Should Faculty Hires Be Expected To Live Nearby In Non-Diverse Communities?

[Hibush]

A remarkable contrast to the IHE article above is a New Yorker article about incredible resilience in the face of strong challenges by a different hispanic professor in the same city as the first one. (And about how another's lack of resilience to similar challenges led instead to one of America's most traumatic assassinations.)

[Kron3007]

This just in, if you don't like living in the country you shouldn't take a job in the country...

This is a ridiculous article.  Tonnes of people commute for all sorts of jobs, usually from the country (or burbs) into a city.  Many people around here have over an hour (or hours) commute into the nearby major city.   If you choose to live far away from work, that is the price you pay.

I don't see why the author thinks it should be different for a university job and there should be accomodations.  If you decide to live far from where you will work, you need to accept that there is a cost to that choice and act accordingly.

Personally, I choose to have a 30-45 minute commute so that I can live deep in the countryside outside of my smallish university town.   

[spork]

To a certain degree the author, while trying to point out that SPADFY, fails to recognize that SPADFMe. She's a tenured prof at UIUC, so her teaching is probably 1-1 or 1-2. Her average semester means being in a classroom only one or two days per week, and if it's a 200-student undergraduate lecture course she has GTAs. She's possibly in a department of two dozen other faculty members, with clerical assistance. And it's unlikely that she's expected to show up on Saturdays three times a semester to hep try to sell the university to prospective students.

That said, I think her underlying point is sound: that in many ways academe still reflects the attitude that academic employment is a calling with a particular set of norms, and that these norms correspond less and less to how people actually want to live their lives.

I once was the replacement hire for someone who had been commuting by air to "home" in Washington, DC, every weekend. During the academic year, she would fly out every Friday afternoon and return on Monday in time to teach an afternoon class. This was with a 4-4 teaching load, at a campus an hour's drive from a major airport with direct flights to and from DC. After about five years of it, she threw in the towel and quit.

For the first two years I worked there, I rented an apartment near campus. My wife lived two hours away. We saw each other only on weekends, if that, during the academic year. So a very similar routine to the person I replaced. For the next two years, my wife changed jobs, and we moved to a place that was 45 minutes away from campus. That was the most proximal location we could manage; the town where the campus was located had a population of 4,500 and there were no jobs for my wife. Plus she was from a city with a population of nearly a half million, and an ethnic minority. We did not have children, if we had, there would have been an entirely different set of complications -- trying to find a good school system, for children with a multiracial background.

There are other similar work-life balance complications that exist in my current marriage. None of these complications have been acknowledged at an institutional level at the places that I've worked. I know many faculty members -- e.g., those with small children who desperately need adequate, affordable child care while they are at work -- in similar situations.

[polly_mer]

The issue was, people didn't want to become familiar with others...that's the starting point. Yes, if they were more familiar, there'd probably be fewer barriers.

But if you keep building walls instead of inviting others in, you're going to maintain that blinkered, inhospitable, unknowing mindset that says that "the other" is bad, stupid, smelly, whatever.

From the small side, there's a huge frustration with people who also don't want to become one of us, because we're bad, stupid, smelly, whatever.  The rest of this post is not aimed at Mamselle, but is my experience as someone who grew up in a small town where I didn't really fit, but has moved several times and found new homes in small towns where I did fit.

It's fine as the new person to town to say, "Oh, have you tried crystallized fruit in water as a refreshing summer beverage?  It's one of my favorites and my mail order just came in."  It's fine as the new person in town to say, "Oh, I miss my favorite coffeeshop.  What's your favorite place to ...?"

It's much less fine to have a very transactional attitude towards fellow humans in town.  Yes, there's one grocery store that likely doesn't have some of your favorite items. That one grocery store is staffed by a handful of of unique and valuable individuals whom you will also see around town in the rest of their lives that may include being secretary of the Kiwanis, being a kick ass float builder, being a reliable member of the PTA committee on community programs, and being a devoted moviegoer.  Thus, treating them as cogs in a subpar grocery store experience where you can't get lemon grass or kombucha is very annoying when the rest of us are seeing Marge, who is doing the best she can after Joe left her with the three kids under 6 and will never be fast at the register, but has a good heart and led the effort to get a stoplight on that blind corner just as you're coming into town where we were averaging an accident with serious injuries a month and the state would do nothing to fix the situation.

Likewise, we are all watching and judging that you were impatient with Frank, who will never be a good bagger because of the accident that left him with some brain damage, shaky hands, and a limp.  But, he's taking care of his aging parents and really needs that job.  He's good enough for most aspects of the job.  Just keep the eggs and bread way back on the belt so he can't put them in the bag first before the big cans of tomatoes.

It's also fine to start with "What do people do here for fun?"  It's much less fine to treat our local culture, traditions, and food as being an interesting touristy thing to try once or twice, but not something Real People do as a matter of course.  For example, the community pasty fundraiser is a way to stock up on tasty meat pies; you don't have to participate, but it's a big thing that takes a couple months of planning and then a weekend of devoted effort by a good chunk of the community.  Depending where one is, pasty may be instead burgoo, pony shoes, corn boil, brats, or green chili roasting as the big festival.  The key is that's what the town is doing and you aren't winning any friends by insisting we don't have any restaurants up to your standards for a weekly visit and thus our festival is a waste of effort.

You're missing out by insisting you aren't X so you're not going to the Friday fish fry during Lent, not going to the Lutheran monthly pot lucks, not going to the Boy Scout euchre party in January, not going to the two-day community softball bonanza in August, or a whole host of other things that rely less on adherence to certain principles and more on being a community member who enjoys interacting with neighbors for something that took a small group of identifiable individuals a lot of effort to organize and is more fun with a broader cross-section of the community participating.

You don't have to be coach/troop leader/Sunday school teacher for kids, volunteer at the library/community center/senior center, or join the Lions/Kiwanis/Eastern Star/Rotary/Optimists/Toastmasters/League of Women Voters/American Legion, but again, we actually like those interactions with our fellow humans as individuals.  Many of us are educated individuals who have lived other places and yet chose here for reasons of our own.  Yes, Ted is an overbearing know-it-all-jerk on nearly every topic that comes up in normal conversation; Ted also spends his Saturday mornings ensuring that all the 8-10 year olds who want to play soccer can play safely by donating a pretty penny from his local business, wrangling all the coaches and parents, and being a fabulous mentor to the kids.  Martha has very definite ideas about that corn boil, but we couldn't successfully pull off a thousand-attendee festival every year without someone wrangling the 20-50 people who do all the related free labor and doing so for free.  Marge goes to every town board meeting with a list of concerns, but, at least twice a year, one of the new concerns is something that need to be addressed by the board and it's worth the 10 minutes every meeting to ensure we're not missing something that will bite us as a community.

The questions for the newcomer are what value are you adding to our community as an individual and what are you doing to help make our community more interesting in ways that the rest of us care about?  Introducing the Nth-day-of-the-month square dancing may take a little doing, but it might be worth it as long as you make some effort to coordinate timing with the other entertainment options in town. 

Organizing a monthly trip to Big City to take in a nice lunch, a matinee/museum, a nice dinner, and then opera/symphony/theatre might be great.  However, that means accepting all the individuals who want that experience including Ted and Frank as well as accepting the polite refusal from many of us who would rather be kicked in the leg repeatedly than spend our Saturday that way.  We're fine with you going and then telling us all about it when we're in line at the grocery store; in return, you're supposed to listen and nod along as we explain about how the Farmer Appreciation parade planning is going because that's just as interesting and life-affirming as your hobbies.

We're going to be much less receptive to the idea that we're doing it wrong by focusing on diversity as accepting flawed human beings as unique individuals instead of your checkbox areas that rely on stereotypes of various groups.  We will resist mightily anything that involves trying to be all things to all possible people instead of focusing our resources on improving the collective lives of people who are already here and already have solid ideas on how their lives could be improved.  I still remember one person who wasn't run out of town on a rail, but took on the voting-at-large system for the school board that tended to not have as many skin tones represented as she liked.  She lost miserably because the individuals with those skin tones were not interested in having the mayor appoint people with those skin tones based on which block they lived if no one from those blocks chose to run and instead found much more in common with the other parents in town who lived a whole ten minutes away and had the bandwidth to run and then serve on the school board.  She left town soon after that and ended up at a much bigger place where she was much happier.

I remember the one person who was offended at every turn by normal interactions in small towns.  She was offended that the Catholic school wanted evidence of her activity with her home parish before giving her kid the tuition break for Catholics, a tuition break that was financially prudent only because of tithing; upon being asked, this person was Catholic but was raising the child in a different religion due to an agreement with the father.  This person eventually ended up enrolling the child in a third religion's school and was then mad because they taught religious things as part of daily lessons. 

This person was offended at the idea that, as a two-person household consisting of her and a middle-school-aged child, she was considered a single parent by everyone; the offense is she was married when the child was born and thus she was not a single parent.  She was offended every time she mentioned being engaged and was asked when was the wedding and when will her future husband be moving to town because that's a very narrow view of being engaged. 

She read a big sign in front of a shop that proclaimed "Most Politically Incorrect Store in Town", went inside, and was offended by signs that were indeed politically incorrect; other shops in town carry the items she sought and advertise locally that they do so and yet she continued to walk past that sign and be offended for multiple visits, as we all heard for weeks after every visit.

When this person quit her tenure track position, she flat out told us she was leaving without another job even lined up because we were so unwelcoming to her.  Apparently, inviting her to our houses more than monthly to share food and chat, including her child in all the activities we organized for our own children, and going out of our way to ensure she knew about things like the local food festival and community gatherings meant we were unwelcoming because we were small town folks who didn't immediately convert to her big city ways.

[ciao_yall]

To a certain degree the author, while trying to point out that SPADFY, fails to recognize that SPADFMe. She's a tenured prof at UIUC, so her teaching is probably 1-1 or 1-2. Her average semester means being in a classroom only one or two days per week, and if it's a 200-student undergraduate lecture course she has GTAs. She's possibly in a department of two dozen other faculty members, with clerical assistance. And it's unlikely that she's expected to show up on Saturdays three times a semester to hep try to sell the university to prospective students.

That said, I think her underlying point is sound: that in many ways academe still reflects the attitude that academic employment is a calling with a particular set of norms, and that these norms correspond less and less to how people actually want to live their lives.

This thread has been interesting to read in the context of the ones about the importance of face-time for one's career and for students to build networks for later success.

How can her graduating juniors and seniors, not to mention grad students, expect to have her do the part of opening doors for them or mentor their research if she isn't even on campus?

What message does it send students when they go to campus and there are nothing but closed doors and empty faculty offices?

How can the college hear faculty voices when they are "working at home" doing research "where it's quiet" and the only people they can get to show up to policy meeting are 30-year-old stooges with EdDs? (interthreaduality)

[ciao_yall]

I think it's also worth considering that a key reason for increasing diversity is to make the campus community more diverse. Having a diverse faculty that isn't regularly on campus... Doesn't have the same impact.

^
This.

[pgher]

The issue was, people didn't want to become familiar with others...that's the starting point. Yes, if they were more familiar, there'd probably be fewer barriers.

But if you keep building walls instead of inviting others in, you're going to maintain that blinkered, inhospitable, unknowing mindset that says that "the other" is bad, stupid, smelly, whatever.

From the small side, there's a huge frustration with people who also don't want to become one of us, because we're bad, stupid, smelly, whatever.  The rest of this post is not aimed at Mamselle, but is my experience as someone who grew up in a small town where I didn't really fit, but has moved several times and found new homes in small towns where I did fit.

I would argue that the author of the piece didn't even try. She saw Champaign-Urbana as a podunk little town and assumed that there would not be a place for her in it, so she didn't explore in hopes of finding one. Like any city, the area has lily white enclaves, but it also has very diverse areas. Not so different from Pittsburgh where I grew up--a city of neighborhoods. C-U just has fewer neighborhoods from which to choose.

[spork]

The issue was, people didn't want to become familiar with others...that's the starting point. Yes, if they were more familiar, there'd probably be fewer barriers.

But if you keep building walls instead of inviting others in, you're going to maintain that blinkered, inhospitable, unknowing mindset that says that "the other" is bad, stupid, smelly, whatever.

From the small side, there's a huge frustration with people who also don't want to become one of us, because we're bad, stupid, smelly, whatever.  The rest of this post is not aimed at Mamselle, but is my experience as someone who grew up in a small town where I didn't really fit, but has moved several times and found new homes in small towns where I did fit.

I would argue that the author of the piece didn't even try. She saw Champaign-Urbana as a podunk little town and assumed that there would not be a place for her in it, so she didn't explore in hopes of finding one. Like any city, the area has lily white enclaves, but it also has very diverse areas. Not so different from Pittsburgh where I grew up--a city of neighborhoods. C-U just has fewer neighborhoods from which to choose.

I find pgher's point very interesting -- basically something I agree with. I come at this subject with more history than I mentioned initially. I was raised in a rural town of 1,000 people, where one had to drive an hour to see a movie (until laser disks and then VHS tapes were invented). My current wife is from a foreign city of five million people. As female, an immigrant, non-white, and Muslim, she meets many of the current government's criteria for being someone who should go back to where they came from. But she has chosen not to live in the 25,000-person town where her campus is located not because of any overt or perceived prejudice, but because she found the community boring. The milieu simply did not interest her. So she now has a one-hour commute because we live in a city of 200,000. We made our choice based on our priorities. 

[clean]

because she found the community boring.

Let's not downplay that the choice also included the bonus of living with her spouse! 
A one hour commute is probably worth the price of having a good job AND living with her spouse! 

[spork]

because she found the community boring.

Let's not downplay that the choice also included the bonus of living with her spouse! 
A one hour commute is probably worth the price of having a good job AND living with her spouse!

Yes. I also forgot to note that we both work at teaching-heavy institutions. A one-hour commute makes participating in campus events much less attractive -- a campus guest speaker in the evening means not getting home until 9:00 pm. There are many small institutions that penalize -- either explicitly or implicitly -- junior faculty who do not establish a "presence" on campus by attending these events.

[wwwdotcom]

Would love to know what her colleagues at UICU think about this perspective.

[mouseman]

I still can't get over the idea that Champaign Urbana isn't diverse.

Urbana is only 55% non-Hispanic White, while Champaign in 61% non-Hispanic White. Now let us look at her University. Enrollment - fewer than 50% of the enrolled students are non-Hispanic White; of the faculty about 66% are non-Hispanic White, 65% of the Tenure/TT are non-Hispanic White (70% of the tenured faculty and 51% of TT faculty). Not the best, but still pretty diverse.

So, perhaps Dr Harris has this experience from another place in which she worked? Well, she grew up in and did all of her degrees in the UK, and she's worked in London and Oxford, so it's not from there. She's also worked in Albany, another fairly diverse city.

It is not surprising that a person who has made her career pontificating about the experiences of others in countries in which she has not lived would write an article pontificating about the issues which she has not experienced in locations in which she has not lived. She is also going to tell everybody how to solve their problems, without ever having to deal with any of the potential fallout.

Oh, and where did she commute from to the non-diverse town of Urbana-Champaign, IL, pray ask? From Safety Harbor, FL, a community which is 93% White.

She is trying to justify the fact that she wants to work at UIUC but wants to live somewhere more exciting. So she spun some BS story about how faculty commute because the University town isn't diverse.

I think that she gets the Self-Righteous Hypocrite of the Year Award.

PS. She is not commuting form an hour away, since an hour away from UIUC is in the middle of the corn and soy. Chicago is 2.5-3.5 hours away, and Florida is a bit farther.

[mamselle]

Re-re-reading the article, and her credentials, I'm wondering if she ran into anti-Semitic issues someplace that made her wary?

Or maybe she's in FL to care for aging parents who settled there?

I was raised maybe 200 miles from CU, and there were pockets of intolerance of various kinds in my smaller suburban town-outside-the-big-town, although there were other abutting areas that were focused around the same cultures ours shut out (literally, as in realtors would not show homes to blacks there until, maybe 10-15 years ago; everyone knew all the synagogues were in the large suburb east of the main town; the Asian families of the science profs seemed to all live in a down-at-heel part of the main town that they kept improving until it started to attract a "different sort of" buyer...then they started moving away and started over elsewhere, apparently (this was just starting to occur a few years ago, don't know the upshot now).

I'm also thinking of Jhumpa Lahiri's novels about town-gown-societal interaction patterns, which I'm pretty sure are closely tied to known individuals' experiences.

Maybe Harris' piece is skewed to certain kinds of reality, and reflective of others, and maybe there are two kinds of issues going on, here--commuting demands of any kind, in the one hand, and new-neighbor settling-in/ethnic receptivity on the other.

Size, proximity to town centers and campuses, and open-mindedness to all kinds of diversity--including the potentials for ageism and ableism that Polly's community has laudably been able to offset among them--affect and are affected by these issues.

Maybe the expressed wish for financial accommodations is a cipher for saying, "Have some compassion, I'm dealing with different levels of difficulty than those who live nearby--for whatever reason--or maybe not.

M.

I think they do intersect,

[Hibush]

It is not surprising that a person who has made her career pontificating about the experiences of others in countries in which she has not lived would write an article pontificating about the issues which she has not experienced in locations in which she has not lived.

I thought this argument was headed towards a charge of cultural appropriation. The article has spawned a surprising rich commentary.

[Parasaurolophus]

Whoa waitwaitwait. She commutes to Champaign from Tampa?!

Seriously. Tampa? Tampa?