The Black Academic’s Guide to Winning Tenure without Losing Your Soul (review)

Intrigued by the title, I honestly cannot say what I expected when I started reading Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Tracey Laszloffy’s book, but I found it to be both informative and entertaining. The authors dispense practical, no-nonsense ideas using a conversational writing style. I felt that I could easily have been sitting in one of their workshops from which many of the stories in the book are taken.

In Chapter 1, the authors admit that most of their suggestions for tenure-track faculty “can be used by faculty of any race” (p. 5), but they candidly indicate that their reason for targeting Black junior faculty is their perception that, in academe, racism shapes life for Black faculty; thus, Black faculty have challenges that may not exist for White faculty or even other people of color. If you doubted this perception, by the time you finish reading the stories and examples in this book, you will recognize its unfortunate truth.

The authors also use this chapter to make a number of assertions that underlie the rest of the book: (1) Institutional hierarchies bestow “one-down” status on all junior faculty but are exacerbated by this country’s social hierarchies that tend to marginalize Black faculty; (2) Black faculty are beset by disproportionally higher service requests, such as advising Black students and serving on “diversity” committees; and (3) the general lack of mentoring to guide Black faculty successfully through the tenure process.

All three themes are addressed several times in the various chapters, producing a certain amount of redundancy. Most of the repetition, however, is appropriate and constructive, such as the recurring admonition to write daily and the repeated suggestion to seek therapy for help in, for example, discussing “relationships and emotional pressures before a crisis emerges” (p. 171).

Following that introductory chapter, the book is divided into three sections: “Understanding the Game,” “Mastering Your Technique,” and “Playing to Win.” Chapter 2 describes the interface between race and power in the academic system. The authors identify a number of general conditions to which Black faculty are often subjected: isolation and alienation, excessive visibility, classroom hostility, racially based double standards, persistent stereotypes, exclusion from networks, the devaluation and marginalization of their scholarship, and what the authors call “the curse of color blindness”—an oxymoronic condition in which “racism becomes irrelevant and precludes a direct dialogue about race, but [in which] the manifestation of racism in Black faculty members’ lives persists” (p. 25).

Chapter 3, “The Politics of Fit,” helps the reader identify his or her “personal system of orientation,” the organizational system of the institution, and how the two systems interface. Particularly useful in this chapter are guidelines of how an individual can assess his or her dimensions of cohesion (varying degrees of closeness, independence, and loyalty) and flexibility (ability to negotiate, shift roles, define rules, and make changes) based on family background. These guidelines are buttressed by suggestions of how to weigh these characteristics against the written and unwritten rules of one’s department.

Section 2, “Mastering Your Technique,” begins with a chapter on tenure and time management that describes myths causing junior faculty to underestimate the magnitude of the tasks ahead of them (e.g., “six years is a long time” or “I don’t need to plan because I have lots of free time”). It then describes a rather specific five-step proactive plan for accomplishing one’s goals, especially getting published, which is explained in more detail in chapter 6.

The fifth chapter describes the benefits of an organized office and how to go about designing and maintaining an office space that works for you. Hints about organizing paper and electronic files as well as suggestions about what to save and what to discard are presented along with advice to match one’s office habits with the norms of the institution and department. (Even an old veteran...