduate degrees? It is this question posed in the report that we wish to answer with the help of some thick description. Therefore, in the spirit of the Seattle panel and in line with the contextual and textured narrative approach taken up by the contributors, we each offer a short response of our own, given the relation of the report to our respective careers as professors in the humanities.

Response 1: Nwankwo

“You’ll go on to graduate school and become an English professor.” So said Professor Donald B. Gibson to me during my sophomore year at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey. The idea sounded remotely interesting, emphasis on remote because I really had no idea how I would do that or even whether I wanted to do that. After all, I was in INROADS, the internship program with the mission statement, “to develop and place talented minority youth in business and industry, and prepare them for corporate and community leadership.”1 I was majoring in economics and Spanish. Becoming an English professor had never crossed my mind. Correction: it had never crossed my mind until Dr. Gibson mentioned it.

By the end of my sophomore year I had declared a double major in English and Spanish. Economics was gone. My senior year came down to a choice: Was I going to accept the job offer I had from a corporation or one of the offers I had from PhD programs in English? I felt confident that I knew what it would take to do well at the corporation. I didn’t really know what I would need to do or be expected to do in the PhD programs. That prospect was intellectually exciting but daunting. I knew I loved poetry. (I had been performing the work of Louise Bennett and Federico García Lorca since the beginning of high school and dreamed of comparing Phillis Wheatley’s verse with that of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.) I knew I loved learning about new cultures and languages. (By the age of thirteen, I had taken two years of French and three of Spanish. In addition, I had grown up with a grandfather who regularly regaled me with the Portuguese, Spanish, and other words he had picked up during his years as a Jamaica Railway stationmaster.)

As I talked with my mentors at Rutgers and reflected on my long-held passions, I became progressively more excited about pursuing a PhD in literary studies and becoming a professor. Would I be able to think about, read, learn, teach, and do research on literature day in and day out and get paid for it? Would I have the opportunity to spend my days creating programs and projects that would help circulate information about issues of literature, locally and globally? How could I not jump at the chance? The sage Donald Gibson was right. I graduated from Rutgers in 1994, went on to earn my PhD in English, and in 1999 joined the ranks of tenure-track faculty members. As the years went on, I realized that when Dr. Gibson made that statement, he was also announcing his commitment to doing all he could to help me achieve that future.

Rutgers is fifth on the list of institutions of higher education whose black baccalaureate degree recipients went on to obtain PhDs in the humanities between 1997 and 2006. I am one of the sixteen faces behind that piece of data. As I look back on my years at Rutgers, it is no surprise to me that my alma mater ranked so high in the MLA report (Data, table 1b): faculty members and administrators at Rutgers fought to create and sustain an environment that nurtured and nourished students of color as human beings, as intellectuals, and as citizens. During my years at Rutgers, crucial elements of this environment were the presence of noticeable numbers of black and Latino/a faculty members, junior and senior; faculty investment in the growth of undergraduates so that as citizens they could think critically about the world around them as well as about texts; faculty members of color who embodied a diversity of models for political engagement and took divergent positions on the degree to which academic work was or should lead to it; an approach to degree requirements that made it easy for students to gain in-depth knowledge in their majors while also engaging in sustained course work in interdisciplinary and ethnic studies programs; support for student organizations and other on-campus spaces in which students could gain, hone, and refine their understanding of what being an engaged and productive citizen means; the presence of administrators of color at a range of levels in the institution; the willingness of university administrators to mentor students of color and to work with them in innovative ways to develop, exercise, and refine the students’ critical thinking, community engagement, and leadership skills. There were professional and psychological costs to faculty members and administrators entailed by this labor, sacrifices that were not apparent to me as an undergraduate student but that I now recognize and deeply appreciate.

The presence of several black faculty members, junior and senior, in the English department at Rutgers made seeing—and, by extension, thinking about becoming—an English professor a perfectly natural thing for my fellow black students and me. Among the department faculty members were Donald Gibson, Cheryl Wall, Wesley Brown, Abena Busia, and Judylyn Ryan. Renée Larrier, of the French department, had an important influence on me, even though I never met her while I was at Rutgers. Just seeing her walk across campus every day mattered, reminding me that a black woman could be a professor of French—or of any field. These faculty members taught us, whether they knew it or not, by what they did professionally outside class as well as in class. Busia, for example, organized and hosted the annual African Literature Association conference during my time at Rutgers. This event intensified my interest in becoming a scholar, in being able to do research about Africa and its diaspora, publish that research, and participate in thought-provoking conversations like those I heard at the conference.

In addition, that all English majors were required to take African American literature made it clear to everyone that black writers mattered, in the literary world in general and at Rutgers in particular.

Thanks to the way the degree requirements were constructed, I was able to take life-changing classes in other departments and engage in conversation with black faculty members in other departments, including Deborah Gray White (history), Kim Butler (Africana studies), Gayle Tate (Africana studies), and Karla Jackson-Brewer (Africana studies). My taking classes in interdisciplinary programs and departments also played a role in leading me to graduate school.

The relation between blackness and Latinidad interested me. Like many other anglophone Caribbean people, I had grown up hearing that I had ancestors who journeyed to Latin America early in the twentieth century to find work. What I didn’t know was that exploring that relation could be the focus of a career, the subject of one’s scholarly research and teaching. Gerard Aching’s presence in the Spanish department opened my eyes to this possibility. My awareness was heightened by courses in the Puerto Rican and Hispanic Caribbean studies department, including one that introduced me to José Luis González’s powerful analysis of race in Puerto Rico, “El país de cuatro pisos” (“The Four-Storeyed Country”). My regular conversations with Tom Stephens about bilingualism as well as about race and ethnicity in Latin America stoked my intellectual fires. Marcy Schwartz’s seminar Latin American Displacement and Exile further enriched my intellectual toolbox by introducing me to critical theory from and about our America.

The Spanish department was crucial to my growth, because faculty members like Margo Persin were supportive of and invested in students who were excited about their courses, regardless of their race or areas of interest, regardless of whether her time spent with these students would advance her career. George Kearns in the English department was Persin’s twin soul in this respect. Ronald Christ, then English department chair, supported my interest in crafting an independent study that would help me research various university-linked career paths. Along the way, he gave me a copy of the special issue of World Literature Today he had edited, and it was my introduction to academic journals.

Supportive administrators were vital to creating the environment that led me to pursue a PhD. Marie Logue, dean of students, was open to student ideas about new ways in which her office could support their dreams. Her openness made it possible for Dean George Ganges to create a student affairs internship for and with me. One of the programs we developed allowed a faculty member and a small group of students to attend a play at Crossroads, a world-famous black theater company. The help of administrator mentors like Wally Torian, adviser to the Paul Robeson Special Interest Section, which I chaired for two years, and Ed Ramsamy, residence coordinator for the dorm that housed this section, was important.2 (Ramsamy was a doctoral student himself at the time and eventually ended up becoming a faculty member in the Africana studies department.) The value of having high-level university administrators of color invested in connecting with and mentoring undergraduates became most clear to me with the arrival of Roselle Wilson, a black woman who joined the university as vice president for student affairs. Wilson regularly and willingly spent hours with me sharing her wisdom, answering all my questions about the life of a university administrator of color, and challenging me to think critically about the world around me as well as about my vision for my future.

The report Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity provides valuable numbers—among them, the number of black Rutgers alumni who earned PhDs between 1997 and 2006 (table 1b), which indicates an environment that encouraged black students to pursue graduate study. It also hints at the difficulties faculty members of color face when they endeavor to create an environment that will nourish both them and their students. It shows, for example, disparities among faculty members by race and ethnic identity: in average age at tenure (39.3 for white, 41.5 for black, 42.2 for Hispanic [table 9]), in average hours per week spent on unpaid tasks (4.8 for white, 6.0 for Hispanic, 7.5 for black [table 11]), and in average hours per week spent on paid tasks (46.3 for white, 41.5 for Hispanic, 40.1 for black [table 11]). These numbers demand that we dig deeper, that we gather and listen to the stories of the people behind the data. It is only through that kind of work that we will be able to understand the productive actions and painful sacrifices that led to the data points. Only then will we be able to reduce the disparities and make the sacrifices unnecessary.

The data quantitatively encapsulate the actions of individuals and institutions, as well as the interactions between them. We, the individuals behind the data, now have the opportunity and, many of us would say, the obligation to try to inspire our students the way Dr. Gibson inspired me. The institutions represented in the report also have opportunities and obligations before them. The data present a multitude of possible departure points for institutional conversation and action, including attending to the aforementioned sacrifices. No individual or institution is perfect. The commitment showed me by Dr. Gibson and the many faculty members and administrators at Rutgers was an index not of perfection (mine, theirs, or Rutgers’s) but rather of an unrelenting determination to make a difference in the lives of students in general and of students of color in particular. We, individuals and institutions, can and should all strive to be as committed and determined.

Response 2: Rodríguez

When I first read the MLA report Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity, what caught my attention especially and held it longer than any other item was the table documenting the institutions that sent the most undergraduate students to graduate school in the humanities between 1997 and 2006 (table 1). Under the category “Hispanic” (a term by which I often find myself interpellated despite its historical and identificatory complications), the institution boasting the highest number of students who went on to pursue doctoral study is the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. This fact calls for a discussion of the socioeconomic differences between Puerto Rican students from the island as compared with those from places like New York and Chicago, but here I focus on the second institution on the list, the University of California, Berkeley, which is where I obtained my bachelor’s degree in English.

I arrived in Berkeley in the summer of 1989 as a student in Summer Bridge, a program designed to give underrepresented students a running start before their first semester. I don’t recall the precise number of Summer Bridge students enrolled that summer, but I do remember thinking that the university was indeed as diverse as the materials in my acceptance folder declared (this perception was significantly altered once the fall semester began). Being almost four hundred miles away from home in Santa Ana without a friend or relative nearby, I came to rely on peers who became friends and eventually extended kin after the eight-week program. What also sustained me was the willingness of graduate and advanced undergraduate students to provide healthy doses of mentorship that I consider the key to my baccalaureate success. And despite being told by a high school English teacher that Berkeley professors would be unapproachable, I soon met a number of them who were generous with their time and saw the importance of undergraduate mentorship.

Before the spring semester of my first year, I came to realize that Berkeley was the ideal place for a future scholar of ethnic and Latino/a literary and cultural studies because of the professors working there. I enrolled in four literature courses (and as a result deferred taking many general education courses until later in my undergraduate career). Why so many literature courses for a first-year student? I learned that I could get a degree in doing what I loved most, reading and writing, and that there was institutional value in writing about the things I was passionate about. Scholars and mentors like Genaro Padilla, Barbara Christian, Norma Alarcón, and Alfred Arteaga made sure that their students, many of them first-generation students of color, were aware of the possibility of pursuing a career in the humanities. Informing us about opportunities such as the Minority Summer Research Exchange Program (MSREP), they also provided the guidance and mentorship required for us to transition from undergraduate to graduate studies. They taught us how to take thinking and writing to the next level and demonstrated that academic labor demanded serious commitment and the acceptance of responsibility.3

I can’t name every student of color with whom I shared classroom space during my four years at Berkeley and who went on to earn a doctorate in the humanities and eventually tenure at places like the University of Southern California; the University of California, Santa Cruz; Princeton; California State University, Los Angeles; the University of Illinois, Chicago; and the University of California, Los Angeles—the very students who make up the statistics documented in the MLA report—but I will say that we were all fortunate to have faculty members of color guide us toward doctoral study. From providing frank advice at Minority Undergraduate Students in English (MUSE) gatherings to delivering lectures at weekly meetings of Other Voices, a faculty-supported course for which advanced undergraduate students facilitated discussions on the topic of that week’s lecture, the Berkeley professors we studied under were pivotal in sending us to PhD programs.

The vibrancy of the campus community at this historical moment had a great deal to do with my and my peers’ decision to pursue literary and cultural studies. Berkeley at the time claimed an ethnically diverse first-generation student population, which of course would diminish with the passage of Proposition 209, the ballot initiative ending affirmative action in public education. The steadfast encouragement and backing of my undergraduate professors—preparing me for advanced study, suggesting suitable doctoral programs, and writing many letters of recommendation—was the key factor that landed me on table 1c of the report as one of the seventy-two students from Berkeley who went on to complete a PhD in the humanities. For me, mentorship took shape in Arteaga’s willingness to read multiple drafts of my statement of purpose (and in turn asking for comments on a freshly composed essay about to be sent out for peer review), in Padilla’s sage advice to contact faculty members with whom I wished to work in Latino/a and queer studies, in Alarcón’s gentle but firm prodding for me to master the terms of critical theory, and in Christian’s willingness to share personal stories about the highs and lows of academic life. These are but a few of the many mentoring strategies that I’ve learned from senior scholars in my field and that I have adopted with my own students.

A Deep Accountability

In her essay “But What Do We Think We’re Doing Anyway: The State of Black Feminist Criticism(s); or, My Version of a Little Bit of History,” Christian writes, “Although black women are not the only ones who can do feminist criticism, it would be a significant loss if they were absent from this enterprise” (73). We wish to echo Christian, who in her essay responds to the consistently low number of blacks receiving PhDs in English with the argument that the absence of United States students of color from working-class origins in the academy perpetuates the profession as a bastion of racial and economic privilege, despite the frequent—if not obligatory—lip service paid to educational access and social justice. As our contributors illustrate, the MLA report might make faculty members and administrators face the data and work to increase the number of underrepresented scholars at their institutions and in the study of languages and literature more broadly. As Nellie Y. McKay has noted, the presence of faculty members of color “has changed the face of American education and revised the premises of accepted knowledge in material content, philosophical approaches, and interactions with and between students and faculty” (64). It is essential that we sustain and strengthen this presence at a moment when concerns of race, culture, and difference in the humanities matter more than ever.

Christian asks, “To whom are we accountable? And what social relations are in/scribing us?” (74). We believe that those of us working in the humanities should keep asking these questions no matter what our field or focus may be. The “we” and “us” to which Christian refers might help us consider who is included and who excluded in the profession and allow us to take stock of the faces that populate spaces from graduate seminars to professional meetings. Bringing affirmative action back may be an increasingly difficult feat (as we are currently witnessing in Texas), but a proactive stance and a deep accountability to underrepresented students are required if we are to provide mentorship similar to what we received as undergraduates. We must not forget that well-prepared and well-informed undergraduates—academic job market opportunities notwithstanding—will eventually become our most stellar graduate students and invaluable colleagues. It is our hope that this special section will prove instructive for how, in the midst of the complex social relations in/scribing us, we can work toward a humanistic inquiry that requires diversity in both intellectual perspective and faculty composition.

Notes

The authors wish to thank Deborah A. Miranda, Debra K. S. Barker, Thabiti Lewis, Chandan Reddy, and Doug Steward for their participation on the panel at the 2012 MLA convention in Seattle and all members of the Committee on the Literatures of People of Color in the United States and Canada, past and present, for making this special section possible.

1. The mission statement of INROADS now uses the term “underserved” instead of “minority.” ↩

2. It important to note that at least three of the students living in that section in those years ended up pursuing and earning a PhD—one in English, one in history, and one in counseling. ↩

3. MSREP, an intensive research exchange program sponsored by various institutions on the East and West Coasts in which students were paired with faculty mentors to produce a scholarly project of their choice, has ceased to exist, but other opportunities—for example, the Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program and the Summer Research Opportunities Program—continue to aid underrepresented students in transitioning from undergraduate studies to graduate school. I was a MSREP fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, and studied under the tutelage of Raymund A. Paredes in the English department during the summer of 1992. ↩

Works Cited

Christian, Barbara. “But What Do We Think We’re Doing Anyway: The State of Black Feminist Criticism(s); or, My Version of a Little Bit of History.” Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women. Ed. Cheryl A. Wall. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989. 58–74. Print.

Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity. Modern Language Association. MLA, Apr. 2010. Web. 9 Aug. 2013. <http://www.mla.org/data_humanities>.

González, José Luis. “El país de cuatro pisos” y otros ensayos. Río Piedras: Huracán, 1980. Print.

INROADS. INROADS, 2011. Web. 14 Aug. 2013. <http://www.inroads.org/>.

McKay, Nellie Y. “Minority Faculty in (Mainstream White) Academia.” The Academic’s Handbook. 3rd ed. Ed. A. Leigh DeNeef and Craufurd D. Goodwin. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. 62–76. Print.

Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo is associate professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Richard T. Rodríguez is associate professor of English and Latina and Latino studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Both are former cochairs of the MLA Committee on the Literatures of People of Color in the United States and Canada, which organized this special section.

Posted November 2013

In her recent On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Sara Ahmed concludes her reflections on dealing with the challenges of creating diversity in European universities with the image of a brick wall as a metaphor for institutional inertia. She exhorts scholars to continue “insisting” that our institutions need to be transformed (26, 173–87). In the United States, engaged minority scholars have been insisting on diversity, collectively, for almost half a century. Yet the numbers continue to be dismal. The MLA’s Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity reveals that there has been little gain in the number of scholars of color in our fields and departments. As regards United States Latinos/as, the focus of this essay, only 4.4% of faculty members in the humanities are Hispanic (Data, table 6), while Latinos/as constitute nearly 17% of our nation’s population and are the majority minority in this nation (“People QuickFacts”). (Hispanic is the official term created by the federal government for census purposes, yet I use Latino/a throughout this essay.) There are different preferences in how to label this identity, but Latino/a has been consistently embraced by academics to name the field: Latino/a studies. While both Hispanic and Latino/a are umbrella terms and tend to homogenize what is a most heterogeneous community racially, socioeconomically, nationally, and in terms of migration history, Latino/a has become more relevant in reference to social encounters and transculturations among various national groups of Latin American descent in the United States. (Recently some scholars have argued that it is used as a racial label, although Latinos/as in the United States are a multiracial community.)1 This significant and increasing gap between our presence as professors and the demographic changes nationwide augur a widening schism between faculty members and students, an emerging academic divide of sorts. As the MLA report indicates, “[I]t is dispiriting to see that, after years of effort to improve the pipeline for doctorates of color, the cohorts of several groups remain out of proportion to the United States population” (Data 3). A report by Arthur Coleman and others shows that, in the context of the demographic shifts in United States schools, “minority students will account for practically all of the growth among high school graduates over the next decade, with Hispanic graduates alone almost completely offsetting the decrease in white, non-Hispanic graduates” (4).

The implications of the divide between population numbers and representation in academia are serious and even dangerous. Despite the growth of students of color nationwide, our humanities departments continue to be overwhelmingly white. While there are strong efforts nationwide at diversifying the STEM fields, the humanities are being neglected, partly because administrators assume that they are already diverse. The data celebrate Hispanic studies units as diverse locations on campus but do not distinguish among Latinos/as as United States racial minorities, other United States–based Latin Americanists, and Spaniards. Those of us who have taught or studied in Spanish departments know firsthand the intense power struggles at play in them. Latino/a graduate students and faculty members, when there are any, usually reside in the lower echelon of the hierarchy.

The academic divide suggests a lack of mentoring; very few, if any, role models; and a curriculum that does not reflect the lives and experiences of Latino/a students. It is true that individual nonminority faculty members can have and have had significant influence on the academic careers of students of color, but it is also true that whiteness in departments and disciplines continues to cement institutional racism. When policies are created, rules are imposed, and norms are established, the needs and interests of students of color (and faculty members of color) will not be considered, let alone addressed. For instance, in a predominantly white department, it is difficult for undergraduate students of color to have access to role models who will exhort them to consider completing a PhD in the humanities. Students of color may be stigmatized for their writing styles, hybrid linguistic practices, and bicultural or working-class perspectives that are censored or curtailed in their writing assignments. The students thus receive lower grades and end up with a less competitive academic standing. Required readings and topics in course syllabi may not reflect the racial, ethnic, class, or gender experiences of many of the students, thus limiting their ability to identify with the course material. These practices of marginalization can limit the motivation of minority students who enter the humanities. Such students may feel that they are “space invaders” in the literature classroom (Puwar, qtd. in Ahmed 13), or they may perceive humanities courses as merely another category in the distribution requirements for graduation rather than as entryways to a possible career.

The data offered by the MLA report on the humanities exhort us to reflect once again on our historical moment, on the factors that impede the growth of faculty members of color in our fields, and on how institutional policies and resources can open up our disciplines and universities to transformation. The semantic shifts of the term diversity, since it began circulating in institutional discourse in the 1980s, have redefined the term away from race, ethnicity, and gender subordination to include all forms of difference, including intellectual and emotional. Many universities have reframed diversity as intellectual heterogeneity, which is more easily associated with institutional excellence. I have heard discussions in diversity committees in which courses about emotional intelligence are being considered to satisfy the diversity requirement. Moreover, racial diversity has been put in the context of globalization. Thus the oppositional values of a project that was grassroots‐driven has become a public relations tool for administrators. As Ahmed suggests, diversity ends up reinforcing whiteness and aestheticizing equality by marketing such institutional efforts in ways that render some differences more acceptable than others (151).

What does it mean, then, to write about the need for increased numbers of faculty members of color in the humanities? How do we support talented minority undergraduates at a time when affirmative action has been under legal attack and now is at risk of being revoked? How do we counteract the market forces that dictate the reduction of graduate programs? Demographic changes and the growth of minority high school graduates should prompt universities to support initiatives that increase the presence of minority students on campuses, yet budget constraints, limited resources, color‐blind policies, and postracial discourses are enlisted to justify ignoring such initiatives.

In this essay, I share personal memories of the contradictions, tensions, and challenges that minority graduate students and assistant professors have faced in the humanities. Quantitative data show patterns, but the numbers should be complemented with experiences as well as with a candid analysis of the policies and factors that continue to fuel the marginalization of intellectuals of color. If “to talk about racism is to become the problem you pose” (Ahmed 153), then I risk once again (as I did in the 1990s) being described as the angry Latina (not the “wise Latina” [Sotomayor]) who speaks out in criticism of our disciplines and institutional life.

That scholars of color question the inclusion and exclusion of writers, traditions, or communities in established Eurocentric and United States canons suggests that their presence will trigger discussion and revision of these canons. I have witnessed the dismantling of reading lists for master’s exams in Spanish departments after graduate students of color demanded inclusion of United States Latino/a writers. Instead of adding these voices, faculty members decided to eliminate the required reading list altogether and restructure the goals of the master’s exam.

Any attack on racial and ethnic minorities is an attack on the interdisciplinary scholarship central to Latino/a studies. I am conscious of the risky homology between faculty members of color and interdisciplinarity, for it elides the work of many scholars of color who specialize in a mainstream field of study. Such scholars are more easily integrated into departmental life and curricula, yet they can influence their units if they speak out about inequality and exclusion. Most of my memories of the struggles of graduate students of color since 1990 involve their efforts at validating and legitimating their proposals for dissertation projects that challenged the discipline methodologically and in terms of its canon. Although literary studies has been profoundly influenced by discourses on race, ethnicity, and gender proposed by scholars of color, a cursory look at most literature departments across the country reveals a limited number of minority-focused courses in the curriculum. When scholars of color engage the humanities in interdisciplinary modes, literary texts no longer serve as the primary source of data. A literary text becomes one of many discourses, which are interwoven to answer social questions regarding cultural and racial inequality. This methodological maneuver is not always clearly understood by traditional scholars.

Research and teaching related to minority issues continue to be deemed as exotic or secondary, as a subfield at best, not central to the discipline. We are currently witnessing attacks on liberal arts education’s inability to provide marketable skills. The humanities have historically been associated with nonlucrative jobs. Yet by expanding the traditional curriculum and connecting the humanities with the new social, racial, cultural, and linguistic demographics of the United States, the presence of minority students in our disciplines could constitute a meaningful, long-term investment for the humanities.

During my career, I have faced several incidents of discrimination. On one campus, although I was approached by more than the usual number of students for mentoring, I was told that few students would be interested in my field of study and that those studying with me would not get letters of recommendation from other colleagues. It was an instance not of “microaggression” (Wing Sue) or even of a “decidedly chilly work environment” (Sotello, Myers, and Creswell 28) but of outright hostility toward me as a scholar and toward the field that I represented. Despite these threats and disciplinary violations, I ended up mentoring an excessive number of students of color who are now tenured, published professors in liberal arts colleges and public universities. I now consider it a major achievement of mine and a contribution to the field of Latino/a literary and cultural studies that I prepared those students for the professoriat, but this work was a direct result of the lack of faculty members of color in the College of Arts and Sciences on that campus. I mentored graduate students in ethnomusicology, English, sociology, anthropology, gender and women’s studies, American studies, and Spanish. I could have easily refused to work with these students on the grounds that I was not trained in their discipline or that I was not familiar with their research interests. Yet my willingness to mentor them was a central factor in their eventual completion of the PhD.

Hiring scholars of color was a painful struggle at one of the campuses where I taught. For ten years we identified senior and junior scholars as candidates but to no avail. Departments had to approve them, and most professors did not welcome people who they thought would rock the disciplinary boat. In contrast, at another institution where I taught, my unit had the ability to hire 100% full-time equivalents (FTEs) and evaluate them for promotion and tenure. The program grew from five faculty members to thirteen in ten years. However, because most minority scholars are clustered in interdisciplinary programs, most departments still lack a diverse faculty body. There is a clear correlation between policies and structures of hiring and recruitment and the curtailing or making impossible the hiring of minority scholars, not only in the humanities but in the social sciences as well. Minority scholars must also be hired by mainstream departments if diversity is to be legitimized on any campus, and interdisciplinary programs must also be equal partners with departments in curricular and hiring decisions. Many young scholars of color who have been trained in interdisciplinary ethnic studies programs may not desire a departmental affiliation. Universities or colleges that allow only departments to hire are clearly limiting the possibility of increasing the number of their faculty members of color who engage in interdisciplinary scholarship.

There is a strong relation between the presence of minority faculty members and graduate students and curricular transformation. At one of the campuses where I taught, many Latino/a graduate students in Spanish were frustrated at the lack of available graduate courses that addressed their interests in popular culture, the diaspora, and race and ethnicity. They were successful in their request to the dean for one more faculty position in those fields of study, but only after preparing a report that revealed the gaps between the most requested fields of study in the job market and the existing graduate courses in the Spanish program. The program offered most courses on Peninsular topics, but the report clearly indicated an increasing interest in interdisciplinarity, United States Latino/a literature and culture, and postcolonial and subaltern studies. I have taught on campuses where some departments informally express interest in hiring Latino/a scholars but never prepare a job announcement in that field. Other departments, recognizing the increasing number of Latino/a undergraduates in their classes, ask Latin Americanists to prepare new courses in United States Latino/a literature and cultures (as if there were no differences between the two fields in training or literary corpus) instead of requesting a new FTE focused on Latinos/as. Such empty rhetoric shows a lack of respect for a field of study that has developed for more than fifty years and that has contributed to our understanding of identity, hybridity, colonization and empire, immigration, language and bilingualism, literary studies, and the politics of representation. I will never forget a Latin Americanist historian who once told me, in passing, that he could teach a Latino/a studies course very easily if he spent two months reading the bibliography. I would never have considered undermining his field of study in that way.

Graduate students interested in pursuing Latino/a literary and cultural studies face major obstacles in completing their PhDs. At universities with generous financial aid to minority graduate students, many departments welcome graduate students of color as freebies, even if they do not have faculty members who match the research interests of those students. This lack of scholars of color exacerbates the already alienating experience of graduate school, for the minority students have to spend much more energy and effort in finding viable mentors, inside or outside their departments. Then, when the work of meeting the departmental requirements begins, so does the power struggle over disciplinary legitimacy.

A graduate student in ethnomusicology, for instance, who wanted to write an interdisciplinary, cultural studies–based dissertation on Mexican American music, was told that she was enrolling in too many interdisciplinary courses and not completing enough courses in her own department. Yet that department’s curriculum did not address her intellectual needs. Only one faculty member from her department, given the interdisciplinary nature of her project, ended up being on her dissertation committee. Another student in Spanish had to postpone her PhD exam dates for almost a year because the graduate committee in her department constantly changed its mind about approving the fields of study that this student had proposed for her exams. It insisted, in the name of the canon, that she prepare herself in one area that had no relevance to her dissertation. Yet, having created these obstacles, and only after her graduation, the department, for marketing purposes, listed her dissertation as an example of the cutting‐edge research by graduate students. Most graduate students I have mentored experienced this kind of struggle and tension. Even in the interdisciplinary programs where I taught, some were told that their research projects were too interdisciplinary. Because they were contesting disciplinary boundaries, these students ultimately enhanced their dissertations, but their departments would still refuse to recognize the importance of studying United States Latinos/as or would advise students earlier to change to a more traditional area of study.

Many students left academia altogether. The MLA report indicates that humanities doctorate attrition rates generally hover around 50%, while the “Hispanic doctoral students have an especially low ten-year completion rate of 37%” (Data 1–2). Dominant narratives argue that this attrition rate is natural and that students depart by personal choice, but I maintain that institutional factors explain their departure. The departmental work climate, the lack of faculty mentors who are familiar with the scholarly interests of graduate students of color, limited financial aid, and admission but no strategies for support or retention all play a role. In one instance, a student completed his master’s degree in Spanish but was told that he could not be admitted to the PhD program because his proposal to examine, from a gender and sexuality approach, the life and works of a poor minority poet was not considered acceptable by the graduate committee, although the poet’s literary significance had been highlighted in a biopic film. After repeated attacks against this student and his project, he left the academic world and is now teaching in a public school. He is an outstanding elementary school teacher yet to this day visits Spanish department Web sites, social media, and other forms of communication that update him on the latest Latin American novels and on literary news. He continues to be an avid reader. He would have made an excellent literature professor but was rejected and damaged to such an extent that he could not continue in the academic world.

I have witnessed female minority graduate students who dropped out of doctoral programs because no faculty mentor was interested in their research projects. Their departments admitted these women but, once they were in, offered little to no support for the women’s projects. The less support the students had, the less productive they were. Less productive, they received less funding and fewer teaching assistantships. This vicious cycle led to their departure. One student approached a woman of color faculty member to see if she would be interested in working with her, but the faculty member said no. Given the challenges that faculty members of color, particularly when they are women, have in balancing research and teaching demands with the service expectations on our campuses, this refusal was not surprising. Yet it is our collective responsibility to address the challenges that these students face and to get our departments, colleges, and universities to help. The MLA report states that faculty members of color spend more hours per week working on “unpaid tasks outside their institutions and more hours per week with advisees” (Data 4), which documents the significant needs of our communities and students. The burden of one body representing “her whole ethnic group” is not shared by many other colleagues in the humanities or in other scholarly areas (Sotello, Myers, and Creswell 42).

The MLA report’s figures indicate that between 1997 and 2006 not much has changed in terms of the numbers of foreign languages and humanities doctorates awarded to Hispanics. In the humanities, we gained seven more PhDs in nine years, while in the foreign languages, we gained four. These numbers show the stagnation that has characterized institutions of higher learning when it comes to diversifying. They suggest that diversity is being “managed” (Ahmed 53) and not truly associated with the inclusion of minorities. In the United States, the legal environment around affirmative action has led to the passage of laws that eliminate considerations of race, ethnicity, and gender from decisions about conferring benefits on students in higher education. (According to the American Council on Education, California, Washington, Nevada, Michigan, and Florida have enacted those laws [Coleman et al.]). Yet if we want to avoid a national scenario of academic segregation in which higher education is accessible only to the children of the elite, then we must educate and mentor our students of color. Demographics are a compelling reason for universities to reconsider their curricula and make the humanities and foreign languages spaces for the empowerment and inclusion of minority voices. English departments, for instance, need to include Arab American literature in their teaching and scholarship. How are we integrating religious studies into our analysis of racialization and subordination? If we think of diversity as a “narrative of repair” and as a means of recovering from racism (Ahmed 163–71), then it is up to scholars and administrators to make diversity a leading value that will transform the university and society as well.

Much has been said about the pipeline, both as a means of producing new scholars of color and as a problem, because those students drop out (Sotello, Myers, and Creswell). Yet the undergraduate years are when most college students make career decisions. If I had not had faculty members during my junior year who praised my analytic skills in literary studies, I may never have applied to graduate school in Spanish. If I had not had the mentors who spent substantial time with me reviewing my senior thesis and taking my work seriously, I may not have imagined myself as a future thinker and intellectual, as a producer of knowledge. The sense of empowerment that undergraduate students of color, particularly women, experience as the result of developing a scholarly voice can play a central role in helping students of color make decisions about their future professional lives. Teaching at the university may not grant a lifestyle of wealth, but it grants a status that increases one’s sense of respect and legitimacy. For students of color, many of whom are from working-class and working-poor families, earning a PhD must become a viable option as they consider their future careers.

How can we, scholars in the humanities and foreign languages, urge minority students to join us at a time when the economic crisis steers students toward more lucrative fields? In major Latino/a urban centers, such as Chicago, many students come from immigrant families where higher education is a channel for social mobility. Not many students (or their parents) may seriously consider the humanities as a way of moving up. I have encountered many parents who were not happy about their son’s or daughter’s long-term investment in a PhD in the humanities. They privileged manual labor over intellectual labor, they measured their child’s professional success in terms of salary and years in school, and they felt some urgency in having their son or daughter begin “real work.” Educating parents and students about the importance of the humanities in an increasingly global world and in the United States national context is crucial if we are to secure a strong pipeline of students who will pursue the PhD.

Making our society understand Latinos/as is in itself a much‐needed task. Departments, programs, colleges, and universities continue to alienate students of color and impede their progress. While quantitative data serve as important reminders of our long-term failure, they cannot contextualize or explain the specific hurdles and human decisions that produce institutional racism. People, committees, departments, and disciplines can make changes that will influence positively and include students of color. At a time when liberal arts education has been criticized for not being pertinent or pragmatic, humanities and foreign languages departments should revise their curricula and literary and critical canons by identifying, nurturing, and mentoring undergraduate students of color who wish to gain the skills they need, and the vision, to become producers of humanistic knowledge.

Note

1. See De Genova and Ramos-Zayas. For a more recent and continuing debate on the question of race and ethnicity in the United States census, see Prewitt and the response to Prewitt by López. ↩

Works Cited

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

Coleman, Arthur L., et al. A Twenty-First Century Imperative: Promoting Access and Diversity in Higher Education. University of Southern California. Coll. Board Advocacy–Amer. Council on Educ.–Educ. Counsel, Oct. 2009. Web. 12 Aug. 2013. <http://www.usc.edu/programs/cerpp/docs/ArtColeman-Diversity_Imperative.pdf>.

Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity. Modern Language Association. MLA, Apr. 2010. Web. 12 Aug. 2013. <http://www.mla.org/data_humanities>.

De Genova, Nicholas, and Ana Yolanda Ramos-Zayas. Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.

López, Nancy. “An Inconvenient Truth: ‘Hispanic’ Is an Ethnic Origin, Not a ‘Race.’” The New York Times. New York Times, 24 Aug. 2013. Web. 2 Oct. 2013.

“People QuickFacts.” United States Census Bureau. US Dept. of Commerce, 2013. Web. 6 Nov. 2013.

Prewitt, Kenneth. “Fix the Census’ Archaic Racial Categories.” The New York Times. New York Times, 21 Aug. 2013. Web. 2 Oct. 2013.

Puwar, Nirmal. Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies out of Place. Oxford: Berg, 2004. Print.

Sotello, Caroline Viernes Turner, Samuel L. Myers, Jr., and John W. Creswell. “Exploring Underrepresentation: The Case of Faculty of Color in the Midwest.” Journal of Higher Education 70.1 (1999): 27–59. Print.

Sotomayor, Sonia. “A Latina Judge’s Voice.” 2001. The New York Times. New York Times, 14 May 2009. Web. 3 Sept. 2013. <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/us/politics/15judge.text.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0>.

Wing Sue, Derald. Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation. Hoboken: Wiley, 2010. Print.

Frances R. Aparicio is professor of Spanish and director of the Latina and Latino Studies Program at Northwestern University. This essay appears as part of a cluster from the Committee on the Literatures of People of Color in the United States and Canada.

Posted November 2013

As an academic-unit administrator in a high-quality, public institution of higher education in this era of dwindling resources, I have come to a sort of peace with the way deans, provosts, chancellors, and their minions (of which, I guess, I am one) make data-driven decisions. Thus, I read reports like the MLA’s Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity with appreciation for the careful work reflected in it, and I understand how such reports are useful to those of us who advocate better and more attention to the needs of the humanities in the emergence of new models of higher education. Indeed, in crucial ways, data and analysis of them are the ticket to a seat at the table and the discussion around it.

Having reached this pleasant (albeit restive) peace, I want to also point out that over the past two decades I have read through reports like this one and become accustomed to the regular fact of Native American statistical insignificance in quantitative studies of American higher education. This report uses double crosses, or double daggers, to note that insignificance, and I can’t help exploiting the irony. Cross me once, shame on you; double-cross me, shame on me. Stab me once, shame on you; stab me twice, I guess I didn’t run away fast enough. Nearly every report like this one I have read over the past two decades double-crosses or stabs me with the persistent reality of Native American statistical insignificance in American higher education.

This is the first time anyone has come to me and asked me to address the meaning of Native statistical insignificance, so let me express my appreciation for an opportunity to do some venting. I have a criticism to make of this particular report, but I make it in the context of ongoing support of the MLA’s openness to criticism. Let me start, then, with a recent example that illustrates how I read this MLA report.

Last year, the University of Illinois, where I work, placed an ad touting its commitment to diversity on the same page of the Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2011 “Diversity in Academe” annual statistical report on the state of higher education that reported the percentage of Native American and other groups of faculty members on our campus. The ad reads, “At Illinois, it’s all about our commitment. … The University of Illinois is committed to cultivating a campus in which students, staff, and faculty are welcomed, valued, and celebrated.” In the table alongside the half-page ad, Illinois lists American Indian faculty as 0%.

I would, perhaps, be less sensitive to such slights if my campus and our program were not as overdetermined as we are. Illinois is, as you may recall, a campus that treated the country to a controversy of nearly two decades over its sports mascot, which was eventually and spasmodically retired in 2007. The university spent millions of dollars defending the rather backward and embarrassing position that having a student dress up in Northern Plains–style clothes and perform dance moves like aerial splits to obviously fake Native-themed music could be construed to honor Native Americans, specifically those from this decidedly non-Plains region of the Midwest. The flimsy argument didn’t work despite those millions.

Thanks to the hard and resolute work of Native and non-Native students, staff members, and faculty members on our campus, Illinois created an American Indian studies program a decade ago. That program, oddly enough, has become regarded by people around the world as a leader in global Indigenous studies. I came to Illinois to direct the program five years ago, largely because of the terrific people who had assembled in it. I am proud to say that we have got even better since then. I don’t know if we are the best, but I do not hear anyone saying that some other program or department is better. So, given this odd confluence, what does it mean that we are in a conversation about having the best program studying Native Americans while also having statistically no Native American faculty members?

As a program director responsible for administering an academic unit with tenure-granting rights, I have participated in meetings at which departmental requests for new faculty lines are vetted. In those meetings, I have sat looking at data projected on a screen detailing how many majors a department has and how many instructional units (at Illinois, an instructional unit is earned for every hour of paid tuition for a particular class) a department produces for every full-time faculty member on its roster. The logic is simple: one can gain a decent picture of what an academic unit will likely produce with a new faculty member by looking at what it’s doing with its current roster.

In my experience, which includes more opportunities than most people in our profession have had to be inside the conference room for this sort of process but which is still limited in comparison with the experience of bigger fish in the academic pond, data that drive this simple logic are part of a longer, often much more complex discussion that involves peering into memos, spreadsheets, and other media to create a context for understanding how to make a decision about a particular academic unit in a particular institution at a particular time. But, however complex that discussion becomes, those data are almost always the entry point for the discussion and can come to represent a trump card for or (much more often) against deciding in favor of a unit’s request to grow.

If you have ever had to compare faculty members across a large department, or if you have ever been part of a tenure and promotion committee, you have probably had a similar experience with teaching evaluations. Those evaluations obviously say something about a course and how a professor taught it, but most MLA members, I would guess, would argue that a quantitative presentation of evaluations provides only one, highly limited view of what happened across the span of time in a course. Was the professor a tough grader? Did she pitch the course at a level slightly higher than the average student in a room? Did the reading list go one notch above what students on that campus could endure? Such questions, none of which are reflected in the data, can affect a decision.

In graduate admissions, I have never been part of a discussion that started with a candidate’s GRE scores (though I have to say I have been in discussions in which admissions decisions unfortunately hinged on those scores). Recently I had the pleasure of being on a graduate fellowship board focused on providing support for underrepresented students—the pleasure coming in part from the shared sense of the experienced board members with whom I have worked that GRE scores rarely say anything significant about a candidate unless they are incredibly high or incredibly low.

So data are for me something worth considering, and I am open to considering the reasons why my colleagues in measurement-based disciplines trust them much more than I do, especially when they are open to my suspicions that we trust quantifiable scores too much. Which brings me to the MLA report.

The first time American Indian or Alaska Native people show up as a number higher than 4 in Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity is in the table listing foreign languages in which doctorates were earned from 1997 to 2006. The total number in that decade is 13, slightly more than one per year, representing 0.2% of all doctorates earned (table 3a). The next chart, table 3b, indicates that 68 American Indians or Alaska Natives earned PhDs in English in the same period, including 10 in 2001 (0.5%). Table 3c tells us that 153 American Indians or Alaska Natives earned doctorates in the humanities during that same decade (0.4%).

Table 4 provides a snapshot of where scholars of color who graduated from English PhD programs found jobs in 2003–04. Only four Native people graduated that year: one found a tenure-track position, one got a non-tenure-track position, one got a postdoctoral position, and one got a job in government, business, or a not-for-profit organization. By contrast, 46.6% of white PhDs in English found tenure-track jobs, and 67%–74% of other people of color found tenure-track positions.

Soon after, the double crosses or double daggers appear. These crosses or daggers, according to the footnotes, represent “[t]oo few cases to report statistically significant information” (table 7). They appear in the American Indian or Alaska Native column of the following categories in the report: research activities of full-time faculty members at four-year institutions by race or ethnicity, hours per week worked by full-time humanities faculty members at four-year institutions by race or ethnicity, overall job satisfaction of full-time humanities faculty members at four-year institutions by race or ethnicity, opinion of full-time humanities faculty members at four-year institutions by race or ethnicity in response to the statement that faculty members who are members of racial or ethnic minorities are treated fairly, and responses by full-time humanities faculty members at four-year institutions by race or ethnicity to the question of whether they would choose an academic career again.

So, what do I learn from this report about how institutions are doing in providing opportunities and support for Native American scholars, and what can you learn? Beyond the basic set of very low numbers, let’s be honest and say that we learn only that language departments have not provided enough opportunities for Native American scholars to even register as significant in this study—despite the fact that the MLA has been involved in the development of Native literature as a legitimate academic field for more than four decades.

To elaborate, the MLA has been involved in Native literary studies more extensively than it has been in any field in race and ethnicity except for African American literary studies. American Indian literatures gained divisional status well ahead of Chicano/a literatures or Asian American literatures. The Association for the Study of American Indian Literature (ASAIL) provided further opportunities for sessions in the association’s structure at an early juncture.

The field’s whiteness surely had something to do with the speed with which American Indian literatures became a structural part of the MLA. Without the non-Native scholars who took the lead in legitimizing the field in their departments and in the MLA, Native literary studies would have had neither the numbers nor the expertise to push forward. Yet a field focused on Native literatures but having the vast majority of its practitioners be non-Native leads to perceptual and representational problems. With so few Native scholars around, non-Natives have been the face of the field. Non-Native scholars do not, by definition, experience the field in the same way Native scholars do, and non-Native and Native scholars necessarily represent Native experience differently.

Twenty years after the initial moves toward the field began, when I first started attending MLA conventions in the 1990s, Native scholars were statistically insignificant in their own division: three to five Native scholars being able to find one another at a session was the status quo. Efforts to make things different eventually helped bring as many as twenty-five Native scholars to the same convention, and for a couple of years in a row, every member of the division’s elected leadership was a Native scholar. Those couple of years when twenty-five showed up created parity of a sort in the division, and to the great credit of nearly all the non-Native scholars who had been integral to the building and development of the division, Native scholars in both small and more equal numbers have been welcomed as colleagues and leaders.

I don’t intend my criticism to imply that the MLA’s four decades of support mean nothing, but none of that work is captured in a report like this one. My question, then, is, What does the MLA plan on doing to reflect its long-standing commitment to this field? The focus or methodology of the report may be fine, but the report’s stance toward data about Native American responses reads like a shrug of the shoulders. Is this “Oh, well, we tried,” or does it open the door to some other avenue along which we all might learn something about what four decades of supporting a field means?

The overall bad news of the report makes me wonder about the extent to which language departments have grown complaisant about the recruitment and retention of students of color in our profession. Thus I offer the following recommendations for the consideration of those who remain concerned about Native participation in the work of Native literary studies.

• Acknowledge the statistical insignificance and characterize what that means for the MLA. The basic problem is not statistical insignificance but lack of characterization. After forty years, shouldn’t the MLA have something meaningful to say when its own studies don’t capture information about a constituency to which it has, in various ways, committed itself? Do the data, even if they are not statistically significant, point to anything? If not, okay. But let us at least discuss the fact of their insignificance.
• Consider dedicating association resources to gaining a statistical-quantitative understanding of this field. The MLA’s Language Map uses aggregated data from the 2006–10 American Community Survey to display the locations and numbers of speakers of thirty languages commonly spoken in the United States, and its Language Map Data Center provides data about over three hundred languages spoken in the United States. Beyond these tools, I know of no quantitative project the MLA has sponsored that captures Native participation in the profession. Why not sponsor studies that focus on Native American participation in the profession? At worst, such studies would establish a baseline of how close or far we are to being able to quantify Native experiences of teaching language and literature. At best, they would capture data that other studies have not.
• Do not allow statistical insignificance to limit the extent to which the MLA refers to diversity in the profession. Instruct all those who speak for the association and those who work with them to include Native Americans, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and First Nations people in their discussions about diversity. Anytime someone speaks for the MLA and lists underrepresented groups, Native Americans should be able to expect those speakers to include Native Americans.

I hope these recommendations prove useful to the association’s leaders and staff members as they consider what it means to be inclusive of Native people in policy and practice. Action on these recommendations would make the double crosses or double daggers a little easier to endure.

Works Cited

Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity. Modern Language Association. MLA, Apr. 2010. Web. 6 Mar. 2013. <http://www.mla.org/data_humanities>.

University of Illinois. Advertisement. “Diversity in Academe.” Chronicle of Higher Education 10 Sept. 2011: B50. Print.

Robert Warrior is professor of English and American Indian studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana. This essay appears as part of a cluster from the Committee on the Literatures of People of Color in the United States and Canada.

Posted November 2013

When W. E. B. Du Bois wrote “The Field and Function of the Negro College” in 1933, the “Negro” college, still in its youth, grappled mightily with its ability to introduce unique curricular approaches to enhance higher education in America and to help the country meet its potential as a democracy. Echoing remarks he had been making about the Negro college since 1906, Du Bois implores it to position itself on the “high ground of unfaltering facing of the Truth” (130) and to provide for the world a lens through which to interpret all history, one that looks to Africa “to interpret and understand the social development of all mankind in all ages” (125). By 1950, Du Bois’s peer, Alain Locke, in response to Harvard’s 1945 report General Education in a Free Society, had begun to argue for a new method of university education that would not only change the scope of liberal arts or general education but also use liberal arts training to change the way of intellectual thinking (268)—in other words, Locke proposed that we change not just what we study but also how we think. In an attempt to exorcise parochial thinking and to correct traditional culture bias, he proposed a methodology he termed critical relativism, which called for an evaluation of world cultural values or ideas about humanity while avoiding the two extremes inherent in such an evaluation—relativism and dogmatism. In its acknowledgment of values as relative to their culture, critical relativism would situate them in the contexts out of which they are birthed and concurrently acknowledge, with reciprocity and tolerance, the diversity of values and cultures that populate the world, all the while subjecting cultural values to objective criticism. A curriculum model grounded in critical relativism would make clear how course content from seemingly disparate disciplines and cultures connects one to another and, significantly, to the formulation and articulation of solutions to problems of the human condition and social culture. Central to the development of such solutions is an awareness of the limits of the narrow confines of the nation-state as governing or underlying concept and a corresponding commitment to require the liberally educated to imagine themselves as citizens of a world of many coequal cultures.

While Locke, as a multiculturalist and interdisciplinarian avant la lettre, envisioned the implementation of his proposed curricula for all colleges and universities, not just historically black ones, the Harvard-trained philosopher and Howard University professor was fully aware of the history of black intellectual traditions, which by necessity developed at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). HBCUs would lead the way to critical reforms of American higher education. Absent such transformation of liberal arts ideals, “an external dislocation in the relationship of knowledge to the problems of social culture” and “a breakdown of the culture itself,” Locke predicted, could and should be anticipated (265). After revisiting the 2010 MLA report Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity with an eye toward answering its call for more contextualized and textured narratives to accompany the data as text, I found myself turning, again, to Du Bois and Locke as the intermediaries through whom I might best explain the report’s acknowledgment of “the continuing prominence of HBCUs [as the undergraduate institutions] among African American doctorate recipients” (1).

A pulling back of the layers of Locke’s proposal for a core curriculum for liberal arts or general education training reveals that undergirding that proposal is a keen awareness of the significance of the humanities—which concerns itself foremost with the exploration, analysis, and exchange of ideas that inform the human experience and human condition—to the well-trained student. In the broadest interpretation of the idea of the humanities, it is impossible to completely dissociate traditional humanities disciplines from fields more interested in empirical articulations of data, despite the accepted demarcation between science and the humanities. As Cathy Davidson suggests, “The humanistic turn of mind provides the historical perspective, interpretive skill, critical analysis, and narrative form required to articulate the significance of the scientific discoveries of an era, show how they change our sense of what it means to be human, and demarcate their continuity with or difference from existing ideologies” (707). Our failure in recent years as scholars and critics to provide, with adequate integrity and saturation, the variables Davidson cites here and, conversely, the failure of the American public to understand and demand that this need be met have, in unfortunate ways, rendered Locke’s prediction of a breakdown in social culture a near foregone conclusion. More than fifty years after his caution and perhaps in an effort that seeks, at least in part, to mitigate the breakdown, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, offers a remarkably similar admonition and posits that an aesthetic education is of utmost importance in what the American education system has finally come to accept as a global era. The MLA report, Du Bois’s admonishment that the HBCU accept its role in the innovation of moral consciousness, and Locke’s curriculum proposal, especially when considered in the light of Spivak’s argument, implore us to consider again the HBCU in rethinking the humanities fields and in meeting the demands of that rethinking. At least two related questions come to mind: In what ways does the HBCU, with its commitment to fostering and extending black intellectual traditions especially, advance humanities ideas and ideals? What role does this commitment play in preparing African American undergraduates to become doctorate recipients?

The HBCU, since its inception, has been engaged simultaneously in acts of inclusion and subversion. As M. Christopher Brown and James Earl Davis indicate, “Understanding the fundamental characteristics that shape historically Black colleges serves as a framework of analysis for meaningful equity and access” and inclusion; yet, in its commitment to help the disempowered interpret and engage the “competing roles of knowledge construction, information transmission, and status allocation” (32), the HBCU participates steadily in the undermining of accepted thought as truth, especially in relation to peoples of color, and prompts us to interpret more broadly what we know and how we come to know it. Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity reveals that African American students who earn doctoral degrees in humanities fields (identified as English, literature, modern languages, religion, history, philosophy) are being trained at the undergraduate level overwhelmingly at HBCUs—Spelman College, Howard University, and Morehouse College being the top three. Research suggests that there is a definite correlation between higher educational aspiration and African Americans who attend HBCUs.1 Factors relevant to the correlation may include student-student interaction, which increases leadership aspirations and thus a desire for additional education, and student-faculty interaction, which Kevin Cokely suggests is the best predictor of academic self-concept among HBCU students (while GPA, Cokely asserts, is the best predictor of academic self-concept for students at traditionally white institutions). Undeniably, student-faculty interaction provides encouragement to pursue further study. It was what led me to become a professor.

Research still says little about how curriculum informs self-concept and about the relation of self-concept to educational aspiration in humanities fields and success at the doctoral level in them. Research is clear, however, that emphasizing teaching and valuing it as equal to scholarship, even valuing teaching-based scholarship, have a long-standing history at HBCUs. As Du Bois announced at the turn of the century, curricular innovation must be the hallmark if not a mandate of the HBCU, considering that dominant narratives tend to be less than forthright and inclusive in their dealings with peoples of color. At Howard and at Morgan State, for example, introductory humanities courses have been reimagined both to make evident an Africanist presence in traditional humanities texts and themes and to recognize the ways African beliefs, themes, and cultures anticipate time-honored mythologies, thus highlighting that the relation between African cultures and traditional Western ones is reciprocal at the very least. Such reimagining helps undergraduates, as early as their freshman year, understand how humanities texts teach us about ourselves and our relation to others, about values and beliefs, about creativity and democracy.

The most astute humanists consistently recognize the relation of humanistic inquiry and analysis to ideas of self and other, to ideas about what constitutes right and good, and to ideas about culture and meaning. The requirement of curricular change at the HBCU from its inception and the unrelenting tendency toward curricular innovation ever since encourage humanities departments, especially at HBCUs, to position themselves as vanguards and to prepare their students for the rigor of the multilayered exploration of texts as cultural productions. At Spelman College, the all-women’s liberal arts college that ranks highest among HBCUs as the undergraduate institution of students who go on to earn doctoral degrees in humanities fields, English majors are expected to demonstrate critical thinking about ideas and texts and understand the role of literature in the development of culture. But they must also show that they can “recognize and engage the conflicts and tensions in values and belief systems” embodied in literatures from different cultures and “examine and analyze the representations of women, especially Black women, depicted in literature and visual culture” (“English Goals”). To help meet these objectives, students are required to take the standard Introduction to Literary Studies and Introduction to Critical Theory Studies courses along with others. They are also required to take two courses in category 1, “African American and US Literature” (esp. Seminal Writers in the African American Tradition), two from category 2, “British Literature,” and two from category 3, “Gender Studies, Critical Theory, and International Literature.” This curriculum is buttressed by a required two-semester course in the African Diaspora and the World Program, which places particular emphasis “on the intersections and connections among the various communities of African descent globally” and seeks to have students “examine, interrogate and deconstruct dominant knowledge systems about Africa and its diasporas” and “identify how Africa and African diasporan communities have shaped the modern world” (“ADW”).

Students majoring in English at Howard are similarly required to take at least one course in the African American cluster (a requirement for all undergraduate students, as is the two-semester course in the African Diaspora and the World Program at Spelman) in addition to African American Literary Foundations, a course that examines representative African American literary discourses (including folk traditions) from the colonial period to the present. More than twenty courses in humanities fields with an emphasis on African American and African diaspora cultures are offered each academic year, and students take six such courses on average. In addition, many courses in African literature, Caribbean literature, and African diaspora literatures are offered regularly as electives. The department’s mission is to train its students in ways that are informed by African American and African diaspora critical strategies and intellectual discourses.

At Morehouse, in addition to traditional courses on authors like Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare, students can take a two-semester sequence in African American literature and single-semester courses on the Harlem Renaissance, the contemporary African American novel, the Caribbean novel, and major authors in African American literature. Like the English departments at Spelman and Howard, the Department of English at Morehouse encourages students to use their special position at an HBCU to understand ideas and concepts and their histories through texts and movements that adopt a liberal worldview informed by African diaspora traditions. Most English departments would argue that they too embrace the aim of fostering in their majors “an abiding appreciation of world literatures and cultures” and of providing them with the intercultural skills “necessary to succeed in advanced studies in the humanities” (“Department”), but there persists among these HBCUs a distinctive commitment to a culturally responsive pedagogy that aggressively expands the Western world’s values, literatures, and cultures to include those from classical and modern African and African diaspora civilizations. The logical (even if only anecdotal) by-product of this commitment is the development of a self-identity rooted in black intellectual traditions that are at once expansive and inclusive and confined and unique. In the best of circumstances, students are exposed to a range of global traditions and texts that transmit both culturally specific and universally applicable humanistic heritages. The goal of the core courses in the Humanities Division curriculum at Howard, for example, is to help students feel at home with all peoples of the world. Plato’s and Socrates’s inquiries about morality and the greatest good are contextualized among wisdom literature of classical African civilizations. Mephistopheles’s role in Goethe’s Faust is read through the lens of the African trickster, and Faust’s lament that two souls live within him is considered alongside Du Boisian double consciousness. A broad base of knowledge about the world and its cultures and the awareness of being heirs to this intellectual and cultural genealogy create in students a self-definition informed by their traditions and heritages and a confidence that abides with them under circumstances good and bad. They understand fully, through theory and practice, the significance of graduate study’s contribution to knowledge production—its project of making critical interventions in traditional and nontraditional spaces alike. They survive graduate school and go at a pace comparable to that of their white peers: “only African American and white doctorate recipients show completion rates over 50% at year 10” (Data 1–2). Although African Americans received less than 5% of total doctorates earned in English between 1997 and 2006 (table 3b), in 2003–04 they found tenure-track placements in English departments at the high rate of 73.9% (table 4) and earned competitive salaries (table 8). Finally, more than 80% reported that they were either “very satisfied” or “somewhat satisfied” in their roles as humanities faculty members (table 12).

As the 2007 report “Affirmative Activism” (published in Profession [ADE Ad Hoc Committee]) and 2010 report Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity make clear, there is much work to be done to increase the pitifully low number of African American faculty members in English. The cluster of essays “African Americans and the Doctorate in English” in the fall 2006 ADE Bulletin offers meaningful suggestions that speak candidly of possible solutions. Like my colleagues, I recognize that the HBCU is a vital source for feeding the pipeline of African American faculty members in humanities fields, English in particular. We would agree, however, that the HBCU is no panacea for a problem deeply rooted in historically practiced institutional and cultural discriminatory customs within the profession and without. So when Doug Steward astutely notes that there are stories the data do not index about the “pathways by which black Americans enter and succeed in, or walk away from, advanced study in English” (33), we should consider that among those stories are those that remind us that content matters, that what we know and how we come to know it are as meaningful as what we do with what we know and who we are.

Conversations about curriculum in which broad-reaching, full engagement with African diaspora traditions is posited as a saving grace (as Locke posits it) and in which acknowledgment is made of these traditions (as Du Bois makes it) as critical to enhancing the ways we think of ourselves in relation to the world might be seen by some as divisive. But as Wole Soyinka argues in Of Africa, the query, What is Africa? is best answered in the negative: “it is not a hegemonic construct, nor one that aspires to be” (24). So the approach by HBCUs to African diaspora studies tends to avoid fictionalized representations of the continent and to deconstruct the histories that emerge to perpetuate them. Their approach avoids imposing oppression or suppression on its methodology. Instead, HBCUs seek to expand the “existing boundaries of apprehension, one that transcends the mere cataloguing of external phenomena and attempts to delve into the nature of others, emerging (hopefully) with enhanced knowledge of one’s self and place in an enlarged and more complex universe” (Soyinka 35). Using texts to explore solutions to problems of the human condition and expand our view of the world and our relation to it is what these top HBCUs and other peer institutions have in common with the humanities. In fact, it’s their shared “field and function.”

Note

1. See especially Wenglinsky for commentary on the influence of HBCUs on educational aspiration. ↩

Works Cited

ADE Ad Hoc Committee on the Status of African American Faculty Members. “Affirmative Activism.” Profession (2007): 150–55. Print.

“ADW Creates Global Citizens (Continued).” Academics: Majors and Programs. Spelman College. Spelman Coll., n.d. Web. 24 July 2013. <http://www.spelman.edu/academics/majors-and-programs/african-diaspora-the-world/african-diaspora-the-world-(continued)>.

Brown, M. Christopher, and James Earl Davis. “The Historically Black College as Social Contract, Social Capital, and Social Equalizer.” Peabody Journal of Education 76.1 (2001): 31–49. Print.

Cokely, Kevin. “The Impact of College Racial Composition on African American Students’ Academic Self-Concept: A Replication and Extension.” Journal of Negro Education 71.4 (2002): 288–96. Print.

Data on Humanities Doctorate Recipients and Faculty Members by Race and Ethnicity. Modern Language Association. MLA, Apr. 2010. Web. 6 Mar. 2013. <http://www.mla.org/data_humanities>.

Davidson, Cathy N. “Humanities 2.0: Promise, Perils, Predictions.” PMLA 123.3 (2008): 707–17. Print.

“Department of English.” Morehouse College. Morehouse Coll., n.d. Web. 24 July 2013. <https://www.morehouse.edu/academics/eng/>.

Du Bois, W. E. B. “The Field and Function of the Negro College.” The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques, 1906–1960. Rev. ed. Ed. Herbert Aptheker. New York: Monthly Rev., 2001. 111–33. Print.

“English Goals and Objectives.” Academics: Majors and Programs. Spelman College. Spelman Coll., n.d. Web. 24 July 2013. <http://www.spelman.edu/academics/majors-and-programs/english/goals-and-objectives>.

Locke, Alain L. The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond. Ed. Leonard Harris. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1989. Print.

Soyinka, Wole. Of Africa. New Haven: Yale UP, 2012. Print.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2012. Print.

Steward, Doug. “The Status of African American Faculty Members in English.” ADE Bulletin 140 (2006): 32–34. Web. 23 July 2013.

Wenglinsky, Harold H. “The Educational Justification of Historically Black Colleges and Universities: A Policy Response to the U.S. Supreme Court.” Educational and Evaluation and Policy Analysis 18.1 (1996): 91–103. Print.

Dana A. Williams is professor of English and chair of the Department of English at Howard University. This essay appears as part of a cluster from the Committee on the Literatures of People of Color in the United States and Canada.

Posted November 2013

Half a century ago—at a forum on nationalism, colonialism, and United States foreign policy—James Baldwin cautioned, “We are misled here, because we think of numbers. You don’t need numbers; you need passion” (12–13). I am grateful to Frances R. Aparicio, Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo, Richard T. Rodríguez, Robert Warrior, and Dana A. Williams for the thoughtful passion that they bring to their responses to the report on available data on faculty members of color in English and foreign languages, where I note that numbers do not speak for themselves but call out for interpretation and narrative frameworks. Baldwin did not think terribly interesting the hypothetical day on which an African American would become president, but he did think we needed to realize that “no other country in the world has been so fat and so sleek, and so safe, and so happy, and so irresponsible, and so dead” (10). I doubt that he would think differently today, when the United States has an African American president but also, in Michelle Alexander’s words, “imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid” (6). That Baldwin no doubt meant the term passion to resonate with its Christian usage, as he so often did, suggests that we need to pass through a difficult trial that will strip us of the complacency Baldwin saw around him. The point is compelling, but I think, too, that in the bureaucratic terms that govern our lives nowadays, we are not misled to think that we need some numbers. Baldwin meant that numbers could be compensatory tokens, in the dismissive sense, but numbers can also be exchangeable currency in a bureaucratic economy. Humanists are widely suspicious of many of the numbers industries, and this suspicion finds fine, subtle form here in Warrior’s contribution. But data can give an advocacy campaign some common currency to spend in answering opposition that proceeds from different premises. Faculty members might find that they do not share the priorities and premises of their upper administration, for instance. But then the question becomes, Can they move the conversation to a place where they share some facts, where they agree on some data points? It’s my hope that the data report clears such a conversational space for those who seek it and that they will find in that clearing a more secure footing from which to leverage their institutions.

By way of update to the report, I draw attention to the supplement from the American Council on Education (ACE), Minorities in Higher Education. I am heartened to say that these findings are not wholly dispiriting, but most of them are no cause for celebration. For instance, the report finds generally that “[t]he younger generation in the United States no longer achieves a much higher level of education than its predecessors. . . . Only two groups, Asian Americans and whites, made notable gains over their elders. . . . No gains were observed for African Americans and Hispanics. . . . For American Indians . . . attainment rates for young adults were lower than their older counterparts” (Kim 1). “Young Asian Americans marked the highest rate of college enrollment (63 percent) in 2009, while American Indians registered the lowest rate (23 percent)” (2). The gender breakdowns continue to show stagnant or even bad news for men of color: “[Y]oung racial/ethnic minority men, except Asian Americans, have fallen behind their predecessors in postsecondary attainment,” and “African Americans and Hispanics showed the largest gender gaps in college enrollment rates” (1, 2). Unfortunately, these data show a lack of progress toward equity.

The news is better if we turn our attention toward graduate education, which is where the MLA has directed several of its efforts through the work of groups such as the ADE Ad Hoc Committee on the Status of African Americans in the Profession and the Group for Underrepresented Students in Humanities Education and Research, which began as an MLA project and has since migrated to other institutions. The ACE supplement finds that “[b]etween 1998 and 2008, the total number of master’s and doctoral degrees conferred rose by 51 percent and 30 percent, respectively. At each of these levels, the growth in degrees conferred is attributable largely to minorities. Their gains are notable especially at the master’s degree level, where the number of degrees conferred to students of color nearly doubled” (Kim 3). This information is encouraging for graduate education in English when we consider that about sixty percent of Hispanic and about seventy percent of black PhD recipients in English find tenure-track jobs in their first year on the market, while the overall rate is less than fifty percent (MLA Survey, table 2). However, the MLA Survey of Placement of 2006–07 Graduates from Doctoral Programs in the United States and Canada shows the rate of placement to tenure-track positions is very uneven across ethnicities and across English and foreign language fields, and the statistical difficulties of very low numbers that Warrior so eloquently discusses are evident: with only three American Indian graduates in English and two in foreign languages represented among the 2006–07 PhD recipients, the percentage values are on a different order of magnitude.

In Reading Machines, Stephen Ramsay suggests, “The scientist is right to say that the plural of anecdote is not data, but in literary criticism an abundance of anecdote is precisely what allows discussion and debate to move forward” (9). In this spirit, I close by quoting Valerie Lee, of Ohio State University, on the usefulness of quantitative data on and for faculty members in the humanities:

We care about individuals, their unique characteristics and motivations, etc., but if we tried to understand phenomena in terms of unique, individual causal factors, we could not predict, shape or change our world. By analyzing quantitative data, we are able to transcend individual or randomly-distributed factors to recognize patterns and relationships among observations. These relationships inform our understanding of processes and outcomes.

Works Cited

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New, 2010. E-book. Kindle ed.

Baldwin, James. “From Nationalism, Colonialism, and the United States: One Minute to Twelve—A Forum.” The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings. New York: Pantheon, 2010. 10–18. E-book. Kindle ed.

Kim, Young M. Minorities in Higher Education: Twenty-Fourth Status Report: 2011 Supplement. University of California, Santa Cruz. Amer. Council on Educ., Oct. 2011. Web. 9 Aug. 2013. <http://diversity.ucsc.edu/resources/images/ace_report.pdf>.

Lee, Valerie. Message to the author. 13 Oct. 2011. E-mail.

MLA Survey of Placement of 2006–07 Graduates from Doctoral Programs in the United States and Canada. Modern Language Association. MLA, Dec. 2011. Web. 9 Aug. 2013. <http://www.mla.org/pdf/survey_phdplacement_0607.pdf>.

Ramsay, Stephen. Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2011. Print.

Doug Steward is associate director of programs and of the Association of Departments of English at the MLA. This essay appears as part of a cluster from the Committee on the Literatures of People of Color in the United States and Canada.

Posted November 2013