#faculty diversity

New Study: Faculty Diversity Gains in U.S. College and Universities Largely Minimal

Ethical and Inspiring Mentorship in STEM Conference - September 21, 2017 @ UMD

Navigating Departmental Politics. A Play! Thurs. March 31, 2016

[C]ertain fields in the humanities (e.g., English and Philosophy) place increased value on single-authored scholarship versus collaborative work. This practice may seem at first glance to prioritize (in a nondiscriminatory manner) scholarship that makes it easier to evaluate individual merit. However, this 'pragmatic' valuing of single-authored scholarship risks distorting a central feature of the *politics* of producing new knowledge—that is, new forms of inquiry often require new institutions of validation (e.g., feminist presses, new journals) and new forms of collective research and action (e.g., interdisciplinarity and participatory action research). The value given to single-authored scholarship distorts the ways in which collective work is often the only route toward changing academic norms and dominant values, and better attending to the needs of underserved communities (e.g., low income and racial-ethnic minority communities). For instance, edited collections, such as anthologies in feminist and ethnic studies, are rarely valued as significant, promotion- or tenure-worthy contributions by research universities. Yet they constitute one of the most important methods minority intellectuals have pursued for establishing new fields of inquiry and for challenging the status quo. Valuing single-authored publications or peer-reviewed journal articles in high-ranking journals, in other words, is not an unbiased preference for 'high standards,' since it has historically marginalized new forms of knowledge production (Antonio, 2002).