On Authority, Empowerment, and Shelf Life

As I reflect upon the gathering of women of color faculty in May 2008, I realize that since then much has changed in my own status within academia. At that time, I had only three years of teaching behind me on the tenure track at my institution, Iona College, and I was soon awarded a grant from the Louisville Institute that funded a fellowship leave to further my scholarship. With that scholarship completed and published, I was granted tenure in 2012. I have earned the respect of students and colleagues at Iona College as well as of the wider academic community. I have been invited to speak at other institutions on my scholarship and on the status of diversity in the professoriate. I have served on strategic-planning committees at my institution and others that will impact the landscape of our educational process in the years to come.

And yet, so much has remained the same. In 2008, I was the only US Latina/o full-time member of the faculty of arts and science at Iona College; to my knowledge, there has been no significant change to improve that number. Fewer than 10 percent of the entire full-time faculty of the School of Arts and Science are faculty of color; this percentage increases when adjunct and contingent faculty are included in the numbers.¹ While Iona College has made some effort to address concerns related to the lack of diversity in many areas of campus life, not much has happened since 2008 to move the needle in a positive direction toward greater faculty diversity.²

For me, that the question of authority was the main theme that emerged from our 2008 consultation is no surprise. During that consultation, I had the chance to think about a critical incident in the classroom in which race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality all converged through silent scripts and contested spaces. I’ve written about that incident and the pedagogy of transformation it inspired in the Metaphor for Teaching (a regular feature in Teaching Theology and Religion) piece entitled, “Good Teaching Is Like Good Sex.”³ Here’s an excerpt that addressed my personal concern about authority and the accompanying fear of its absence:

In my very first semester at Iona College (on a one-year visiting professorship), I was required to teach a class entitled, “Christian Sexual Ethics.” While the course’s emphasis in the past had been on Catholic moral theology, I decided . . . to include Protestant perspectives as well, introducing an anthology of essays edited by Nelson and Longfellow, Sexuality and the Sacred, and two additional texts—Genovesi’s In Pursuit of Love and Cahill’s Sex, Gender and Christian Ethics.

By the second week of the course, it was clear to me that students were having a very difficult time with the reading. While I did my best to work through the sticking points, the students had lost interest and were becoming increasingly discouraged. Unwilling to work through some of the difficulties, the students wanted clear cut explanations to questions of sexuality and were uncomfortable thinking critically about new paradigms and approaches.

Then the midterm exam came around. I had assigned a take-home, open-book exam in which students had to respond to five of seven essay questions. Soon I began receiving emails and phone calls regarding the overwhelming nature of the exam, and I took notice when the more conscientious students in the course began articulating these concerns. . . . I heard the concerns loudly and clearly and, after much deliberation, sent an email to all students scaling down the midterm considerably and giving them more time for its completion.

With that done, I set to thinking about why I had given such a challenging exam without considering, or even bothering to find out, that students at the college carry a five-course load per semester. . . . Taking this opportunity for honest reflection, I came up with several significant reasons for why I had given such an intense midterm in a course that was having more than its fair share of difficult moments:

First, I wanted...