#black professors

“Since 1976, the nation has celebrated the contributions and achievements of Black Americans each February. This commemorative moment in the yearly calendar serves as a reminder of where we’ve been, as well as how far we’ve come. MasterClass, an online education subscription platform, is making a glimpse of that history available to everyone for free this month, releasing a three-part, 54-lesson class entitled “Black History, Black Freedom, and Black Love.”

Becoming Full Professor While Black

“My promotion last month brings the number of black female full professors in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia, where I am now appointed, to a paltry three. Across the United States, black women are only about 2 percent of all full professors. That is at least better than the situation in Britain, where the number of black female professors at any rank stands at a total of 25, but it is still rather dismal given that black people make up 13 percent of the U.S. population. “

This excerpt is from an article published in the Chronicle of Higher Education.   ( It does not really seem to be getting better for black academics.) Read the entire article here:

“Black female professors have to overcome bullying, stereotyping and institutional neglect in order to win promotion, according to a damning new report of their experiences working at British universities.”

“Black women make up just 0.1% of active professors in the UK compared with the 68% who are white men ... The women, of black Caribbean, black African or other black backgrounds, reported being systematically overlooked for promotion, mistaken for clerical staff or shut out of participation in university activities.”

One professor related how even contributing to departmental meetings was made humiliating: “I had my hand up for about half an hour,” she said. “The debate was going on and I just kept it up and everybody was looking at him and eventually everyone was looking at him, looking at me.”

The Guardian, February 4, 2019: “Black female professors must deal with bullying to win promotion, report finds,” by Richard Adams and David Batty

University and College Union, February, 2019: Staying Power The career experiences and strategies of UK Black female professors, by Dr. Nicola Rollock (40 pages, PDF)

and in Canada ...

“’They’ll come and tell me the most horrific stories,’ Dr. Henry says. '[They are] black students who experience racism and discrimination and need to talk to someone who understands, even though that [student] might be in science or engineering, and I’m in education.’”

“Such interactions are part of what Dr. Henry and other academics refer to as the “emotional labour” that often falls disproportionately on faculty of colour, as black, Indigenous and other non-white students increasingly turn to a relatively small segment of university teaching staff for support.”

“According to Dr. Henry, universities need to start thinking about why people of colour are overloaded, change their hiring practices to encourage a more inclusive and racially representative faculty, pay attention to curriculum diversity, and question why non-white faculty members leave their university jobs.”

The Globe and Mail, June 3, 2018: “The extra load that professors of colour have to bear,” by Anya Zoledziowski

Hadiya-Nicole Green Physicists

Dr. Hadiya-Nicole Green is an assistant professor at Tuskegee University. She is one woman of less than 100 African-American female physicists in the United States of America. The scientific marvel was most recently awarded a prestigious $1.1 million cancer research grant.

The honorable grant was awarded to Dr. Hadiya-Nicole Green to develop advanced cancer treatments that utilize lasers and nanoparticles to arrest the debilitating and often fatal disease.

“Tori Anderson, a third-year Law School student, shows her support by adding a sticky note to the portrait of a black Law School professor on Thursday afternoon after black tape was found covering the photos in the morning. Anderson said, ‘This [the post-its] shows the outpouring of support for the faculty. I wish we had a greater and more robust response from the administration and a greater focus on creating, not only community inclusion, but institutional inclusion.’” Jennifer Y. Yao, The Harvard Crimson

“Black tape, stuck systematically across the portraits of black law professors, spurred on Thursday a police investigation into vandalism and a pronouncement from the dean of Harvard Law School that the school has a ‘serious problem’ with racism.

Law School students and teachers who walked into Harvard’s Wasserstein Hall on Thursday morning found pieces of black tape covering some of the faculty portraits that hang on walls inside the building—specifically on the faces of black professors depicted there.

The incident prompted outrage from Law School students who were quick to condemn it as racist vandalism, and police are now investigating.

Harvard University Police Department spokesperson Steven G. Catalano said Thursday evening that the investigation is ‘active and ongoing,’ and although he declined to comment further, Law School Dean Martha L. Minow wrote in a statement that police are investigating the incident as a hate crime….”

…Leland S. Shelton, the president of the Harvard Black Law Student Association, described it as ‘actually one of the most clear-cut, overt instances of very, very vile and disrespectful behavior from somebody’; second-year Law School student Michele D. Hall, who posted photographs of the vandalized portraits in a post on the website Blavity, wrote, ‘This morning at Harvard Law School we woke up to a hate crime.’

After the tape was removed from the portraits, students posted notes with words of support for the black professors alongside their photographs.

…The incident and subsequent hate crime allegations follows incidents at Yale and the University of Missouri at Columbia that have prompted protests against racism at colleges across the country, including a march and rally at Harvard on Wednesday.

It also comes as a group of Harvard Law School students who call themselves Royall Must Fall has requested the removal of the school’s seal because it features the crest of a family that owned slaves.

That group of students denounced the vandalism as ‘an overt act of racial hatred’ in an open letter published in the Harvard Law Record, a student publication. They also claimed in their letter that the Thursday incident could be a reaction to their activism: They had placed several pieces of black tape over several depictions of the school’s seal around campus on Wednesday night, they wrote, alleging that someone had removed those pieces of tape and then placed them on the portraits of black faculty members….” Andrew M. Duehren with Claire E. Parker, The Harvard Crimson

Read more:

The Harvard Crimson

The New York Times

The Boston Globe

Blavity

The Root