The stories of faculty of color reflect the general trends of faculty dissatisfaction: concerns about work/life balance, inadequate compensation, and a flagging sense of purpose. But these scholars also struggle with pressures that remain mostly invisible to their white colleagues: isolation in rural communities, hostile work environments, and guilt about prioritizing self-care over the needs of their students. [...]

Over the last few years, colleges have worked with renewed fervor to increase minority representation in academe. Institutions have created toolkits to identify and counteract implicit bias throughout the job search, budgeted for cluster hires, and expanded outreach to historically Black colleges and universities and other minority-serving institutions. They’ve tried to diversify, and better train, hiring committees and have begun requiring candidates to submit diversity statements. The goal is to hire and retain more faculty of color.

Demographic data on higher-ed faculty suggest that these initiatives have borne some fruit. Between 2013 and 2020, the total number of faculty of color increased by 28,000, as the number of white faculty declined by 19,000. Those seven years saw significant gains in Asian and Latinx representation (up by 27 percent and 29 percent, respectively) and moderate gains in Black representation (up by 8 percent). [...]

These experiences exemplify what can happen when colleges hire Black faculty without confronting systemic inequities: New faculty members find themselves isolated, undermined, and gaslit. In fact, the cross-currents of diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring initiatives and unchecked institutional bias make some scholars wonder if academe actually wants faculty of color. Black women, in particular, face hurdles to achieving tenure that often go unacknowledged. As Zawadi Rucks-Ahidiana writes, “[I]ncreasing the number of Black women with Ph.D.s does nothing to address the structural and institutional barriers that Black women face throughout the process, including microaggressions from faculty and students, invalidation of their research, and the devaluation of their service contributions in the tenure process.”