Racism in the Ivory Tower

When Black, Brown, and Yellow graduate students and faculty are “beyond the pale”

If liberals and conservatives seem to agree on one thing, it’s that academics are “liberal.” All too frequently, liberals praise academics for being wise and informed while conservatives dismiss them as out-of-touch eggheads. Regardless of their interpretations, however, both sides seem to think that given the apparent state of “wokeness” at universities and the teaching of critical race theory, academics are free of racial prejudice. Not to mention their awareness of (just) professorial outrage at the demise of affirmative action.

But is the Ivory Tower as liberal and freed of racial prejudice as commonly assumed?

Those of us of color know it ain’t. Not by a mile! For many, the Ivory Tower feels like an institution that is literally and figuratively so. But like many other liberals, I believed for the longest time that academics were indeed “liberal”–especially since I was raised by Taiwanese parents of the Confucian persuasion. In fact, my own father was a Princeton-educated aeronautical and mechanical engineer who regarded academe as a safehold, the be-all, and end-all of life, liberty, and liberalism – notwithstanding his efforts to turn me into a physician.

It did not take very long, however, for the scales to fall from my eyes. In college, I found professors asking me if I spoke another Asian student’s language. Some would smirk as they told me that I was “as American as apple pie.” Others who heard me complain that minorities did not have a fair chance in the real world were shocked, answering me with a curt “I hope affirmative action works out for you one day.”

“It’s a big club and you ain’t in it”

At a Midwestern graduate school, I encountered more of the same — and in certain cases, even worse examples of presumption: for example, a British professor who invited a Thai student to her house, asking her to wear her native dress and serve dinner to the guests.

Later on, the same professor would ask both of us in a seminar why “you Oriental women are so interested in libertinism”; it must be something in “your culture.” Never mind that I was American-born and raised while my friend was raised in Hong Kong–and that she had no interest in libertinism at all. Libertinism happened to be a hot topic in the early 1990s, leading me to wonder if that professor would have asked a white student a similar question.

I initially tried to brush these remarks under the rug. After all, we can’t expect everyone to know everything, right–even if they’ve attended world-class universities? Even if they’ve spent at least twenty-two years becoming edju-ma-cated?

Alarm bells began to ring, however, with my lack of success at applying to more prestigious American doctoral programs. How was it that other students with lower grades and scores–the vast majority of whom were white–were admitted to the very graduate programs that turned me down? Was it my race?

Something was deeply troubling. Especially when I got accepted by Oxford University and wound up doing significantly better than some of those who not only had been accepted to the same schools that rejected me but also received generous offers there.

Imperial Dreams at Oxford

I was even more puzzled when I was denied the opportunity to teach at American satellite programs at Oxford but given the chance to teach at the various colleges that comprised the university: a highly unusual outcome for an American or Canadian! It was as though none of those American programs considered me American at all. To them, my Asian surname conveyed “foreign” and “outsider.” Someone who was not a native English speaker.

Yet, despite being relatively open-minded, even Oxford academics were not immune from racist assumptions. I recall feeling shocked whenever my doctoral supervisor, a fervent Labour supporter and feminist, defended imperialism. As she put it, “The natives did worse after Britain left.”

She also denied that academics were racist while implying that sexism was a far worse problem. After all, she, a white female, had never encountered racism! Like other liberals, she too believed that because most academics were upper-middle class and well-educated, they were less likely to be as bigoted as the working classes and the poor.

As a graduate student, I was initially reluctant to push back and only had the guts to challenge her after I had my degree safely in hand. It was then I retorted that the divisions and deterioration in former colonies only took place because the British had fomented those very divisions while governing. To her credit, she admitted that it was a real possibility. Whether or not she ever agreed with my claims of academic racism, she became more hesitant to argue or deny it.

Upon returning to the US, I encountered the same problems with the very same universities all over again when applying for tenure-track jobs. Never mind I had a Ph.D. in English literature from what was then the top program in the world. Never mind I had a solid teaching portfolio and reports from my doctoral examiners. In fact, one journal editor who accepted my article went so far as to ask me, “Why is someone as promising as you not in a tenure-track position?” I casually replied, “Because Americans are racist and hypocritical.” I noticed how he dropped the subject in his following email.

Could my problems from graduate school through the tenure-track job search boil down to my name? After all, in 2002, there was new research suggesting that the job market in general discriminated against names that were obviously Black. Well, mine was obviously Asian. I thought of the doctoral supervisor of a freshly minted Indian Cambridge Ph.D. who was asked by an American hiring committee if the former student spoke English. The supervisor wrote back “She probably speaks better English than you dumb Yanks.” Ouch. But a richly deserved retort for the benighted hiring committee who assumed that applicants with distinctly non-Western names are not fluent in English.

Are educated people truly more liberal?

Naturally, even if I had no definitive proof of racism, I started exploring research on the relationship between education levels and racism, as well as racism at colleges and universities.

For instance, a study from the University of Toronto in 2016 shows that while “high-ability whites are less likely than low-ability whites to report prejudicial attitudes and more likely to support racial equality in principle,” the same high-ability whites are also “no more likely to support a variety of remedial policies for racial inequality.” In short, the educated are unwilling to put their money where their mouth is. Perhaps that’s why so few visible minorities make it to the upper ranks of the corporate world and academe.

Meanwhile, another study from 2020 similarly reveals that on average, teachers display comparable levels of pro-white/anti-Black bias as the general population. Here, too, liberal beliefs made little difference; there were actually far more significant differences between Black and white respondents than between conservative and liberal respondents. Altogether, “teachers’ biases very much mirror those of non-teachers.”

Yes, Virginia, there are racist American academics!

But what about higher education itself? Some of you may have already heard of Amy Wax, a law professor at an Ivy League university — the University of Pennsylvania — where she claimed a few years ago that “the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration” and pretended that no Black student had ever graduated at the top quarter of their class.

And others may have heard more recently of Thomas L. Keon, the Chancellor of Purdue University Northwest, who used a mock-Asian accent at a commencement speech in December 2022. If you watch the video, you will notice other professors laughing along with him. It’s worth pointing out that neither Wax nor Keon have been fired despite widespread student outrage.

Then there’s the less obvious kind of racism, the kind that can be just as pernicious in its effects on the hiring and promotion of POC faculty.

In 2014, research conducted by Dolly Chugh, Katherine L. Milkman, and Modupe Akinola amply demonstrated that professors do discriminate in favor of white male students among a pool of other prospective female, Black, Hispanic, Indian, and Chinese graduate students. Here, the researchers sent query letters with made-up names closely associated with certain ethnic groups. The most pronounced bias was found at private universities. More interestingly, regardless of the race or sex of the professor, nearly all faculty members favored white male-sounding names–even Blacks and women: this genuinely astonished me since I believed that women professors would be more likely to favor female students. So much for “feminism!”

But what stood out most for me was the fact that despite the Asian model minority stereotype, women with Chinese names were least likely to get a response from faculty members.

The tenure process is similarly fraught with bias. In a study conducted at the University of Southern California, International Relations Professor Mai’i K. Davis and political scientist June Junn exposed numerous discrepancies in the awarding of tenure to whites and people of color between the years 1998 and 2012:

92% of white men in the social sciences and humanities were awarded tenure

55% of women and faculty of color were awarded tenure

66.7% of white women were awarded tenure

40% Asian-American women were awarded tenure

Note the significant differences between white men and everyone else as well as white women and Asian women of at least 26.7%.

Even adjunct hiring and promotion can be very biased. For instance, many visible adjuncts have discovered instances where department chairs prefer to offer classes to white males without Ph. D.s rather than visible minority female Ph. D.s — even when they are in the same subject area. There are also chairs who prefer to offer classes to white males with a lesser publication and teaching record — as well as so-called feminists who would rather partner up with a man than a visible minority female to teach a class. These are indignities that numerous visible minority female adjuncts have encountered— including me. The fact is being a visible female minority in academia is still very fraught with disadvantages. That’s why the argument that departments must hire quality over diversity is an extremely disingenuous one when they are in fact selecting for whites instead.

Whiter than Paper

But the injustices do not end there. Nature has recently reported that POC scholars are also weighed down when it comes to the area of scholarly publications. While focusing on the sciences, a study from April 2023 indicates that discrimination against members of under-represented groups in academic publishing leads to lower citation rates, fewer editorial board positions, and longer manuscript review periods.

Moreover, while scholars submitting papers from Asia, Africa, and South America comprise 35% of the author pool, they make up only 19% of editors. The same study also discovered that in the US, Black scholars faced the longest delays between the submission of a paper and its acceptance for publication while papers written by a collaboration between Black and Hispanic scientists were cited less frequently than similar papers by white researchers.

Although this study focuses on the sciences, I couldn’t help but notice how these results are uncannily similar to my own experiences even though I publish primarily in literature and history: for instance, having to wait at least nine months to hear back from my peer reviewers for an article in a scholarly journal and a book proposal — in addition to waiting seven months for a peer review of a manuscript. Now, fortunately, these reviews ended with acceptances. Let me point out, however, that the average time for a review runs between three to five months. What are the odds that a single person has to wait for so long in three separate instances?

One can’t help but wonder too if reviews of books in scholarly journals operate in a similar manner. Again, let me use a personal example — my very own Routledge Guidebook to Paine’s Rights of Man. This was one book that received praise from the foremost scholars of Thomas Paine (assuming they were not merely flattering me in their emails). Yet there was not one single review. Routledge, after all, is a well-known academic trade publisher, not a vanity publisher. The subject is a famous writer. In other words, there was no excuse for its oversight by book review editors and book reviewers.

Although I am not absolutely certain that my book was not reviewed because 1) scholars assume English is not my native language 2) an Asian female could not possibly have any knowledge of the history of Western rights or 3) adjuncts are assumed to write crap, I would not be surprised if any of these reasons were indeed behind the oversight.

By now, you can see how the failures of the tenure process and discrimination of visible minorities can feed into a vicious cycle of exclusion – whether or not they pertain to my own trajectory in academia. Prejudice against such faculty leads to a failure to promote or elevate them to tenure-track positions: a failure that can lead to scholarly oversight as readers brush aside their work. At the same time, discrimination against visible minorities in the scholarly publishing world (also largely managed by academics) also leads to further oversight. It becomes all too busy to become invisible when nothing you say or do matters.

A Not-so-Modest Proposal

Trust me when I call out racism as the 500-pound gorilla in the tower that (white) academics don’t want to discuss. At the end of the day, elite and “educated” whites are no different from their less educated counterparts when they dismiss or downplay the fact of white privilege. Perhaps they’re oblivious to racism because they’ve never had to deal with it. And perhaps they don’t want an end to their privileges either.

But it’s high time to call out academe for what it is: a racist institution where no one “beyond the pale” is allowed into the “ivory tower.” Is there a solution for this thousand-year-old institution?

Let’s begin by proposing that all faculty — and students — should be attuned to racist assumptions and generalizations. Avoid simplistic stereotypes like “Blacks are lazy” or “Asians are nerds.” Or even more subtle claims like “such and such people are gifted at X.” Although this may all seem like far too obvious no-no’s, these statements are quite common.

Note, too, that the statement “All white people are racist” is also not acceptable.

Professors should be prepared to address race and gender stereotypes and other assumptions in class if and when they crop up. Conversely, students should speak up if they hear something racist. In the case that students are reluctant to confront a racist professor, they should report the professor to the chair of the department or dean of students. Or better yet, make their objection in class — politely and rationally.

Moreover, when there are at least three incidents of racist behavior or speech reported on the part of a faculty member, s/he should be fired — regardless of tenure. The “freedom of speech” claim is absolutely BOGUS. Anyone with any understanding of rights knows that individual freedom should never infringe upon the rights of others. Students should not receive a lower grade because of their race while other faculty should not have their work overlooked. Let me reiterate that there is nothing wrong with firing such a professor — or even an upper-level administrator like a dean or chancellor. It’s not like there’s a shortage of academics to hire from!

As far as the peer review process goes, why not make it entirely blind — i.e., assign a number to the person submitting a book or an article — and numbers to the peer reviewers? All other identifying characteristics (e.g., university) should be removed. On the other hand, one can also retain the names of ALL involved so there is at least some clarity of who the reviewers are.

Finally, get rid of tenure itself. It is elitist and does little to guarantee quality. Instead, pay faculty on the basis of their publications and teaching. Given rampant favoritism and discrimination at work, especially against visible minorities as discussed above, tenure is a total farce. (Not to mention that famous senior faculty otherwise caught behaving badly — e.g., plagiarizing or harassing others — are a blight on the academic community.) Overall, when tenure-track professors are treated too frequently like the “king who can do no wrong,” it’s time to reconsider its usefulness.

If academics are truly invested in the idea of liberalism, these steps are the least they can take if they want to make “diversity” and “inclusion” more than a mere slogan.

© Frances A. Chiu, September 27, 2023. All Rights Reserved.

Further Reading:

Marybeth Gasman. 2022. Doing the Right Thing: How Colleges and Universities an undo Systemic Racism in Faculty Hiring.

J. Nathan Matias, Neil Lewis, Jr., Elan Hope. 2021. “Universities say they want more Diverse Faculties. So why is Academia still so White?” FivethirtyEight. Universities Say They Want More Diverse Faculties. So Why Is Academia Still So White? | FiveThirtyEight

Patricia A. Matthew. 2016. Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure.

Isis H. Settles, Martinique K. Jones, Nichole T. Buchanan, Kristie Dotson. 2021. “Epistemic exclusion: Scholar(ly) devaluation that marginalizes faculty of color.” Journal of Diversity in Higher Education. Epistemic exclusion: Scholar(ly) devaluation that marginalizes faculty of color. (apa.org)

Kieu Linh Caroline Valverde, Wei Ming Dariotis, et al. Fight the Tower: Asian American Women Scholars’ Resistance and Renewal in the Academy. 2019.