Lanterns and Street Signs

Abstract

Around the time I first received an invitation to contribute a chapter to this volume on junior faculty of color in the academy, my institution made headlines across the nation and the globe for a noose hung on the door of a professor of color.¹ The charged and complex tensions involved in this incident focused my thinking on a more ambitious approach to mentoring, especially as it relates to junior faculty of color navigating the academy. An incident like the hanging of a noose in the halls of an Ivy League institution brought issues of race and diversity into the national spotlight and, in that moment, made faculty of color more visible based on our vulnerability to such attacks.² In response to this episode, Teachers College facilitated town hall meetings and discussions, and students organized protests and teach-ins around racism, diversity issues, and the status of people of color in our institution. As a junior faculty member of color,³ I attended the various town hall and faculty meetings with purposeful attentiveness, noting what was and wasn’t said by colleagues and administrators on what seemed, at first, like a fairly straightforward racist incident. I was struck by how differently people responded to the situation given their positioning vis-à-vis their social identities and their status in the institution. Immediately after the noose incident, responses seemed to emerge along typecast lines, but in the months that followed when information emerged that the victim of this hateful attack was at the time under investigation for plagiarism (among her accusers were doctoral students of color), competing narratives emerged about “diversity” and “intellectual integrity” in the academy, with camps not easily broken down along lines of race and ideology.⁴