Doing Everything and Nothing: A First-Year Experience

I was hired in the 1995-96 academic year at the University of Alaska-Anchorage (UAA) in the Department of English. My position was funded as a direct hire—one of two Alaska Native professors hired as part of a diversity directive to increase the number of minority professors on campus, and more specifically Alaska Natives. Alaska Natives overall comprise about 20 percent of the state's population. At UAA Alaska Natives and American Indians make up about 12-15 percent of the student population, including tribal groups from all over the state—Yup'ik, Inupiaq, Athabascan, Aleut, Alutiq, St. Lawrence Island Yupik, Eyak, Tlingit, Haida, Tshimshian—and the university itself is built upon land originally owned by the Dena'ina Athabascan. Since we were directly hired in 1995, we have remained the only full-time Alaska Native faculty hired for academic tenure-track positions at UAA. Two years ago, I received tenure and promotion and was relieved that the following year I would be able to serve on one of the committees that passed judgment on the tenure file of my colleague, who is now also a tenured associate professor. As I look back, I realize that there was much I could have done more effectively and more efficiently, and I am trying to slowly incorporate some of these lessons into the next phase of my university work. What follows is part of my own story, and I hope through telling it to enable others to think about their own situation in light of the issues I have encountered.

When I was hired at UAA, although I was forty and married with two sons ages four and six, I was also green as they come in terms of what it meant to hold an academic position. Fresh out of the University of Washington (uw) graduate school, my dissertation ink barely dry on the page, I had only vague ideas of how universities functioned. In truth, the fact that I ended up with the job I now hold suggests both the value and pitfalls of institutionally mandated diversity hiring practices.

While many people were both directly and indirectly involved in making possible the faculty line I eventually assumed, a major reason I ended up where I am now is due in great part to the persistent efforts of one faculty person in the English Department, who was chair of the department at a time when I had returned to Alaska to teach a special summer session of freshman composition. At the time UAA was interested in diversifying their faculty and held a special "Alaska Native Summer Scholars" program to invite potential faculty to teach a summer class with the hopes of eventually recruiting us for positions within the university. Part of the idea was to introduce us to the departments in which we might possibly be recruited. In my case this institutionally generated program actually worked as the initiators had imagined.

Having always had the hope that my family and I would be able to return to my native state after I finished my PhD program in American and American Indian literatures, two people in Anchorage alerted me to the possibilities of the "Alaska Native Summer Scholars" program—my sister and an Inupiat friend I met while attending uw graduate school who had returned to the area after completing his master's degree in public administration. While the on-campus experience gave me a great opportunity to actually teach a course (because of family commitments I had gained little teaching experience while in graduate school), it did not afford me much of a chance to meet any of the faculty because few full-time faculty were available during the summer. Later that year, however, I received a call from the chair of the English Department, and she indicated that the department might be interested in recruiting me for a position. As one of her teaching and...