Conditionally Accepted
Conditionally Accepted
Navigating Higher Education from the Margins
A collection of essays that provides advice and strategies for BIPOC scholars on how to survive, thrive, and resist in academic institutions.
Conditionally Accepted builds upon an eponymous blog on InsideHigherEd.com, which is now a decade-old national platform for BIPOC academics in the United States. Bringing together perspectives from academics of color on navigating intersecting forms of injustice in the academy, each chapter offers situated knowledge about experiencing—and resisting—marginalization in academia. Contextualized within existing scholarship, these personal narratives speak to institutional betrayals while highlighting agency and sharing stories of surviving on treacherous terrain. Covering topics from professional development to the emptiness of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, and redefining what it means to be an academic in our contemporary moment, this edited collection directly confronts issues of systemic exclusion, discrimination, harassment, microaggressions, tokenism, and surveillance. Letting marginalized scholars know they are not alone, Conditionally Accepted offers concrete wisdom for readers seeking to navigate and transform oppressive academic institutions.
Perhaps what is most interesting about the collection of writings is the diversity among them. There is diversity in terms of the authors’ identities, which is rich, but there is also diversity of thought and variety in the way the writings are presented. . . . As readers engage with the diverse voices and experiences within the book, they will be compelled to reflect not only on the struggles of minoritized scholars but also on the collective responsibility to dismantle oppressive structures. The editors remind us that the pursuit of knowledge cannot be divorced from the pursuit of justice.
Anchored in the art of personal storytelling, the voices in Conditionally Accepted speak to the structural inequality faced by minoritized scholars in order to help any person dealing with racism, homophobia, or sexism inside or out of the ivory tower. I wish I could have had this book in graduate school.
This essential new volume is a call for justice, a reckoning between scholars of color and the academic hierarchies that persist in devaluing and diminishing their work. This book is a resource guide and a resting place for wearied, brilliant souls who might be wondering what their path forward should look like. The sheer breadth and depth of voices compiled here, and the intentional inclusion of contingent faculty among them, remind us that academia is not in any guise worthy of the talent, insight, and creativity that minoritized scholars bring to it.
Eric Joy Denise is the owner of Speak Truth, LLC, founder of Conditionally Accepted, and coeditor of Counternarratives from Women of Color Academics.
Bertin M. Louis, Jr. is an associate professor of anthropology and African American & Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky, author of My Soul Is in Haiti, former editor of Conditionally Accepted, and owner/founder of Navigating Higher Education.
- Introduction (Eric Joy Denise and Bertin M. Louis Jr.)
- PART I. Navigating Our Way within (or Out of) Academia
- Navigating the Africana Studies Joint Faculty Position (N. Fadeke Castor and Bertin M. Louis, Jr.)
- From Associate to Full Professor (Keisha N. Blain)
- Don't Sell Yourself Short: Starting Your Own Business as an Academic (Manya Whitaker)
- The Unbearable Whiteness of Economics: An Interview with Gary “Hoov” Hoover
- Conditional, but Essential, Contingency (Kelly Fong)
- A Black Woman’s Journey from Academia to the Community: An Interview with Alisha Winn, Applied Anthropologist
- PART II. Disciplinary and Institutional Betrayals
- Institutional Betrayals: The Costs Are High (Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt)
- Conditionally Invisible: Indigenous Invisibilization in US Academia (Robin Starr Minthorn)
- The Institutional Othering of Disability: A Graduate Student’s Perspective on Ableism in Higher Education (Sarah Manchanda)
- Dealing with Sexual Harassment as a Junior Black Woman Scholar (Shantel Gabrieal Buggs)
- Denied Tenure: To Be Conditionally Unaccepted (Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder)
- PART III. Diversity Rhetoric and Empty Promises
- This Is Your Pipeline Problem: The Far-Reaching Effects of the Mistreatment of Senior Faculty of Color (Amelia Gibson)
- Faculty of Color and the Changing University (Adia Harvey Wingfield)
- From Good Intentions to Inclusive Behaviors: Achieving the Diversity Goals We Profess in Academia (Neil Anthony Lewis Jr.)
- Dismantling Whiteness in Academia (Salvador Vidal-Ortiz)
- PART IV. Transforming the Academy and Beyond
- Becoming a Chicano Scholar-Activist: Key Lessons and Takeaways (Álvaro Huerta)
- Why I Write for the Public (Victor Erik Ray)
- The Price of Sanctuary at a Hispanic-Serving Institution (Aimee Villarreal)
- Embracing Scholar-Activism as Legitimate Academic Work (Eric Joy Denise)
- Acknowledgments
- List of Contributors
- Index
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The Little Orange Book
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By The University of Texas System Academy of Distinguished Teachers
