[...] Diversity in hiring and in the curriculum are both desirable, and while they are sometimes linked, they don't have to be. My department has male faculty members specializing in women writers and female faculty members specializing in what has come to be tagged the literature of dead white men.
True, our African literature specialist is from Ghana, and our Asian Americanists have roots in China and India. But we also have instructors of various backgrounds who don't teach anything related to their race or ethnicity, and we have a rainbow coalition of faculty members who do research and teach minority literatures, languages, and cultures.
Some departments don't face that identity problem: There's no such thing as African-American chemistry or Latina math. But diversity in hiring can be problematic for engineering and the physical sciences because those disciplines don't yet have the numbers of female and minority scholars that are found in other fields. And those departments have to compete for top talent against better-paying jobs in the private sector.
When we hire in any area of English, we're looking for the best candidate, intellectually, not the best candidate of a particular ancestry, skin tone, or gender. Still, there is an expectation among many students, and sometimes among faculty members and administrators, that minority studies will be taught by professors of color; that women's studies will be taught by women; that gay and lesbian literature will be taught by gay men and lesbians.
We have black students in our graduate program, but no one assumes they will specialize in minority literatures. Two recent graduate students -- one Asian and one white -- wrote dissertations on African-American literature, and although both got jobs, they both met resistance from some search committees when they turned up for interviews because they weren't black. [...]
| Go back for the rest of Dennis Baron's Chronicle of Higher Education article "A diverse department"
posted in articles on August 14, 2004 2:28 AM | t (0)
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