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Afterword
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501 Afterword Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs Much has changed since I was involved in women’s studies there [Stanford University] and elsewhere. What I’ve seen of the materials you sent looks like a developed and cogent indictment of institutional biases and assumptions which have lived on despite token “diversity.” With respect for the project and the goal of intellectual justice it pursues, and with my best personal regards to you, sincerely, Adrienne Rich. Adrienne Rich, letter to the editors of Presumed Incompetent, January 7, 2010 As a twenty-first-century Latina, I came across many obstacles in my quest for tenure and particularly an epistemological gap in academia: an emptiness in the journey from graduate school to an assistant professor to full professor. To my knowledge, there was no one document readily available for new PhDs that defined, deconstructed, described, or clarified the evolution of terminology in academic settings about acquiring tenure. Although these documents perhaps exist in some institutions , they are purposefully written to possess certain levels of mystery, obscurity, and avoidance, depending on the university. Seemingly faculty handbooks often delineate issues peripherally but not in detail, the way that particular populations— new to these professions—need these unknown and unfamiliar, as well as evolving, rules spelled out. Hence, there was no manual that made the difficult experience of the tenure process clearer to me, or many of the women with whom I work or attended graduate school. In 2004—after four years of working at my current university—through reading about Cecilia Burciaga’s concept-metaphor of the dense, impenetrable “adobe ceiling ” in academia for Latinas (as opposed to a more penetrable, see-through “glass ceiling” encountered by white women), I became more aware that in fact there was a difference in the way that the intersection of gender, race, and class came together in our professions. As a minority and a working-class feminist, I observed that most of the women I knew were forced—if they wished to become part of the academy— to blindly follow a yellow brick road without road signs, an imaginary and supposedly ethical yellow brick road, at best only described peripherally by others. This interminable road was supposed to lead us into a permanent position in an institution that was part of the American academy. I felt that academia’s bedside manner PRE S UME D INCO MPE TE NT 502 was lacking, to put it mildly, in providing a manual for new users, particularly for those who had invested deeply with high stakes, especially if they were women or came from the working class. Often new professors from the working class did not have the hidden agendas that other professors (a majority of them coming from the middle class and university-educated parents) possessed or could rely on for advice. Also, amazingly enough, most of the tenured women I met—especially if they were working class or were unmistakably identified by others as women of color— had walked a treacherous road that was never discussed post-tenure or even spoken about along the way. Most had had a tumultuous and even surrealistic journey— which a couple of them described to me as “hazing”—seen as part of entering the fraternal and paternalistic institutions that they had chosen to join. Many women professors on my voyage dropped out of the process, precisely because acquiring tenure became an obscure procedure; they were often described by colleagues as the casualties of an intellectual war, or was it a quest? As the daughter of migrant/immigrant farm-working parents, who lived their lives in fear of their patrones firing them—or of someone else at the migrant camps making up something about them to steal their highly desired manual-labor position —I identified similar patterns of external and internalized oppression and undermining feelings of paranoia in academia. I recognized this as unsettling, particularly coming from the educated and privileged lot that ran these institutions. I had practice with difficult situations; I also had been forced to redefine high school and college for my population of children of farmworkers who attended major universities , only to become the Other, not unlike the role of an assistant professor of color or from a background of poverty, who now holds a position romanticized by the outside world but one that becomes, at times, impossible to navigate without support and instruction. Thus, from all of this emerged the idea of Presumed Incompetent, which my friend and colleague...