Pretenure and Black: Teaching and Research in the Era of Trump

Barbara Smith (2000, xiii) asserts that “black feminism has probably been most successful in its impact on the academy, in opening a space for courses, research, and publications about black women.” Smith’s assertion about the impact of black feminism to academia is true in terms of theory. Content intersectionality and critical race theory are just two of the many theoretical frameworks made popular by black feminism and regularly used in many academic disciplines. But there is still work to be done to make academic institutions spaces where marginalized peoples can thrive. Research has shown that many black women leave tenure-track academic jobs. Crystal Renee Chambers (2011/12, 244) explains that the reasons black women leave tenure-track jobs are complex “even when codified and clearly articulated standards exist, often from the biases within the measures.” In this essay, I reflect on my experiences as a pretenure black woman and how the lack of institutional support for feminist pedagogy and scholarship led to my decision to leave a research-intensive university.

Lack of institutional support often comes in the forms of biased measures or metrics of progress. The overemphasis on narrowly defined research productivity at the University of Missouri made it very difficult for me to engage in feminist pedagogy and research. Feminist pedagogy encourages engaged and democratic teacher–learner formats over hierarchal formats where the teacher is the sole source of information and the student a blank slate. Feminist research understands that rigor can come from collaboration. When community activism, collaborative research, public intellectualism, and legal and nonprofit consultation only count as second-tier research or as service, as was the case at the University of Missouri and is the case for many public research-intensive universities, faculty such as myself are discouraged from doing such work. For me, this tension exploded in the fall of 2014.

In mid-August 2014, I returned to my home in Columbia, Missouri, after a summer stay in Germany. When I switched to my U.S. phone, I noticed that I had a number of texts and missed calls from family and friends directing me to check the news about unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. Once I caught up on what had happened—the killing of an unarmed young black man by a white police officer—I was awash with feelings of anger and grief over the senseless murder of that young man who had so much life left to live. Since the university is located only two hours from Ferguson, many of my students and advisees were from Ferguson and the St. Louis vicinity. I knew that the murder of Michael Brown would have a direct impact on campus life.

That fall, I was beginning my fifth year as a tenure-track professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Missouri. Before I started working and throughout my time at the University of Missouri, there were a number of racist incidents.¹ Some of the racist incidents occurred through passive means such as the defacing of a dormitory wall with swastikas and the dumping of cotton balls in front of the Black Student Union. But after the murder of Michael Brown, emboldened by the white supremacist rhetoric of the alt-right, racist students and politicians started to target the curriculum and faculty in the social-justice-oriented departments of Women and Gender Studies and Black Studies. These attacks made it more difficult to incorporate social justice issues in course curriculum. For me, the killing of Michael Brown shifted my priorities from an intense focus on keeping my head down and completing my research agenda to a renewed focus on what my role as a professor meant in terms of helping to create a more just and equitable society. I wanted to help. I wanted to use my platform as a professor to do the kind of work that I had envisioned doing many years ago when I made the decision to go to graduate school and to become a professor.

I organized a campus-/community-wide Forum on...