Negotiating mentoring relationships and support for Black and Brown early‐career faculty

Abstract

In this essay, we share historical and structural components of mentoring within institutions of higher education and grapple with technical and moral obligations of support. We argue for more humanizing approaches that embed personal, social, and cultural aspects of mentoring, and seek to disrupt the purposes of mentoring, and for whom? Using a critical approach, we promote justice-oriented and equity-driven models of mentoring that account for excessive teaching loads and service commitments for faculty at minority-serving institutions and Black and Brown faculty at predominantly White institutions. Current promotion and tenure publish or perish models neglect the intellectual and scholarly contributions made through teaching and service and therefore hold the same level of expectations for engagement in and dissemination of research. We share our own stories as Faculty of Color navigating institutional structures during the promotion and tenure process, while also negotiating incongruent cultures of our personal and professional lives. Furthermore, we address the need for mentoring and networking within exclusionary spaces to support the productivity and critical research agendas of Black and Brown faculty that often challenge the white heteronormative cultures of our institutions, professional organizations, peer-reviewed journals, and prestigious funding mechanisms. Implications of this essay include an acknowledgment of oppressive systems that early-career Black and Brown faculty often

Commentary—misconceiving merit: Paradoxes of excellence and devotion in academic science and engineering

“…Blair-Loy and Cech avoid this tendency by including data by race and gender but sometimes include other combinations as well. This intersectional perspective helps to name and comprehend overlapping systems of oppression and how they push people, particularly women of color, out of academic spaces (King & Upadhyay, 2022).…”

Academic bullying and diversity: challenges and solutions

“…Microaggressions can be addressed through workshops that address unconscious bias and the harm it bestows [31]. Mentors and allies must be identified, recruited, educated and rewarded to provide support and access to the informal networks that surround progress towards tenure [32][33][34]. Similarly, deans and chairs must be guided and empowered to uncover and address bullying in their roles [35].…”

Mentoring science educators for equity‐centered futures

“…While congruence in gender and race is often advanced as crucial education toward reducing inequities (Joshi et al, 2018; McCarthy et al, 2020), Haverly and Brown (2022) discuss the presence and promise of mentoring across demographic differences. Furthermore, King and Upadhyay (2022) disclose the unique impositions on scholars of color who may be unfamiliar with the nuances of tenure while also responding to additional demands from the institution and from students by virtue of being perceived as a role model and advocate (Guillaume & Apodaca, 2020). These pressures are central to equity‐centered mentoring simply because the disparities in demands on university faculty exert a “tax” on those whose perspectives are rare yet often requested.…”

“…But imagine if this was the underlying goal of mentoring? Moving equity to the center (not as an act but as an outcome) could contribute to tangible changes in power distribution that would be emancipatory to individuals (King & Upadhyay, 2022) while creating liberatory decision‐making structures. Otherwise, the standard approaches to mentoring will continue to preserve the structures that disenfranchise people and maintain unevenly distributed power (Curran et al, 2019).…”

“…Quite tellingly the few published mentoring articles explicitly attend to equity, racism, and social justice (Parsons et al, 2018; Parsons, 2019; Tolbert et al, 2018). Negotiating Mentoring Relationships and Supports for Black and Brown Early Career Faculty by Natalie King and Bhaskar Upadhyay (2022) and the companion article Mentoring Across Differences in Science Education: Applying a Brokering Framework by Chrtista Haverly and Bryan A. Brown (2022) offer insights about mentoring in which equity is centralized.…”