Transforming the Academy

Faculty Perspectives on Diversity and Pedagogy

Edited by Sarah Willie-LeBreton

Rutgers University Press

In recent decades, American universities have begun to tout the “diversity” of their faculty and student bodies. But what kinds of diversity are being championed in their admissions and hiring practices, and what kinds are being neglected? Is diversity enough to solve the structural inequalities that plague our universities? And how might we articulate the value of diversity in the first place?

Transforming the Academy begins to answer these questions by bringing together a mix of faculty—male and female, cisgender and queer, immigrant and native-born, tenured and contingent, white, black, multiracial, and other—from public and private universities across the United States. Whether describing contentious power dynamics within their classrooms or recounting protests that occurred on their campuses, the book’s contributors offer bracingly honest inside accounts of both the conflicts and the learning experiences that can emerge from being a representative of diversity.

The collection’s authors are united by their commitment to an ideal of the American university as an inclusive and transformative space, one where students from all backgrounds can simultaneously feel intellectually challenged and personally supported. Yet Transforming the Academy also offers a wide range of perspectives on how to best achieve these goals, a diversity of opinion that is sure to inspire lively debate.

This inspiring book wonderfully fuses scholarship, personal experiences, and pragmatism, offering penetrating analyses of the challenges and benefits of living and teaching diversity and identifying conditions needed for transformation. Caroline Hodges Persell, author of Education and Inequality: The Roots and Results of Stratification in America's Schools

'Transforming the Academy chronicles the meaning behind the sweeping changes in college classroom diversity, the benefits that greater diversity brings to educational institutions, and the unique challenges faced by groups historically shut out from post-secondary education. This book is required reading for ANYONE who works in higher education or is preparing someone to attend college.' Charles Gallagher, author of Rethinking the Color Line: Readings in Race

Taken together, these personal narratives provide powerful, often moving, evidence of the continuing struggle for greater inclusivity and diversity on US campuses ... The contributors to this volume, mostly young and female, should be commended for opening their academic lives to help open our eyes to the ongoing need for change. H-Teach

A remarkably cohesive whole with themes that transcend individual anecdotes or identity markers. This is a book, as Willie-LeBreton proposes, that has the potential to shed light where it is needed, to bring people together under a common purpose, and to celebrate the work people are already doing to help their campuses fulfill the promise of diversity. Harvard Educational Review

SARAH WILLIE-LEBRETON is a professor of sociology at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where she has coordinated the Black Studies Program, served as associate provost, and chaired the college’s Task Force on Sexual Misconduct. She is also the author of Acting Black: College, Identity, and the Performance of Race.

Acknowledgements

Introduction Full Steps Forward, Half Steps Back—The Diversity Challenge of Pedagogy
Sarah Willie-LeBreton

Part I: Challenging Classrooms
Chapter 1        Decentering Whiteness: Teaching Anti-racism on a Predominantly White Campus
Michael D. Smith and Eve Tuck

Chapter 2        Is there a Silver Lining? The Experiences of a Black female Teaching Assistant
Dela Kusi-Appouh

Chapter 3        Radical Leftist or Objective Practitioner? Perceptions of a Black Male Professor
H. Mark Ellis

Chapter 4        Teaching Difference in Multiple Ways: Through Content and Presence
Cheryl Jones-Walker

Chapter 5        What You May Not See: The Oscillating Critique
Pato Hebert

Chapter 6        The Professor, Her Colleague, and Her Student: Two Race-Related Stories
Sarah Willie-LeBreton

Chapter 7        Challenging Oppression in Moderation? Student Feedback in Diversity Courses
Anita Chikkatur

Part II: Witnessing Protest
Chapter 8        The (S)paces of Academic Work: Disability, Access, and Higher Education
Kristin Lindgren

Chapter 9        Queer Affects/Queer Access
Anna Ward

Chapter 10      Geographies of Difference: From Unity to Solidarity
Betty Sasaki

Chapter 11      La Promesa: Working with Latina/o Students in an Elite Liberal Arts College
Aurora Camacho de Schmidt

Chapter 12      Passing Strange: Embodying and Negotiating Difference in Academia
Daphne Lamothe

Chapter 13      A Dean’s Week: “Trap Doors and Glass Ceilings”
Theresa Tensuan

Conclusion      Theorizing the Transformation of the 21st Century Campus
Sarah Willie-LeBreton

Bibliography
About the Contributors
End Notes
Index

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