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

[spork]

Having once worked at a small, rurally-located institution where foreign-born faculty hires often lasted only a year or two before leaving, I thought this was interesting:

https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2019/08/01/small-college-towns-can-be-unsuited-some-faculty-members-diverse-backgrounds.

[pgher]

I agree completely. We struggle with dual career couples especially. We are pretty reasonable about accommodating people who live in Major City about 1.5 hrs away.

That said, I don't consider Champaign-Urbana to be a small, rural town. Last I checked, it had 150k residents. Sometimes "big city" people overlook the opportunities in smaller cities. I grew up in Pittsburgh and have lived in Phoenix, so I have some points of comparison.

[Hibush]

Having once worked at a small, rurally-located institution where foreign-born faculty hires often lasted only a year or two before leaving, I thought this was interesting:

https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2019/08/01/small-college-towns-can-be-unsuited-some-faculty-members-diverse-backgrounds.

If you come from a mid-sized Chinese city, is Tampa really better than Champaign-Urbana? In either case it is a big adjustment. The latter would provide more opportunity to build the desirable cultural institutions.

[polly_mer]

That said, I don't consider Champaign-Urbana to be a small, rural town. Last I checked, it had 150k residents. Sometimes "big city" people overlook the opportunities in smaller cities. I grew up in Pittsburgh and have lived in Phoenix, so I have some points of comparison.

If Urbana-Champaign is a small, rural, non-diverse town, then some states have 0 to 2 cities and there are no words left to describe my preferred living conditions where the hour trip to visit the booming metropolis with 10 000 people is done once a month or so for things that are harder to mail order.  Urbana and Champaign are listed by Wikipedia as being only 67% Caucasian, which is pretty unusual for Illinois outside of Chicago and the St. Louis suburbs.  The engineering student population and faculty contributes to the 10% Asian demographic.  I would be very surprised if people from a world-mainstream religious sect were unable to find a religious home there.

Yes, if someone really wants to live in Chicago, NYC, LA, or Boston, then even Albuquerque or Reno is going to feel small and not diverse.  I mention them specifically because I've heard that assertion from people who really wanted to go back to Boston, NYC, and LA.  I've heard people complain about how small and provincial DC is compared to their preferred NYC or London.

When one is really wedded to a particular type of living, then that's the point at which someone may need to make some tough decisions about what they really want to do with their life.  A bigger metropolitan area will have more job options for someone who really prefers that city than a true small, rural college town where the students are half the town when classes are in session and never does the population of the area go above 10 000.

[marshwiggle]

From the article:

As colleges and universities work to increase diversity in hiring and course offerings, they don't always realize that the small, welcoming communities they believe make up local town life are unsuited to or lack amenities for the faculty members whom they are hiring. Whether Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Baha'i, black, brown, LGBTQ or otherwise, faculty members may not find a place of worship or a community of significant size in a small college town two hours from a larger city.

And they may not find a Starbucks, or a 24 hour grocery store, or a million other things. For anyone who grew up rural, they've heard this same kind of lament from WASP city-dwellers for generations. This has less to do with diversity than with the urban/rural cultural divide. ( I would guess people of diverse backgrounds who grew up in rural areas in other countries would find the adaptation process easier.)

[mamselle]

Part of the issue may be the degree of welcome afforded non-WASP-y, multi-racial individuals who profess an other-than(?Judeo)-Christian faith, however poorly that faith system is manifested in local inhabitants' lives, or however concretely/incorrectly they judge the validity of other confessions.

I can't open the article on this phone, will read and check back in if I find myself wrong, but my sense is that it's more likely the (sadly, accurate) perception of racial or religious intolerance in smaller places--they don't have to be so, and not all are--but size alone put you in a fishbowl under the gaze of judgemental others if you're "different)

Having been raised in such a fishbowl, even near a larger, more tolerant larger town, I'm just surmising from an n=1 experience.

M.

[marshwiggle]

Having been raised in such a fishbowl, even near a larger, more tolerant larger town, I'm just surmising from an n=1 experience.

M.

I just don't like peoples' unfamiliarity with outsiders to be automatically equated with bigotry, etc. People need a chance to get to know others to realize what they have in common as human beings. Rural people could make similar value judgements about urban people for the "stupid" ideas they have because, for instance, they have never been on a farm, but it's not helpful to see things that way.

Accepting "diversity" needs to go both ways; making stereotypical assumptions about the majority is just as bad as making stereotypical assumptions about the minority.

[mamselle]

I wasn't, in fact, making assumptions. I was teased all through school for differences in cultural values, scholastic interests, and the application of what we learned to daily life.

I even happened to be (and remain) a member of the dominant religious confession there, and a WASP by inheritance, but the library (and the large, very liberal church in the town next door) were my only "happy places," really. The school system was excellent, in terms of the teaching, but the way most kids wasted it took it was painful to watch.

When I got to the (very big) university in the larger town on the other side of our town, it was like I'd found my people--of all shapes, sizes, colors, interests, and academic pursuits. Most of what I work on now was spawned there, and I remain grateful.

I couldn't do that goldfish bowl thing again (unless maybe in the small town in France south of Paris where I do my research...and I'm well-aware of how blinkered small French towns can be, as well...) and I'm not saying size is the only determinant.

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.

And as we see all too often, such issues can escalate--even become mortal. So it's not just a fanciful wish to be closer to the Opera, or something (and for some of us, that's not fanciful, either...it's life-sustaining...). It's about being safe in a neighborhood where all kinds of prejudice can fuel all kinds of responses (and I know that's also possible in large cities, but one can run errands in some other part of town more easily if there are several convenience stores instead of just one or two).

OK, that's me.

Now having been able to read the article, Harris is speaking from her own experience as well. She has commuted to C-U from Florida, and from Chicago. So she's not only talking about safety and the nearness of like-minded, like-souled, like-colored neighbors and friends, but about the issues related to living one place (which can be because of those, or other constraints) and working another place that's not close at all.

Reading her piece made me think, in fact, that she'd scoured the CHE forum archives for material, because a lot of the scenarios she cited sounded very familiar.

But I do think that there's a point there, and maybe even a stronger one to be made about safety and acceptance of differently-gifted, differently-appearing individuals of high academic value to their schools in towns where hostility rather than hospitality towards difference is a likely norm.

M.



 

[Puget]

I was prepared to be sympathetic, but it comes across as super entitled and many of her suggested accommodations just aren't reasonable for any job. I do agree that faculty shouldn't be expected to be on campus outside of normal working hours for the most part (though I understand that's part of the expectation at some SLACs), but any employer is going to expect employees to generally be available during normal work hours. Trying to schedule committee meetings etc. is hard enough in general, impossible if people insist on only being there a few days a week, or one semester a year (!).

We all make decisions about where we are willing to live and what we are willing to trade off for our careers. There are some places I didn't apply because I couldn't see myself being happy living there, and I think that's true for most people.

Plus, as others have noted, complaining about living in Champaign-Urbana as if it was a non-diverse tiny town is pretty silly. I have  colleagues there (including Jewish, Asian American and LGBTQ colleagues) and have visited, and although it is a rather isolated and very flat, it isn't that small and has all the amenities (fancy restaurants, fancy grocery stores, cultural events, their own airport!), and certainly there are diverse communities of all kinds. If that's her version of unlivable she should probably prioritize location over career.

[Morris Zapp]

I actually find the bit in the article about 'providing travel stipends' to be kind of offensive.  I worked in a department where Mr. Bigshot refused to live in town and flew in every week and stayed in a hotel at the university's expense.  The same university "didn't have the funds" to pay adjuncts a living wage, and the rest of us had to beg, grovel and steal to come up with travel funds to go to our one yearly professional conference.  If you don't want to live within commuting distance of the place where the job is being offered, it's not the university's job to make up the difference, and doing so should never come at the expense of the other faculty and staff at the university.

[pepsi_alum]

For the record, I think there's a difference between some of the examples in this thread and rural mid-SLACs in towns  of <5,000 that consider it "unacceptable" for faculty to live 45 minutes away in the nearest major town (I know of at least two schools with such cultural norms).

[Hibush]

Many Forum discussions have concerned making students resilient to the everyday challenges that life brings. Maybe universities need similar program for faculty?

In a somewhat related IHE column, a professor writes about the challenges of fitting in as a hispanic professor in a city where there are only five million Hispanics. I suspect moving to a rural LAC is not one of the potential solutions. But what is a solution?

[eigen]

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.

[clean]

hose of us who work at colleges and universities can, and should, make accommodations to faculty members who chose to commute. We can help by providing travel stipends, arranging faculty schedules in ways that serve travel needs, allowing faculty members to teach online courses and providing flexibility in teaching -- such as overloading one semester and releasing another.

I could have pulled a couple of sentences from the article.  I chose this one.

IF the university is making any of the accommodations listed, I wonder, who is filling in the hole that is created by these accommodations?  IF one faculty is teaching online then someone else is losing that option and is forced to teach the face to face classes, or the classes that are only at night, or only early in the morning.  IF someone has a release for a semester, then someone else has to take the added burden so they have the opposite of a release! 

How is diversity served when the person filling the diversity hole is somewhere else? 

I feel that there are similar issues of fairness when some faculty use children as an excuse to manipulate the schedule.  Should single or childless faculty be required to teach all of the late day or night classes so that those that decided to have children can choose to teach only in the morning or early afternoon?  What benefits  do the single/childless get so that they are made whole for all of the 'accommodations' that they actually provide? 
I dont mean to divert the subject of this thread, but IF someone isnt able to do the full job, they should not be offered it in the first place, and they should not expect that the employer will bend over backwards to support the decisions that they have made about their own life! 

[Hibush]

I dont mean to divert the subject of this thread, but IF someone isnt able to do the full job, they should not be offered it in the first place, and they should not expect that the employer will bend over backwards to support the decisions that they have made about their own life!

Now we are circling back to the thread about the WSJ oped that claims professors don't work very hard