While I’m busy filling out graduate school applications and trying to figure out what I’m going to do for the rest of my life, I couldn’t help but stop and think about the furor over Dr. Andrea Smith’s negative tenure review in February of this year. Both students and faculty here raised quite a ruckus about the Women’s Studies department’s decision to vote down her tenure bid.
I know that what I want to do with my life involves academia. This is my home, for sure. Being able to just be around such a wide variety of experts provides a constant stream of information and inspiration. I love the University of Michigan, and I love the idea of being in a social milieu like the one I’ve found in Ann Arbor. (Okay, maybe not exactly like Ann Arbor, but similar. Maybe in a bigger city?)
The thing of it is, I’m already heading down the road toward being a professional academic. My focus for my bachelor’s degree is philosophy of language — largely esoterica nobody else is really interested in outside of other philosophers of language and some linguists and maybe some computer scientists. I want to do research, and I love to write. I’ll also go ahead and claim that I’ve been well-trained in academic writing.
The problem is, I’m a transgender person of color. Tenure committees generally work behind closed doors. If Dr. Smith, who is arguably one of the most distinguished members of the academic community who happens to be a woman of color, can be denied tenure at the University of Michigan, then what will become of me when I seek a tenure bid? In a lot of ways it’s definitely too early to say. I haven’t even been admitted as a graduate student anywhere. Yet I can’t help but wonder if the university system is more or less forgiving than the “outside world.”
I’ve long argued that the places we say are “liberal havens” are only called that because they’re more liberal than the areas that surround them, but how much do we have to settle for? I know it’s impracticaly to say I’ll settle for anything less than safety and support and acceptance into a community both professionally and socially, but I’m not sure I want to find myself a published faculty member whose tenure bid gets voted down for reasons that look suspiciously like genderism or racism.
At the same time, the world is changing really fast. The fact that people are talking about this issue and questioned the judgment of the Women’s Studies department for denying Dr. Smith tenure bodes well for the future. Maybe by the time I make a tenure bid, it’ll be a non-issue. A guy can hope, right?
3 comments
Comments feed for this article
3.November.2008 at 1:59 pm
hinkycorners
Well, I’d like to believe that you’re right, that by the time you make a tenure bid the world will have changed enough to make it a non-issue. One can only hope that human rights simple become that. That at some point gay rights, trans rights, black rights, women’s rights, et cetera all fall under one simple category of human rights. (Who knows, maybe we’ll meet some space aliens and then we’ll even have to come up with a more politically correct phrase than human rights.)
But at the same time, if history tells us anything, it is that equality isn’t just handed out like candy. It’s something we have to fight for. And maybe one of the great things that you can do for the world is simply to go up for tenure to force people to examine the issues of genderism and racism involved. Certainly someone so well versed in language as yourself could be quite the spokesperson for equality; a figurehead to lead the way to a better future for us all. :)
3.November.2008 at 8:58 pm
Cayden
Thanks friend! I really appreciate your kind words. I am still very hopeful about my prospects, but it’s not hard to get a little scared now and then. I think that the subtle genderism and racism that comes out especially courageously from behind closed doors, when people aren’t worried about being scrutinized for what it is they say, manifests very subtly. It’s probably the most dangerous, because it’s easy for such people to say, look, I’m not genderist or racist, such-and-such a person was simply not as qualified as the other guy. So it’s impossible to stand up against, at least by yourself…
11.November.2008 at 1:01 pm
forkergirl
It remains difficult to see the human underlying the flexible frames that are regarded (by so many, including so many that are in positions of power) as norms. Not only are exterior surfaces the first with which visual contact is made, we are trained to interpret, to read this visual information, to file and link the visual information in multiple locations of the brain, so any additional information, info beyond visual contact (which is indirect, and easy; there is no direct touching in the visual assessing) is linked in locations that include the placements of visual information in the brain as well as other locations making it difficult to consider the other information without influence from initial encounters with visual information (when visual contact has been the initial contact).
Synesthetes might have other experiences in initial visual encounters if their additional sense is some combination of vision and another sensory mode, but synesthesia is not (yet) common.
That the human can choose to reconfigure self (physically as well as cognitively, the changing of mind), to become more responsive to reconfigurations of information and human rights should be reason enough to encompass the range of possible human frameworks into what is considered a source of useful (and accurate) understanding of what humanity can be.
That said, I must remind you that I was the first woman of African-American heritage to earn the rank of Full Professor in the Department of English at the University of Michigan, and that was in 1998. When I received tenure a few years earlier, I was only the second female with African-American heritage to receive tenure in the Department of English at the University of Michigan. I was shocked that the “first” was available to me, so keep in mind that you might have to be an agent of change, but from what I know about you and your work, you are already such an agent, and a formidable opponent for rigid systems.
You are right about the relativity of liberality.
You make yourself fit wherever you’d like to fit; reconfigure the space and claim it —I used a limited fork to carve out a limited fork theory space that I occupy.