Sink or Swim: Navigating the Perilous Waters of Promotion and Tenure--What's Diversity Got to Do with It?.

Nine times out of ten the best thing that can happen to a young man [or woman] is to be tossed overboard and compelled to sink or swim.- James A. Garfield, the 20th President of the United States of AmericaThe "sink-or-swim" ideology conveyed in Garfield's quote is pervasive in the United States society. At research universities, for example, promotion and tenure are institutional waters in which faculty are forced to sink or swim with respect to publishing. Either they publish ("swim") or they perish ("sink"). In throwing faculty overboard, institutions assume that those who swim do so because of their hard work and ability and those who sink do so because they are not capable or they are not hard working. To the contrary, all intelligent and capable individuals may not have equal opportunities to swim or to be successful in navigating the perilous waters of promotion and tenure. The sink-or-swim ideology ignores contextual factors that might influence success or failure. Moreover, this manner of thinking does not consider that the same water in which some fish thrive, others die. This is congruent with research which established that underrepresented/ underserved faculty1 at traditionally White research institutions experience the water differently than their White counterparts and, as a result, face a number of obstacles in the promotion and tenure process (Baloney-Morrison, 2003; Johnsrud & Des Jariais, 1998). In this commentary, I discuss two recurring issues related to publishing, or "swimming," that emerged during 3 years of discussion among participants in the Pennsylvania State University Annual Commission on Racial/Ethnic Diversity (CORED) Promotion and Tenure Symposium, titled "What's Diversity Got to Do With It?"2 Continuing with the metaphor of swimming, I highlight instances in which mainstream university structures and norms exclude or restrict the participation of underrepresented/underserved faculty. Further, I cite examples of ways in which some underrepresented/underserved faculty immersed in White waters of academe have not had an equal opportunity to swim or succeed because the water is polluted as a result of racial bias and discriminatory practices (Laden & Hagedorn, 2000; Tierney & Bensimon, 1996; Turner, 2002, 2003). After discussing the implications of existing structural barriers for historically underrepresented/underserved faculty, I discuss various ways in which individuals and universities might take positive steps to alter the tide of the status quo.Schooling Within the Academy: Fish Outside the MainstreamColleges and universities send mixed messages when they espouse the value of collaboration among professional colleagues; yet, in reality, they value competition over collaboration and reward individual work over collaborative work (Goodburn & Leverenz, 2002). In addition to the tension between collaboration and competition, there is bias in interpretation of collaboration between privileged (majority) and unprivileged (underrepresented/underserved) faculty. This issue became evident when participants in CORED symposia reported that some evaluators (within the same programs and departments during the same promotion and tenure review period) provided widely dissimilar evaluations of equivalent evidence in different dossiers. Further, certain participants testified that they were warned to limit their collaborations with colleagues on scholarly work, especially in cases when junior faculty collaborated with senior faculty or underrepresented faculty collaborated with dominant faculty. Symposia participants also reported that evaluators were suspicious of their collaborative work, assuming that they were less capable than or unequal to their contemporaries or that more capable senior faculty and/or dominant faculty were primarily responsible for doing the work of those perceived as less capable underrepresented/underserved/ junior faculty. Many untenured faculty pointed out that their mentors and/or other colleagues had advised them to steer clear of collaborative pursuits until they had earned tenure. …