As an advisory board member for the SSRC Peer Review Objectives and Guidelines for Equity and Representation in the Social Sciences (PROGRESS) project funded by an NSF ADVANCE Adaptation grant, I had the opportunity to observe and provide input on systemic change-oriented strategies to improve equity in the social sciences via partnerships with disciplinary societies. I am a practitioner whose work includes advancing systemic change initiatives within graduate education with a particular focus on equity-informed selection and mentorship practices. This experience has taught me that the localized context of an academic department significantly influences the culture, practices, policies, and other structures that define the experiences of those within an academic department, especially faculty. Recognizing the sphere of influence of disciplinary societies within academia, I was excited to learn how the interventions and strategies employed through the PROGRESS project would help to address inequities within hiring, mentoring, and promotion and tenure practices within the social sciences, especially for faculty from backgrounds historically underrepresented in academia.
Though I have had the opportunity to serve on advisory boards for other NSF-funded projects, the SSRC PROGRESS project was the first in my experience that sought to leverage their advisory board members not just as thought partners, but also as partners in practice. This approach made for a more mutually beneficial and meaningful experience. It was through this approach that I had the opportunity to join members of the SSRC PROGRESS team and two other advisory board members to facilitate a plenary session for the Annual Department Chairs Workshop hosted by the American Historical Association (AHA) in July 2022. This session broadly focused on “Exploring Implicit Bias in Academic Settings”. Following a presentation on this topic by the PROGRESS PIs, we broke out the chairs into three discussion groups each with a different, but complementary focus. The advisory board members facilitated the discussion groups. My discussion group focused on “Equity in Service and Value” where we explored challenges associated with the inequitable service burdens frequently experienced by faculty from historically underrepresented backgrounds. Such service is often referred to as “invisible work,” which is work that is unpaid, unrecognized, and undervalued (Daniels, 1987). We also spent time discussing strategies to help mitigate these inequities.
The chairs participating in this discussion came from across institutional types including public and private research-intensive universities, liberal arts colleges, regional predominately undergraduate institutions, and community colleges. Across all institutional types, the chairs grappled with the inequities created when faculty from historically underrepresented experience inequitable service demands. Of particular concern was the impact on faculty engaging in higher service levels falling into areas not always highly valued or rewarded within the promotion and tenure process. Examples of such service can include disproportionate advising or mentoring demands experienced by faculty of color, especially from students with shared identities and/or lived experiences which is a type of cultural taxation not experienced by faculty from more privileged backgrounds (Griffin, 2020). Additionally, it can include higher demands for service on committees, which in part is associated with institutional efforts to achieve greater diversity within various committees.
As we discussed strategies for addressing challenges associated not only with inequities in service but also the inequities in the value associated with various types of service, the differences in the institutional contexts experienced by the chairs became quite important. As our discussions progressed, it became evident that strategies viable at some institutions were nearly impossible for others due to different institutional contexts or resource constraints. One such example is the strategy to provide teaching relief to faculty from historically underrepresented backgrounds experiencing higher advising or mentoring loads. While providing teaching relief might be a viable strategy at a research-intensive institution, it was not likely to be viable at a more teaching-intensive institution. Still, the opportunity for the chairs to discuss the challenges they were experiencing allowed them to see that they were not alone, which was especially helpful for those newer in their roles. Additionally, it provided them with an opportunity to share strategies, both existing as well as new strategies they had not previously considered that could be adapted and adopted. Our discussions included strategies focused not only on directly supporting the faculty experiencing inequities in service but also strategies focused on structural change, such as supporting all faculty in their ongoing development of more inclusive and culturally attuned mentoring mindsets and practices.
The plenary session we co-facilitated for the chairs fell in the middle of their overall schedule. This seemed to be the ideal time for our session as it allowed the chairs to develop enough comfort and trust with one another via their earlier interactions to engage in more candid and vulnerable discussions during our session. Additionally, the opportunity for us to use our session to not only build awareness around issues such as inequities in service but also begin discussions on strategies to address such issues contributed to the chairs having more productive and action-oriented discussions during the remainder of their workshop. Overall, I found the opportunity to engage in the AHA Chairs Workshop through my service on the PROGRESS advisory board to be a fulfilling experience. Additionally, I believe the SSRC’s strategy to engage PROGRESS advisory board members in the AHA Chairs Workshop yielded productive learning outcomes for the workshop participants and left them with tangible strategies they could adapt and adopt to meet the contextual needs of their departments
Strategies to Support Equity in Service and Value
- Create a culture of awareness about the definition, existence, significance, and critical impacts of invisible work.
- Create a standardized system, such as an online dashboard, to document, quantify, recognize, value, and reward invisible work in evaluation, tenure, and promotion processes (Griffin, 2020).
- Work with faculty from historically underrepresented backgrounds to understand the inequitable demands placed on their time. Support their agency by collaboratively identifying strategies to reward invisible work and mitigate its negative impacts on intersectional scholars. Examples include:
- Provide teaching relief to counterbalance inequitable service demands placed on intersectional scholars to help alleviate negative implications on their well-being, retention, scholarship, and advancement.
- Support their engagement in committee work that aligns with their priorities and interests, and will benefit their retention and advancement.
- Help limit service requests for committees where there is high potential for their tokenization (O’Meara, 2017).
- Broaden the definition of what counts as scholarship to make it more inclusive of community-engaged, public, and outreach scholarship to elevate the value of various types of service to the department, university/college, and discipline (O’Meara, 2015).
- Support faculty from more privileged identities in their development of inclusive and culturally attuned mentoring mindsets and practices to actively support the sense of academic and social belonging for all students, but especially those from historically underrepresented backgrounds (Faculty Advancing Inclusive Mentoring, 2023).
Citations
Faculty Advancing Inclusive Mentoring (2023, Feb). Philosophy & Key Principles. Cornell University. https://faculty-inclusive-mentoring.cornell.edu/about/philosophy-principles/
Griffin, K.A. (2020). Institutional Barriers, Strategies, and Benefits to Increasing the Representation of Women and Men of Color in the Professoriate. In: Perna L. (eds) Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research. Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, vol 35. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31365-4_4
Daniels, A. K. (1987). Invisible work. Social Problems, 34(5), 403–415. https://doi.org/10.2307/800538
O’Meara, K., Kuvaeva, A., Nyunt, G., Waugaman, C., & Jackson, R. (2017). Asked More Often: Gender Differences in Faculty Workload in Research Universities and the Work Interactions That Shape Them. American Educational Research Journal, 54(6), 1154-1186. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831217716767
O’Meara, K., Eatman, T., & Petersen, S. (2015). Advancing engaged scholarship in promotion and tenure: A roadmap and call for reform. Liberal Education, 101(3), 52–57.