Struggles and achievements

Abstract

This study investigated a little known topic: the experiences of working-class white male professors who have attained tenure. Academics who have immigrated from working-class backgrounds have reported experiences of navigating culturally confusing interactions within their professional settings, even years after their class migrations. Working-class white male tenured academics were selected for the present study in order to ascertain findings intended to contribute to understandings of their pre-tenure social class-related experiences and strategies they believed most significant for tenure attainment. Ethnographic research methods were employed in this study. Research questions guiding the study were: "What do first-generation white male college professors identify as the key factors which helped them achieve tenure?" and, "To what extent did their class background help or hinder the process?" The data analysis chapter divides participants' experiences into three themes: Theme 1 addresses some of the formal and informal social contexts of the tenure process. Themes 2 and 3 focus on the participants' psychological and social challenges and successes that were also part of the process. This study analyzed data regarding social contexts that participants believed were relevant to their tenure attainment. Participants experienced academic culture in ways connected to important issues of diversity and exclusion found in the literature on the experiences of other, more traditionally recognized marginalized groups in American higher education. Seemingly routine work-related events often transpired according to unwritten social rules informed by academic culture. Most participants reported significant cultural outsider experiences, although they also experienced culturally-based challenges to success, they gradually developed strategies v your incalculably precious, healing, and exquisitely inappropriate humor has been as vital as oxygen. Key individuals actively and caringly helped me at critical matriculation stages in my two decades (yes, traveling this foreign territory from first-year undergraduate to Ph.D. has taken me 20 hard years) through a number of higher education institutions and programs as a student, graduate student, tutor, and teacher. Each of you has helped me along my journey: Emmitt

A critical examination of first-generation faculty scholarship: Demonstrating the need for intersectional, empirical analysis.

“…The academy's emphasis on individualism and self-promotion conflicts with the values of collectivism and humility some FGF are taught at home (e.g., Anderson, 1984;Edwards, 1995;Kiyama & Gonzales, 2019;Lo ´pez Figueroa, 2019;Oliva & Nevarez, 2019;Rodríguez Coss, 2020). This conflict is felt most acutely in the insistence on individual self-promotion, which FGF ascribe to middle-class, male, and/or White values that overemphasize individual effort (Aldridge et al, 2022;Reddin, 2012;Zarate, 2022). For example, one FGF explained that the promotion process advances a "dishonest notion that one's success singularly manifests and results from the ability to be self-made" (Lo ´pez Figueroa, 2019, p. 56).…”

“…Physical Appearance. The academy's normative culture pervades expectations about physical appearance (e.g., Christopher, 2008;Gray & Chapple, 2017;Langston, 1993;Reddin, 2012;Robideaux, 2005;Soria, 2016; see also Warnock, 2016b), including expectations that emphasize brand names, new clothes, and consumption unmotivated by thrift (Langston, 1993;Reddin, 2012;Rothe, 2006). FGF with multiple marginalized identities face additional challenges (e.g., Christopher, 2008;Gray & Chapple, 2017;Lasane, 2008;Phu, 2022;Soria, 2016).…”

Social class as a blessing in disguise? Beyond the deficit model in working-class and higher education studies

“…Papers devoted to upwardly mobile academics discuss many different kinds of "resource deficits," ranging from poverty (Friedman, 2016;Walley, 2013), low social respect (Adair et al, 2007;Hurst and Warnock, 2015;Butler, 2021), inadequatei.e. non-middle classdemeanor, clothing, language, taste (Skeggs, 2004;Oldfield, 2007;Case, 2017;Lee, 2017;Crew, 2020), lack of cultural knowledge (Mckenzie, 2016;Crew, 2020) or unfamiliarity with academic norms and customs (Oldfield, 2007), insufficient self-confidence (Reddin, 2012;Warnock and Hurst, 2016;Case, 2017), "survival guilt" (Walkerdine, 1994;Walkerdine et al, 2001), to lacking social relations with gatekeepers and key figures in a given field (Crew, 2020). One of Teresa Crew's interlocutors summed these accounts up very concisely: "I am playing catch up, economically and culturally, in comparison to those who had a smoother transition into academia" (Crew, 2020: 40).…”

“…The extant literature has typically analyzed the working-class background, poverty and rural origins (Xu, 2020) as handicaps in different cultural settings. Various authors have investigated class-related shame or stigma (Lee, 2017), embarrassment (Case, 2017), class neurosis (Gaulejac, 2016) and impostor syndrome (Reddin, 2012;Friedman, 2016). Most of these studies suggest that "the choice to both move away and become different to the natal family can evoke powerful feelings of anxiety, loss, guilt and fear alongside the more accepted emotional responses of hopeful anticipation, excitement and pride, resulting in an 'emotional tightrope'" (Reay, 2005, p. 921).…”

Bovine Nasal Granuloma in Victoria—a Search for the Causative Allergens

“…Intradermal injections of allergens have been widely used to detect hypersensitivity in man (Florey 1971) and, to a lesser extent, dogs (Halliwell and Schwartzman 1971) and cattle (Reddin 1945;Campbell 1970).…”