Happy belated Labor Day to our US readers. Hope everyone took (or takes) a minute to learn the history of Labor Day in the US.
Today, the day after, I’m specifically thinking about the labor of “diversity work.” Who is doing it? Who ISN’T?
Why does it matter? As TSW author dualitea recently wrote, there appears to be a discrepancy in majority identities and who shows up to do the learning and labor of evidence-based inclusion.
Academia is seemingly these days always talking about diversity. But is it working? Who is doing the working? The work that institutions are doing so far may not be working. A new NBER working paper indicates that hiring ‘chief diversity officers’ is not significantly correlated with increased hiring of non-white faculty across 462 universities.
So I’d like to suggest some homework for scholars in our reader community who, like me, identify as white – go read On Being Included: On Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012) by Dr. Sara Ahmed.
As she herself says of the book, “we need to work on the university when we work at the university.”
This is not labor that should be asked of marginalized faculty, who are already shouldering more unpaid and undervalued labors in the academy.
As TSW author Acclimatrix recently also wrote, there are many kinds of labors in the academy. One way to be a respectful, kind colleague if you’re a white scholar in the academy is to take on some of the labor of working ON academia while working IN academia.
Tenure, She Wrote 