Guide to Tenure for Black Academics

Via the AWIS Washington Wire, this news of interest to young black academics:

In The Black-American's Guide for Winning Tenure - Without Losing Your Soul, authors Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Tracey Laszloffy provide dos, don'ts, advice and support. One of the tips in the Q&A with Rockquemore includes being proactive rather than reactive in creating a professional network of support. She emphasizes the importance of knowing the institution's exact promotion and tenure process, as well as unwritten rules from department-specific norms to whether race can be explicitly discussed. Once the unwritten rules are understood, one can choose whether or not to obey them - realizing there are consequences for violating them. All faculty need to learn how to say "no" to protect research time, but it's especially important for black junior-faculty because of the disproportionately high number of service requests relating to diversity issues.

See the full article here at Inside Higher Ed.

Sounds like a great book. The authors are also the co-founders of BlackAcademic.com.

BlackAcademic.com is an online mentoring portal for under-represented faculty, post-docs, graduate students, and those who are committed to our success. We provide resources and services for individual scholars, institutional clients, and professional organizations in the social and behavioral sciences.

Not to be confused with Blac(K)ademic, which is a completely different guide to navigating academia.

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What perfect timing - I was speaking today with a black graduate student association discussing why we don't have a similar group for postdocs. BlackAcademic.com seems to cover that middle ground between grad school and tenure-track faculty position.

The book will also come in handy for discussions with colleagues - thanks so much for this post.