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WHEN the opportunity to chair the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures presented itself seven years ago, few people, including me, imagined that I would apply and subsequently get the position. Intelligence, initiative, and dedication were qualities that had sustained me in the profession, but preparation for an administrative post seemed to be lacking—or so I thought. There had been times on four separate occasions when I had served as acting chair during the summers, but that involved little more than signing papers. However, sensing that a change was imminent, I began in 1992 to take a series of on-campus seminars in management just to explore the possibility of a position of leadership. Yet I was hesitant: “Do you really want to do this? Can you do it?” After all, it was not as if becoming a department head had been a lifelong ambition, particularly for a traditionally trained, introverted academic like me. “No,” replied the voice of self-doubt. Only “fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”
My husband, David O. Ogunsola, who is my confidant, sounding board, and best friend, observed that I had no reason not to apply and that I was going to do so. End of discussion. Although in the recent past the department chair had tended to rotate among tenured faculty members, the dean announced there would be a national search. At first I was disconcerted by that news, but then I felt relieved and even welcomed the idea. One challenge that African American female professionals constantly have to face is the assumption that race and gender give one an unfair advantage. In fact, quite the opposite is true. These factors, however, can give and did give me a greater degree of insight, sensitivity, and flexibility, crucial for any leader but especially for a chairperson of such a diverse group as one finds in a foreign language department. In addition, race and gender provided a keener perspective of what combinations of faculty members, students, and programs might work well together and thus enabled me to achieve a measure of success at enriching our department. This goal of enrichment has been achieved within the broader context of the recruitment and retention of new faculty members, an increase in enrollment of foreign language majors, curricular restructuring, and fund-raising, which are our top priorities in the struggle for viability.
The University of Alabama, Birmingham (UAB), includes references to affirmative action in its mission and vision statement, its job-line information, and its written advertisements. Unlike other universities in the growing atmosphere of employment backlash that is besieging the nation, UAB at least publicly embraces the concept, perhaps because of its history and location. Besides, it would be very difficult for a public, urban research (Carnegie I) institution that specializes in health care not to advocate for affirmative action in a city that is about 70% African American and in a state where a significant portion of its population is economically depressed and minimally educated. Affirmative action embraces all citizens—African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, and Euro-Americans from Appalachia as well as from suburbia.1 However, the racial imbalance resulting from vestiges of the Jim Crow system of education has led UAB to place greater emphasis on recruiting and retaining African American faculty members and students. Faculty member and student diversity issues intersect with programmatic revamping.
Institutional commitment of resources, time, and energy is the first prerequisite for recruitment and retention of black faculty members. UAB began this process in 1976 when its first president, Joseph Volker, made a concerted effort to bring in African American professors. In fact, I was part of that group. However, Volker died in 1977, and the matter languished until 1987 when Charles “Scotty” McCallum became UAB’s third president. After a series of breakfast meetings with African American faculty members, McCallum was convinced that if there was ever to be any move toward institutional dedication to affirmative action, it had to garner support from the top—from the president’s office. Of course, there was a great hue and cry about infringements on academic freedom from conservative administrators, while liberal deans and chairs posed the burning question, “Where are you going to find all these qualified minorities with so much national competition?” “We’ll grow our own,” replied McCallum. Thus, the Comprehensive Minority Faculty Development Program (CMFDP) was born in 1988,2 and money for scholarships to recruit high-performing secondary students into undergraduate programs and for fellowships to attract outstanding postsecondary students to graduate-professional studies was set aside off the top of the university’s budget. The first group of students who entered UAB for the academic year of 1988–89 was exclusively African American because that was the definition of affirmative action stipulated by the CMFDP. In consultation with the CMFDP, McCallum also provided an incentive for deans and chairs to use in the recruitment and retention of black faculty members: four $30,000 competitive grants to supplement funding for new hires. The requirement was that a school and a department had to make a commitment to fill an existing tenure-track line. This was a bold, controversial step but it worked. At its tenth anniversary celebration in April 1999, the CMFSDP (now the Comprehensive Minority Faculty and Student Development Program) could toot its horn over many success stories (University of Alabama, Birmingham). Nevertheless, before our unit could take advantage of the opportunity, we had to resolve some fundamental issues.
In 1993 the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures was a collection of individuals and loose alliances constructed primarily according to language area. Had I not attended the ADFL Workshop for New Chairs in Montreal that year, I would not have been able to deal effectively with these divisions. During my first term as chair (1993–96), all efforts were directed toward establishing a unified vision and setting common goals that would continue to respect the distinctiveness of our personalities and areas of specialization. Before dealing with affirmative action, we had to look at who we were (or thought we were), where we had come from, and where we were going but also at what our relation could be to the School of Arts and Humanities, the university, and the community. In short, we had to forge a collective identity. To put it diplomatically, meetings got very “colorful and intense” simply because there were some colleagues who refused to respect me as the chair even though I practiced the concept of shared authority. Perhaps some of those same individuals had accepted me originally only because they felt I would be a figurehead. When that proved not to be the case, conflict was inevitable. Nevertheless, in our first three annual reports, I articulated the short-term objectives of recruiting a diverse faculty and increasing foreign language majors, and the long-range goal of revamping our programs so that they would reflect the student body. It was not easy to convince all parties that these moves were necessary or desirable. However, with a great deal of patience, persuasion, and persistence (my three p’s), I encouraged my colleagues to buy into affirmative action at least in principle. Yet change would not happen overnight. It is important to emphasize here that chairs must not be afraid to exert their authority on affirmative action. At the same time, they must get faculty members to embrace the policy as their own. Otherwise, it can become a losing battle or, if won, a Pyrrhic victory. It is also vital to have the support of the dean, vice president or provost, and president of the institution because those officials have the money and power. As Ruth Y. Hsu so astutely observes:
The way money is apportioned is fundamentally a political-ideological issue. The power to distribute funds is the power to include or to exclude certain bodies, the power to distribute those bodies and the knowledge associated with those bodies to where they “truly” belong. Today, as before, the challenge is to ensure that these bodies are not marginalized in academe or excluded from higher education altogether. Therefore, the allocation of funds or funding priorities is one critical site of privilege and power that must be contested, along with others. (192–93)
Once an administrator clearly understands the relation between material reality and intellectual concerns in academe, it becomes easier to deal with resistance to change, which is often camouflaged as abstractions having little to do with the matter at hand (Hsu 183–85). This is true whether one is dealing with faculty and student issues or programmatic ones.
Concerning student recruitment, our department thought that we could easily achieve this goal because UAB was affordable and convenient, especially for the working adult population. We soon realized that there were many factors that undermined our efforts. First, retaining African American and southern Appalachian students was a big problem, and the problem was exacerbated by a combination of economic hardship, institutional racism, first-generation-student status, and the school’s commuter structure—that is, its lack of a “collegiate atmosphere,” which would have included a strong advising system, dormitories, and a student center. Second, attracting students to a major or minor in a foreign language meant reaching people who had not necessarily studied a language other than English in high school or at any other time. Some even had great difficulty with English, irrespective of race. (I must pause here for an aside. My background and training in African American culture provided me with a basis for understanding Ebonics and concomitant code switching. However, as a native of that great Caribbean city of New Orleans, I was hard pressed to comprehend “hick,” or southern Appalachian variants of English. I had to learn these as new linguistic modes.) Of course, the lessening of interest in the study of other languages occurs within the national context of a devaluation of the humanities and a glorification of professional and technical training, but disinterest paved the way for a third factor. The rapidly changing demographics in Alabama led to a mushrooming of enrollments in Spanish, while the termination of the foreign language requirement for all arts and humanities majors diminished the enrollments in French and German, thus creating an imbalance in the department and a dilemma of viability. Fourth, the teaching of critical languages like Chinese and Japanese, as well as proposals for modern Greek and Swahili, added to the tension within the department because those disciplines were perceived as taking away resources from the major (European) languages. (Predictably, Latin was not seen in that light.) In essence, achieving a measure of balance among the traditional and nontraditional language areas, while maintaining viability for two majors (French and Spanish), was a fifth challenge to face on the road to diversity.
Through a series of workshops initially designed to provide ongoing training for adjunct instructors, our department began to address issues like stereotyped images and presentations of culture in Spanish, French, and German textbooks. Fortunately, we have on board a colleague who not only has written textbooks but also has ties to editors and other authors in that industry. Thus, each time we invited representatives of publisher X, Y, or Z to a workshop, we were ready with our critique, and we made it known that we would not use their products unless we saw genuine efforts to represent racial, ethnic, and gender diversity. Meanwhile, I gently encouraged my colleagues to examine their own teaching philosophies, syllabi, reading materials, and instructional methods with such goals in mind.3 To this end, I was able to serve as a role model because of my general approach to teaching and my specific research interests in Afro-Hispanic literature. Throughout my career, I have included in all my language and literature courses cultural materials and writing from men and women of different racial and ethnic origins. Yet I did not make of my own experience a demand for conformity, tokenism, or curricular balkanization, although I hoped that it would be perceived as a deeply rooted respect for multiple communities and disciplines. Most assuredly, some faculty members were more difficult to convince than others, but our unit made significant strides—always through patience, persuasion, and persistence. We have addressed not only racial, ethnic, and gender diversity but also the numerous dichotomies within a multilingual department: emphasizing literature or language, teaching language for the humanities or language for the professions, using conventional pedagogy or innovative technology, publishing monographs or textbooks, balancing full-time employment with part-time status. The resolution of these concerns will be reflected in our revised programs for the academic year of 2001–02, when UAB converts to the semester system. We have incorporated many of the approaches to curricular enrichment spelled out by Anthony Dahl and by Geraldine Cleary Nichols,4 thus preparing the way for a change in hiring practices. Above all, we have kept hope alive through humor.
One of the most effective ways of embarking on the journey to faculty diversity in our department has been through an institution called the Jemison Visiting Professor. Each year the School of Arts and Humanities provides funds on a competitive basis to its seven departments for a distinguished visiting faculty member or writer. During spring quarter 1995 we were able to win a grant for the visit of Quince Duncan, a university professor, novelist, and short story writer from Costa Rica. Even though he is internationally known and well respected, Duncan is not visible in the Latin American canon if one uses current anthologies as a measure. Although women writers who identify as white have been included in recent times, black and indigenous authors are still offered only as tokens or omitted entirely. Of quiet dignity and captivating warmth, Duncan through his presence in the classroom and participation in departmental affairs had a tremendous influence on faculty members and students, thus helping change negative perceptions of African-ancestored professionals. In addition to coteaching an advanced undergraduate and graduate seminar with me (in which all but one of the students were white), Duncan also presented three public lectures and was feted at various social events. One of his talks was held at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, which sponsors programs on the international struggle for human rights. It was an honor for me to share teaching duties with a famous person, and it was also a joy for my class to deal firsthand with a writer whose writings they were studying. They were able to work with the living, breathing human being behind the creative process instead of a distant personage—dead or alive—who had committed words to a page. My colleagues were shy at first about inviting Duncan to give guest lectures in their classes, but after one instructor broke the ice, Duncan could hardly keep up with the demand. We even tried working with African American studies, but because of some administrative difficulties in that program, we were not able to offer additional classes under its umbrella.
One of the most compelling arguments in favor of this direct, hands-on approach came from a former student (now deceased), who at the time was a public school teacher seeking to expand her knowledge of Spanish and Latin American literature. After reading Duncan’s story “Una carta” (“A Letter”) from the bilingual collection The Best Short Stories of Quince Duncan / Las mejores historias de Quince Duncan, my student commented something to this effect: “The character Miss Spence reminds me so vividly of my own grandmother, a poor, working-class woman of Appalachian background, who had to struggle all her life. I identify with this person because I know her. I am so grateful to Professor Duncan for having written a story like this.” Toward the end of his visit to Birmingham, Duncan was the humanities recipient of the Outstanding International Scholar Award at the annual banquet of the Center for International Programs. Although I did not fully realize it at the time, that crucial year of 1995 set the stage for the acceptance of African American faculty members other than myself, and black students began to feel more comfortable about considering a major or minor in a foreign language. Duncan’s visit to UAB was the catalyst that spurred our department toward achieving greater racial diversity. This process reminds me of the Spanish proverb that says: “Poco a poco se va lejos” (“Little by little one goes far”).
As a department, we are aware of the current climate of “reverse discriminationitis” in our nation, and on that point I concur with Carrie Tirado Bramen’s observation:
The attack against affirmative action, or what one journalist refers to as “the epidemic of rage,” is currently employed to obfuscate the economic changes now occurring in the academic workplace. Corporate restructuring within the university affects all academic employees regardless of race or gender. An exclusive focus on the “color line” prevents us from noticing and adequately responding to the other lines that are being drawn within the profession, lines that divide tenured and tenure-track faculty members from adjuncts and part-time employees, lines that divide faculty members with health care and pensions from those with no benefits, lines that divide those who have representation in faculty governance with those who have no voice in their departments and institutions. (115)
To bring the issue back home, over a period of seven years I have been responsible for hiring—directly or through influence—ten faculty members with the following ethnic backgrounds: three white males; three white females; two Hispanic females; one indigenous mestizo male; and one African American male, who is the new kid on the block. One black person out of ten! Three of the individuals were actually hired by the former chair, although she deferred to the wishes of the Spanish area concerning them; the other seven I personally recruited and hired. However, not all seven stayed with us, because of either downsizing or personal circumstances. In one instance an individual left because of a combination of factors, but in no case has a male ever been replaced during my tenure as chair simply because he was Caucasian. I place my integrity on the line with that statement. In relation to that, I would direct you to another timely comment by Bramen, which reflects my own point of view:
The issue is not who is taking all the jobs but where have all the jobs gone? This more difficult question moves us further into an institutional and structural critique that can get at some of the sources of white resentment toward minority success and ways to redirect this anger toward more constructive ends. (119)
Since my position became administrative, I have had less direct contact with students, unless they are experiencing a problem of some kind, so as I began my second three-year term as chair (1996–99), it was obvious that we needed to hire a full-time, tenure-track African American if we were going to continue our progress toward enrichment. This move required rugged determination as well as a velvet touch because, as fair as we think we are, we all have prejudices, and entrenched patterns are hard to change. Transformation is not easy; it involves soul-searching and may result in discarding cherished beliefs that one does not necessarily see as harmful or negative. As an African American administrator, I walked a tightrope. On the one hand, any effort I made in the direction of hiring another black faculty member could be perceived at best as favoritism, at worst as our “taking over.” On the other hand, despite the university’s best efforts, as well as pressure from the Birmingham community, black administrators, faculty members, students, and staff members face the ugly reality of covert and overt racism on an almost daily basis. Some believe the current debate over whether to house the new African American studies major in a Department of African American Studies, as opposed to an African American studies program, is a case in point, but that lies outside the parameters of this essay.
After assessing the situation thoroughly, I decided to jump in with both feet. At a departmental meeting I simply informed faculty members that as usual we would fill the next vacancy with a qualified person, and although we would not rule out people from other backgrounds we preferred an African American. In addition to forming a search committee that was representative of various areas, I also included all faculty members in the on-campus interview process. Institutional policy has been to bring in the top candidate first, and if that person is acceptable to faculty members, an offer is made. This process can be agonizingly slow; sometimes the candidate does not work out for us, or we do not work out for the candidate, and there is a delay in that moment of recognition when one might lose the prize. In fact, years of recruiting have taught me that it is extremely difficult to get qualified professionals of any color who want to relocate to Birmingham, because they still have an image of the South that is associated with the 1960s. Even when individuals have been willing to come for an on-campus interview, some of them see the Magic City as a temporary stop on the way to bigger and better places (like Atlanta). So the task at hand was to find a person with excellent credentials who was also collegial and genuinely interested in starting a career at UAB. The person did not have to stay forever, but we certainly hoped it would be someone who would at least invest apprentice years in our department. Mission impossible? Maybe, maybe not.
Having served on departmental, school- , and university-wide search committees, I can assure you that recruitment is not limited to advertising in professional journals like the MLA Job Information List, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Black Issues in Higher Education, and The Directory of Women and Minority Doctoral Candidates. All these outlets are helpful in publicizing the opening, but when you are positioned in Alabama, you must find other routes. For two years I had watched a certain graduate student read papers at the annual convention of the College Language Association, a sixty-three-year-old organization of English and foreign language professionals with roots in HBCUs. My observation was possible because as the foreign language representative (1996–98) and vice president and program chair (1998–2000) of the organization, I was privileged to read numerous abstracts or proposals and organize sessions. The first year our budding scholar was placed on a panel of graduate students, but the second time he was paired with a junior and a senior faculty member from different institutions. Not only did he hold his own; he surpassed my expectations and I knew then that he would be able to “cut the mustard,” as the old folks used to say. The challenge was to woo him away from the more high-powered, better-paying universities, because UAB’s faculty salaries in the arts and humanities are not at the top of the scale.
It was now time to take advantage of the opportunity offered by the CMFSDP—the $30,000 supplemental grant designed for the recruitment and retention of African American faculty. This award is to be made for three years to an excellent candidate in addition to the candidate’s salary. Moreover, it is to be used exclusively to allow that person release time to develop research interests, publish articles and books, travel, purchase equipment (hard- and software), develop technology, enhance teaching, or teach in the summer. Without the benefit of that competitive award, I would have had little leverage in persuading this particular candidate to give up a higher salary at a more prestigious institution (and he did have offers from several) to come to UAB. Nevertheless, the opportunity for the prospective faculty member to work with a chairperson who had experienced circumstances similar to his own and work with faculty members with whom he felt comfortable was a very attractive incentive. This does not mean that there was not some resentment about the “minority hire,” but I dealt with that through creative budgeting so that the parties involved received their fair share of the pie and some lagniappe as well.5
Let me add that we are still not out of the woods, for we have a long road to travel toward achieving all that we dream we can be. At this writing, our department has the following composition: four white males, five white females, one indigenous mestizo male, one African American male, and one African American female (me). One white male is relocating and we are losing two white females because of downsizing. After these departures, there will be three white males, three white females, one indigenous mestizo male, one African American male, one African American female, and an open line for which we must recruit this year. One-third of the ten positions are filled by people of color, and although that might seem high, it is not disproportionate to the population of students of color, estimates of which run at 40% when African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, and foreign nationals are included. Black administrators, however, are almost nonexistent, and the spaces they occupy often render them powerless. Thus, it behooves the UAB administration to abide by its own affirmative action guidelines. Hsu articulates this dilemma so well:
Minority faculty members, students, and administrators today—thirty years after the civil rights and various ethnic renaissance movements and over twenty years after the initiation of affirmative action policies—are still underrepresented, and the academy is still a fundamentally conservative, Eurocentric, and masculinst institution in its hierarchical structure, modus operandi, and cultural assumptions. (184)
How then does a department chair begin to have some influence on the hegemonic culture of academe, which not only reflects but also upholds and perpetuates the dominant values of American society? I have not offered any magic formula for achieving diversity. Instead, I have shared what worked for us. First, one must be aware of the realities of power alliances and know how they operate in relation to funding. Second, one must build a foundation of trust, mutual respect, and collegiality. Such values are not synonymous with conformity and agreement on every matter, but they are the basis for constant and consistent work at achieving shared goals. Chairs must remind themselves that emphasizing self-interest over that of the group is always counterproductive and thus should never be a consideration. Third, one has to be bold, daring to take the road less traveled and willing to face the consequences of making a difference. I believe that departmental enrichment was achieved at some risk to my promotion as full professor, but I managed to jump that hurdle too. Fourth, one has to persevere in the belief that justice will ultimately prevail because there is a higher power who will ensure its happening even if the individual leader has vanished from the scene. And finally, one must choose one’s battles carefully, knowing when to back off or walk away or step down. No individual can carry a great load indefinitely. There is an old spiritual from the African American oral tradition that greatly appeals to me: “Wade in the water, wade in the water, children, wade in the water, God’s gonna trouble the water.” Yes, “fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” but sometimes fools, or rebels, make history.
2The original name for McCallum’s “kitchen cabinet” was the Comprehensive Minority Faculty Development Program (CMFDP), which consisted of African American faculty members but also concerned white faculty members, administrators, and community members affiliated with UAB. In 1996 the name was changed to the Comprehensive Minority Faculty and Student Development Program to include a focus on student recruitment and retention as well. I have been an active member of this committee since its inception.
3It was necessary to address certain instances of racism, sexism, and ethnic bias in an oblique manner. During meetings and workshops, I focused on hypothetical cases instead of singling out individuals or citing specific occurrences unless a blatant comment was made on the spot. In the office, however, there were times prejudice had to be faced directly, and I did not hesitate to do so. I also had to be vigilant when a conflict arose between a student and a faculty member, being careful to ascertain whether the student was using race as an excuse for not doing assignments according to class expectations. My general policy was noninterventional in order to encourage the two individuals to work out their differences.
4Dahl lists ten conditions that favor the retention of African American students at colleges and universities. The first five are: “institutions with the will and the resources to recruit qualified African American and international students to provide a sense of community; recruitment by departments of foreign languages of qualified African Americans or persons of African heritage to serve as full-time and part-time faculty members and role models to African American students; development of courses that African Americans can relate to and, at least in courses on contemporary Latin American literature, the incorporation of prominent Afro-Hispanic writers such as Nicolás Guillén, Manuel Zapata Olivella, or Nancy Morejón into the canon; development of courses by the foreign language faculty that appeal to the college or university community at large; study-abroad opportunities that include the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica, or other countries where African Americans can encounter people who look like them” (35). The following is my paraphrase of Nichols’s eight approaches to achieving viability of all language programs in a multilingual department: review one’s mission statement and compare it with those of other institutions; outline a set of expectations and goals for each level of the programs; encourage students with previous language experience to begin at higher levels, while discouraging remediation; foment cross-training in various languages (have students enroll in French or German when Spanish classes are full); implement the National Standards (communication, culture, connection, comparisons, and communities) at the university level; tap the undeclared major pool; make a case to your dean about the high-performance, low-cost credit hour productivity of your department; and provide merit increases for quantitative as well as qualitative work according to guidelines established by the unit (40–42). As Nichols so aptly observes, “maintaining the vibrancy and productivity of all the languages in multilingual departments represents an irresistible managerial challenge for chairs” (40).
5The term lagniappe means “a little extra” in the Creole jargon of New Orleans. During the Great Depression grocers would often provide a bit of meat or a delicacy like a slice of cake or pie to regular customers who bought staple products like red beans and rice. It used to show affectionate consideration for the well-being of the receiver, similar to the biblical statement by the apostle Paul, “and take a little honey with you.”
Dahl, Anthony. “Piquing the Interest of African American Students in Foreign Languages: The Case of Spelman College.” ADFL Bulletin 31.2 (2000): 30–35. [Show Article]
Duncan, Quince. The Best Short Stories of Quince Duncan / Las mejores historias de Quince Duncan. Ed. and trans. Dellita Martin-Ogunsola. San José: Costa Rica, 1995.
Hsu, Ruth Y. “Where’s Oz, Toto? Idealism and the Politics of Gender and Race in Academe.” Lim and Herrera-Sobek 183–204.
Jaschik, Scott. “Alabama Desegretation.” Chronicle of Higher Education 11 Aug. 1995: A21.
Lexis.Nexis. Academic Universe. Document on Alabama State University and desegregation. 10 Aug. 1998: 1–10.
Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin, and María Herrera-Sobek, eds. Power, Race, and Gender in Academe: Strangers in the Tower? New York: MLA, 2000.
Nichols, Geraldine Cleary. “Spanish and the Multilingual Department: Ways to Use the Rising Tide.” ADFL Bulletin 31.2 (2000): 39–43. [Show Article]
University of Alabama, Birmingham. IPEDS Fall Enrollment Reports. Institutional Studies and Services. Apr. 1999.
© 2001 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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