Psychological Heuristics and Faculty of Color: Racial Battle Fatigue and Tenure/Promotion

Faculty who have been historically excluded from participating in academia present a unique quandary for those who have traditionally held power at the university. This article explores the promotion and tenure (P&T) process of Black faculty using a psychological construct to examine how racial micro-aggressions manifest and articulate themselves through individual and organizational phenomena such as Racial Battle Fatigue (RBF). We applied a psychological approach to narrative inquiry to examine how two faculty of color experienced the P&T process. Participant narratives highlighted how much of the P&T process, and even engagement in academia in general, is articulated by likability or congeniality—two constructs absent from P&T policies.