In higher education, predominantly white institutions (PWIs) like Connecticut College generally struggle to hire and retain faculty of color. The student and faculty demographic makeup of PWIs does not accurately represent the demographic makeup of the United States: of all the institutions in NESCAC, for example, not one has a population of white professors under 73 percent. Among this group, Conn sits at the top for faculty diversity, with 26.4 percent of the professors identified as people of color, according to statistics available on the College’s website. When asked about the state of faculty diversity at contemporary PWIs, Visiting Religious Studies Professor Natalie Avalos explained that many colleges are in a time of transition: “some [PWIs] are doing a really incredible job, and, some, and you’d be surprised because some are more prestigious, are stumbling through painfully… Unfortunately with some of the more elite institutions the sense that women of color and faculty of color more generally are tokens is even more salient.” The struggle to retain faculty of color is not an issue specific to Conn, but it is an issue nonetheless.
In light of this reality, the current conversation surrounding Professor Andrea Baldwin’s employment status at Connecticut College has been charged with more issues than just the logistics of a higher-ed institution’s staffing plan, an administrative document that establishes visiting positions and tenure-track lines across the College two years ahead of time. Despite being offered a one-year extension on her visiting contract, Baldwin has chosen not to return without a guarantee that she will be given an opportunity hire the following year. More detailed information on Baldwin’s situation can be found in an article from the Voice’s last issue.
If a position is not open on the staffing plan, it is not open. Many students, however, have rejected the idea of the staffing plan, demanding that Baldwin be given a targeted opportunity hire. On multiple occasions, Dean of the Faculty Abby Van Slyck and GWS Department chair Danielle Egan have stated that because the tenure-track position does not yet exist, it is not possible for Baldwin to be given a targeted opportunity hire this year.
When a targeted opportunity hire happens, it means that a candidate for a tenure-track position has been offered said position without having to participate in a national search. According to Van Slyck, at a recent follow-up event regarding the College’s hiring processes, targeted opportunity hires “should be used very, very rarely and only in exceptional circumstances. ” In a later interview, Van Slyck also stated that a targeted opportunity has never been guaranteed a year in advance, and that it would not follow any normal academic precedent for Baldwin to be given said guarantee. Egan, in a written statement, said, “I do not believe this is a situation of warranting or not warranting an opportunity hire. There is no tenure track line this year. We cannot make an offer of any kind because we do not have a line to offer.” This seems to be a point on which student and faculty opinions greatly differ.
Zaiden Sowle ’21, a GWS major and one of the leading advocates for extraordinary measures intended to retain Baldwin, said, “[The administration] keep saying ‘that administrative procedure,’ ‘this administrative procedure,’ as to why we’re not doing it. And yes, the administrative procedure may be that an opportunity hire is only in an emergency situation, such as Professor Rotramel’s opportunity hire, but the closest word in modern vernacular that there is to academic procedure is guideline. It’s a guideline.”
Many students feel that there is as much a need for Baldwin now as there was for Rotramel in AY 13-14, given the fact that Baldwin is an integral faculty member in the CCSRE and especially the Africana Studies Program, and that Egan, Rotramel and other GWS-affiliated faculty recently announced their intention to re-name the Gender and Women’s Studies department the “Gender, Sexuality, and Intersectionality department.”
Sowle, Castro, and many other students believe that it is not acceptable to re-name the department to include intersectionality when it will be run and occupied only by two white women (with the departure of Baldwin). “[Egan and Rotramel] are saying, ‘oh but we’re women and we’re also queer, that’s intersectional!’,” said Sowle of the name change, adding, “Yes—although that’s true, it negates the origins of intersectionality of being specifically tied to race and gender. It’s heavily rooted in race.”
Egan, in her written statement, responded to general student criticism by writing, “at the moment, we do have a woman of color in the department as well as people of color on the affiliated faculty and staff. Next year, when we have our tenure track search, we will pay great attention to recruitment to insure that our advertisement… also goes to publications and associations which have higher success rates for recruiting faculty members of color. Our committee will work closely with Dean McKnight to insure the best possible results.”
When asked why academic procedure should not be overridden for Baldwin, Dean of Equity and Inclusion John McKnight explained that “the reason you have policies and practices is because you can protect against inequity by having those in place. If we were to disrupt all of our practices to do so would be to make us even more vulnerable.” McKnight added that his office conducts procedures like anti-bias trainings for departments undergoing searches.
“I will defend the tenure system right down to the ground,” Van Slyck commented. “It is absolutely crucially important for there to be a system that actually allows faculty to explore ideas in their teaching and in their research that might not be popular, that might be politically charged, that might, in other situations, prompt someone to want to fire you. We have to be able to have that kind of freedom.”
Despite their support of the overall hiring system within academia, both McKnight and Van Slyck were eager to admit that there is still a lot of work to be done in the area of hiring and retaining faculty of color. “I know it’s a slow process and that’s what can frustrate people sometimes, especially if they’ve been here a long time and they’ve been given a lot of promises over that period of time, but I do think that we are making good progress,” said McKnight when asked to respond to criticism that the College has not done enough to create equity within the institution.
Baldwin’s case illustrates larger issues on Conn’s campus. McKnight, for one, is particularly concerned by the fact that many students have said their only real support person on campus is Baldwin. In light of comments like Sowle’s assertion that “I wouldn’t be here this semester if it weren’t for the love and support that Professor Baldwin has shown me, a trans woman,” McKnight reflected: “clearly this is a professor who has had a significant impact on the community in a relatively short amount of time… but when [students] say things like, ‘she’s the only one who cares about me’ or ‘I couldn’t exist in this space without her’, I’m like wow, you know we’re gonna need to figure out a way for that not to be the case.”
When asked what he thinks Conn can do to better support students of color on campus, Castro said, “I’m glad that here at Conn we have a multicultural center (Unity House), we have Truth Hunter, we have ambassadors and the ALANA program, but it’s still not enough. Yes we have the Office of Institutional Equity and Inclusion, but there’s still so much work that needs to be done. I think the institution needs to invest more in those spaces and in those programs and in professors and students of color.”
This situation has also brought up concerns about the ‘invisible labor’ that is often put on contingent faculty, especially among women of color. Avalos explained that contingent faculty are paid on average about 20-25% less than tenured and tenure-track faculty, which means they are a “bargain.” “So the irony of course,” she said, “is that your bargain position also seems to intersect with your identity and that’s where the problem lies… Part of the whole locus of dispossession or the kind of legacy of dispossession for women of color and how they’re perceived is that they’re disposable. They kind of have to constantly prove themselves worthy even more so than other faculty. That they can be strung along kind of indefinitely.”
That being said, Avalos expressed that she has felt a lot of support from many administrators and people at Conn, and that the issue is far more systemic than it is based on one-on-one relationships. She maintains, however, that “structural violence creates direct violence,” in the sense that individual people are ultimately affected and hurt by the system.
As of now, students are still in a state of protest regarding Baldwin. “I, along with a few others, are not going to give up until the last day of this semester when it really is too late. But until that last day of the semester we are going to keep fighting. We are going to keep pushing the administration and the faculty in the GWS department,” said Sowle. Castro decided to drop his GWS major because he feels that the GWS department is failing to reflect its core values by not doing more to retain Baldwin.
Both Avalos and McKnight expressed their support for students choosing to share their feelings and their needs during their educational experiences at Conn. Avalos applauded students, saying, “something that often happens is that students don’t realize how much power they have and that they need to actually say, ‘this is what our needs are and this is what we want.’” McKnight maintained that he has learned a lot about his position and student needs from Baldwin’s situation. The retention of faculty of color at PWIs will continue to be a strong point of discussion both nationally and on Conn’s campus, and, according to students, the fight for Baldwin is far from over.
