Date of Award

8-2024

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Education/Higher Education PhD

First Advisor

Katalin Szelényi

Second Advisor

Cheryl D. Ching

Third Advisor

Charles H.F. Davis, III

Abstract

Faculty of color (FoC) often engage in social justice scholarship that focuses on the needs of minoritized communities. Yet, FoC often are subjected to suspicion and scrutiny over concerns of objectivity and academic rigor. Despite these barriers, FoC have demonstrated successfully navigating traditional institutional reward systems while making significant contributions to social justice knowledge and knowledge production at research-intensive higher education institutions. Exploring how tenured FoC at research intensive higher education institutions have earned academic success while engaging non-traditional approaches to knowledge production is important to higher education’s mission to broaden scholarship to be practical, political, and beneficial to society. This dissertation applied a narrative research approach involving in-depth interviews with 15 participants to capture stories of how FoC who engage in scholarship with social justice goals navigated institutional reward systems at R1 and R2 universities. The conceptual framework that guided the design of this study included critical agency, outsiders within, and Critical Race Theory. The interview questions sought insight into how FoC navigated both traditional reward systems such as promotion and tenure as well as masked cultural standards that often resulted in punishment for engaging non-traditional approaches to scholarship. The findings of this dissertation closely align with existing literature on how the academy remains a chilly environment for FoC despite their important contributions to scholarship. Higher education institutions continue to privilege basic research as high regard for a faculty members contribution to their discipline and institution. From recruitment to advancement to full professor status, participants reported experiencing barriers such as racism, sexism, and scrutiny of academic ability. Punishment remains a constant factor of institutional life for FoC. This study emphasizes the need to expand the concept of scholarship to recognize and reward FoC’s experiential knowledge as members of minoritized communities. This study also provides insight into how institutions can eliminate punishment by developing a critical consciousness of how intersectional racism and sexism are embedded from recruitment to organizational socialization to authentically reward social justice scholarship. Finally, this study offers 10 Characteristics for academic leaders and faculty to use as guidelines for incorporating activist scholarship into evaluations, rewards, and scholarship.

Comments

Free and open access to this Campus Access Thesis is made available to the UMass Boston community by ScholarWorks at UMass Boston. Those not on campus and those without a UMass Boston campus username and password may gain access to this thesis through resources like Proquest Dissertations & Theses Global (https://www.proquest.com/) or through Interlibrary Loan. If you have a UMass Boston campus username and password and would like to download this work from off-campus, click on the "Off-Campus UMass Boston Users

Download

Share

COinS