Case Study: Faculty Member

Case Study

Anonymous: Faculty Member at UCR

Level of Micro Aggression: Doing an interview about hetero-normativity, professor felt frustrated about the jargon wording that continues to surround these words, they want to get to the bottom of it, and they suggested we start at the smallest form of this through. How does this form of violence happen on a day-to-day level and how aware are the people who do micro-racist, micro-homophobic acts to others?

“Why is it that people simply don’t get it?” They explain campuses understand that they need to “create little vent places” but they cannot actually call it what it is, RACISM, HOMOPHOBIA, HETEROSEXISM, ISLAMAPHOBIA, CLASSISM, instead, we have to pack it into the name of diversity and multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism and Diversity: “Lets code it” Why don’t they call it multiracial, multiclass, multigender, etc? But that’s the point they mention, this is not suppose to actually solve anything, its suppose to make the illusion that it does even though they are not actually addressing the issue. Instead the create little spaces where the conversations are happening, while the responsibility to create and develop this opportunities fall on the ethnic, cultural, gender offices who serve as “little nations” while producing white capital.

UC Riverside Brand, A Paradox: We are branded as diverse in cultures and ethnicities yet what are FACULTY actually doing for the students? Why does this burden continue to follow on the cultural offices and not on faculty, administration, all parts of UC Riverside?

Example 1: The Women Studies Department and the Women’s Resource Center do not have a similar agenda, the programs are not connecting to the classes and the “faculty are not structurally involved.” Instead, there’s an individuality factor that is playing, creating faculty members who must produce literature, books, research over focusing on the students. As they mention, “academic feminism is a tiring pattern” within a capital system of production in which its all about the branding in order to cell instead of actual collective work.

Example 2: The Women Studies Department and the Ethnic Studies Department do not intersect at the level that would strengthen the potential to challenge heteronormativity, racism, etc. This is a GENDERED case in which expression of perceived MASCULINE qualities within the Ethnic Studies Department allows them to show strength and fear from administration while perceived FEMININE qualities creates a weak gendered department that has consequently made it vulnerable and “institutionally destroyed” over the past years.

Example 3: At UCSD, there was “very careful” alliance building with the Women’s Resource Center and the Ethnic Studies Department after the “old boys left” and new young women of color are taking faculty positions.  

Intentionally Marginalized Spaces These spaces can be “highly generative sites of resistance” yet even then they are broken off, divided, and “binarized” in a way that categorizes them through difference.

Pedagogy There must be a shift from programming to institution where the binaries are called out and partnerships are part of the classroom and is VALUED for what it is. It also depends on the support that one has, “marginalization begins when a single person is trying to do work that challenges” the institution.

Capitalization and Internalization plays a big role as a teacher in this university, professors have to compromise a lot to survive and succeed in this university while still keeping their integrity. Teaching falls at the bottom of the hierarchy, as long as you are not sexually harassing someone (and getting caught), you get passing evaluations, and have published, you can be tenured.

The billion-dollar corporation is mystified…

Public vs. Private University: Liberal Arts universities function much differently, one’s attention to students is what’s expected and rewarded; yet who actually has the economic means to even know about them, apply, and actually go there? As a faculty of a private liberal arts college, feminist movements are much less advanced due to the primarily white population. They are not even in second wave feminism… yet they hired them because of the “foreign subjectivity,” expecting to get an transnational post colonialist and not an anti-racist as they surprisingly found out.

Next Steps: Yet as feminist author, Anzaldua, notes we have “an extraordinary amount of power” on the margins we hold and occupy. In terms of survival, “take the money and run” yet hold those margins carefully, strategically, and with care. Marginalization does not mean minority.

Who is the minority in this? We must re-conceptualize what that really means within the institution as well as in the larger context.