Hegemonic Forces: Black Faculty's Sisyphean Task in Higher Education

Introduction

This author identifies as an African American female who is an associate professor on tenure track at a predominantly white liberal arts college in New England. This is the third full-time teaching position the author has held, all in predominantly white institutions (PWIs). With a teaching career that spans three decades, the author’s research has predominantly dealt with ethics, leadership, and diversity as they all relate to non-profit administration. Not surprisingly, the unrelenting diversity and inclusion challenges in the academy served as the impetus for continued research in diversity, equity, and inclusion. This chapter is written with the hope of helping Black female academics to understand that our sometimes-tenuous position in the academy is governed by social forces that cannot be controlled and predetermined our positionality. There is no level playing ground in the academy because systemic racism and cultural hegemony serve to oppress women of color at every turn.

Approximately four percent of African American women have full-time tenure-track faculty positions in higher education, which represents an improvement but is nonetheless relatively low in comparison to the percentage of Black American women in the population as a whole. An even smaller percentage achieve full professor status. One could posit that the low percentage of African American women in the academy is due to the competitive nature of obtaining academic positions or it might be that African American women do not merit a place in higher education. But before one draws a conclusion, an analysis must be made of cultural hegemony and systemic racism. These two social forces have major negative consequences for African American female faculty when it comes to being awarded tenure, receiving low student evaluations for teaching, not being appreciated for one’s scholarly abilities, or disregard for one’s field of scholarship (Buchanan, 2020). Furthermore, Black female academics have limited opportunities for prime assignments, college-wide committees, leadership roles, publishing opportunities, and other aspects of professional life (Sule, 2009). To be clear, the cost of this exclusion is not only shouldered by African American women, but also by the entire academy by making it less democratic, diverse, and inclusive.

Before placing blame solely on predominantly white institutions (PWIs) for perpetuating racism that typically advantages white faculty, let’s consider the larger picture. While higher education cannot, by itself, address or redress all the ill effects of racism, it is surely incumbent upon those who work in the academy to understand how this cultural hegemony and systemic racism function with very little resistance within different social spheres.

Understanding cultural hegemony, as conceptualized by Antonio Gramsci, is an essential lesson that offers a view of how groups within a society consent to be led by a ruling class (for better or worse). For Gramsci, cultural hegemony describes how the ruling class within a culture creates and dictates worldviews about social norms, value systems, and even the morals of society (Adamson, 2014). These norms come to be passively accepted and taken for granted and are so “natural” that people have little idea why they do what they do. Furthermore, what Gramsci called the hegemonic process is how the ruling class disseminates their ideas to those who they lead. Overall, the ideology espoused by the ruling class permeates economic, political, military, mass media, and educational systems and is passively accepted. In the context of a hegemonic process in higher education, the leadership of PWIs create policies and practices to maintain what seems the normative society, but which is in fact the white status quo.