The Socialization of Black College Faculty: Implications for Policy and Practice

When I first came, faculty told me what I needed to do to get tenure but after that--I mean, no one really helped or took me under their wing. They were receptive. I mean, when I went to them--you know, to get feedback and to ask questions; but they haven't had the time to really tell me the things I didn't know but needed to know. Overall, the senior faculty have not provided a lot of mentorship, but maybe they're just too busy doing their own thing and don't really have the time to really show anybody else how to get to where they are. (Tenure-track professor at Banneker State University)

A full load is considered 12 hours and you don't necessarily get the time off to do research because you're expected to do it if you want to get promoted. So you end up pretty much burning your candle at both ends if you want to get tenure. I guess it's all I've ever known. I mean, somehow we just have overcome. I mean, you do what you have to do. It's because through history we have overcome, and we will just overcome again. (Tenured professor at Carver A&M University)

These quotations provide a glimpse into the lives of two Black faculty members at two Black colleges, but how representative are they? Do Black faculty at Black colleges find a supportive environment that readily provides the formal and informal knowledge they need to be successful within the institution? These questions cannot be easily answered because very little research has been conducted on the environment that Black faculty encounter at Black colleges. Hence, this article focuses on the topic of Black faculty at Black colleges, how they gain the formal and informal knowledge necessary for success in the promotion and tenure process, and also some of the barriers that faculty encounter in the process.

Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have employed faculty from a variety of ethnic backgrounds since their inception. Today, there are 103 HBCUs, comprising only 3 percent of the institutions of higher education in the United States; however, 58 percent of full-time African American faculty are concentrated at these institutions. Whites account for 29 percent, and other minorities and foreigners account for the remaining 13 percent (U.S. Department of Education, 1996, p. 69). Given this diversity of the faculty at HBCUs, the reader might presume that a body of research on HBCU faculty would be available. However, few studies in any form have been conducted that focus on this subgroup of the professoriat. Furthermore, the majority of research conducted on faculty at HBCUs was completed between 1940 and 1970, with little research being published during the last quarter of the century. This study begins to address the gap in the literature on these important institutions. Its findings provide a better understanding of the socialization process of African American faculty at HBCUs and may also serve as the foundation for developing a body of literature on the socialization experience of other subgroups of faculty at HBCUs, such as Asian Americans, Hispanics, Caucasians and women.

"Socialization" has been defined in various ways, but we relied primarily on the viewpoints of Merton (1957) and Tierney and Bensimon (1996). Merton (1957) uses the term to indicate a process through which individuals acquire the values, norms, knowledge and skills needed to function in a given society. A favorable or unfavorable socialization experience can impact how successful the promotion and tenure process will be for new faculty. Hence, it is also useful to include Tierney and Bensimon's (1996) perspective of socialization as the rite of passage that begins with probationary membership in the department and concludes, if one is...