Why faculty of color are leaving academe
Why faculty of color are leaving academe
Too many find themselves disenfranchised, exhausted, and isolated
Today, in place of a Friday thread, I am sharing the second in my series for The Chronicle of Higher Education about the state of academe. You can read the essay in its original form here. My agreement with The Review grants them exclusive rights to the article for thirty days, after which all rights revert back to me. To access today’s post, as well as the full archive and podcast, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.
ERIKA GAULT had just turned in her first book manuscript when she suffered a heart attack.
At the time, she was an assistant professor of Africana studies at the University of Arizona, and by all external measures she was thriving. After 10 years of feeling overworked and underpaid at a private college in western New York, she had landed a coveted position at a research university, where she taught courses in African American and African diasporic religions. The new role was an uncannily good fit for her research interests. “Hip hop and religion — that job never comes up anywhere,” she said.
Gault felt she had to accept the position, even though it meant moving across the country with her husband, Ntare, and their infant daughter. Ntare was completing his dissertation at the University at Buffalo and periodically traveled back to New York to meet with his advisers — sometimes for a week, once for a whole month. Gault missed her East Coast support network and often felt lonely in Tucson, where she struggled to adapt to the desert climate. “Academia requires you to sacrifice so much,” she said. “I thought that was the cost of the thing that you loved.”
It wasn’t supposed to feel this way. Gault believed that her scholarship brought her Black community into academe, a space that had historically excluded people like her. And she applied her family’s working-class sensibility to her teaching and research. “You keep going to work,” she said, “because that’s what you do out of necessity for your family.” But shortly after her heart attack came the Covid-19 pandemic. The University of Arizona was one of the first institutions to impose furloughs and pay cuts on its employees. Gault’s salary was cut by 10 percent. Her full pay was restored a few months later, but the experience was unsettling.
“I began asking myself some questions,” Gault said. “‘What is academia to me?’ ‘What do Black women need to flourish?’ It doesn’t have to be publish or perish. It’s OK, Erika, to do something else, to not die here.”
Many faculty of color are asking themselves similar questions. Their stories reflect the general trends of faculty dissatisfaction that I recently explored in these pages: concerns about work/life balance, inadequate compensation, and a flagging sense of purpose. But these scholars also struggle with pressures that remain mostly invisible to their white colleagues: isolation in rural communities, hostile work environments, and guilt about prioritizing self-care over the needs of their students. How much sacrifice is too much?