Thu 18 Aug 2005
As a follow up to our discussion of undergraduate nose counting, it is interesting to consider the question of faculty nose counting. The Diversity Initiatives (excellent) data tables report that there are 14 “Hispanic” faculty at Williams.
Are there really? And, who are they?
To be clear, I am not certain that the 14 number is correct. The chart is hard to read. Whatever the exact number is, I’ll make the following predictions:
1) The readers of this blog, in their collective wisdom, can not come up with the 14 names. Start with Joe Cruz, Gene Bell-Villada, Cesar Silva, . . .
2) Vista will not like some of these names. Although most people agree that ethnic identity is one that people may largely (and acting in good faith) claim for themselves, there are limits to what ethnic activists will allow for. If a non-Spanish-speaking professor’s grandfather emmigrated from Spain, should she be counted as Hispanic? I suspect that Vista will answer No.
3) The College will refuse to release the list of faculty names. (I haven’t yet asked but will soon.) There may be legal reasons for the refusal. Federal law places severe restrictions on what information an employer (like Williams) can provide about specific employees. If so, this raises the interesting question of how any of us can know how many Hispanics teach at Williams.
EphBlog Koan: If there is a Hispanic teaching at Williams, and no one knows it, does the MCC website celebrate?
August 18th, 2005 at 10:06 am
David, why do you want to name names? It is creepy.
I am almost positive there are more than 14 “Hispanic” faculty members at Williams. I went through some departments I thought were likely candidates and stopped counting when I hit 14 faculty members whose names suggested they might be Hispanic. The college numbers come from self-reported surveys administered after the contract offer (many schools have a separate survey to all applicants, but it is voluntary, often anonymous, and almost never linked up with the hire). I don’t think (m)any faculty members would check the box for ethnicity if they did not self-identify as Latino or Hispanic. They already have the job, so there is no incentive to put down anything false. In fact, I’m pretty sure the bias runs the other way. I know several people who have made a point of not checking an ethnicity box because they did not want to label themselves as a “black” or “Hispanic” scholar.
August 18th, 2005 at 10:20 am
Apparently, many Latinos get upset when the partially Sephardic Justice Cardozo, whose family was kicked out of Spain in 1492, then Portugal 4 years later, is described as “The first Hispanic Justice”, though he has never been described as “Latino”.
August 18th, 2005 at 10:23 am
Isn’t the ultimate objective a professional environment in which people are indifferent to a person’s racial or ethnic backround? Why shouldn’t this blog practice indifference in this case?
August 18th, 2005 at 10:24 am
I don’t mean to be creepy, and thanks for the details on how the process works. I would bet that if a faculty member at Williams did not check the “Hispanic” box, the College would still count him as Hispanic if he clearly were so. Shouldn’t it?
If the College stopped counting noses, I would be happy to go along.
But the College seems to think that it is really important that it hire more minority faculty, that 14 Hispanics is not enough. It is certainly reasonable for the College to think this, to argue that Hispanic faculty help in ways above and beyond their scholarship and teaching which, by assumption, is no better nor worse than the scholarship and teaching of their non-Hispanic colleagues.
Yet, for this to be true, it is clear that not all Hispanics can be created equal, that there is a difference between the child of Chicano farm laborers and the great-granddaughter of a Spanish physician. Would you — or Vista — be comfortable if the next 10 “Hispanic” faculty hires at Williams did not speak Spanish?
By the way, do you think it really plausible that the College underestimates the number of Hispanic faculty at Williams?
August 18th, 2005 at 1:01 pm
Once again, David proves that he will never run for public office or seek an appointed government position: “not all Hispanics can be created equal.” Essentialism, racial or ethnic, is never pretty.
As for whether the number is an over or under-estimate, it depends upon two things:
1) How the data is collected. My guess is that the Dean’s Office relies upon a questionaire filled out by new hires. I would be surprised if the Dean was placing new faculty into ethnic categories. This process seems pretty standard at most institutions where my friends have been recently hired (but those tend to be institutions larger than Williams).
2) Whether you think people will under or over report ethnicity. My experience is that ethnic minorities will under report on such forms (at least once the hire is made), so as to avoid being labelled a token hire and/or being appointed to various advisory and committee positions associated with minorities. Most people identifying as an ethnic minority would check the “Hispanic” box, but a few wouldn’t.
And I think it is EXTREMELY unlikely that someone who doesn’t identify as the ethnic minority would check the box. There is a chance that someone (student, colleague, administrator) may question the identification and that could start a whisper campaign that would distract from the person’s scholarship and teaching. Really you don’t gain anything once the hire is made and there is the slight possibility it could blow up in your face.
Again, based upon my personal observations, so I may be kidding myself. But I would be surprised if faculty hires “lie” about such matters. I doubt “the great-granddaughter of a Spanish physician” would count herself as Latina unless she has some other tie to the culture (e.g., speaks Spanish, lives in a largely Hispanic neighborhood, has a social circle consisting largely of latinas and latinos).
August 18th, 2005 at 1:08 pm
Can a college really decide to count someone as a part of an ethnicity if he/she decides to not check the box? I could have sworn that wasn’t allowed.
David, let’s just get away from the little nit-picky points of how well/poorly Williams counts its faculty diversity and get to the question you seem to be hinting at directly at times and indirectly at times:
Does David Kane think Williams’ faculty is appropriately diverse for its current students, its future students, and the rest of the community?
A little less snide, perhaps you just want to ask that question more generally of all of the Williams community? But right now, it just seems…forced is not quite the word I’m looking for, but I’ll use it.
Finally, VISTA is not a single entity with a single voice. VISTA members, VISTA officers may all agree, but trust me, at times they disagree something fierce. To essentialize what is or is not Hispanic or Latino is the same problem as essentializing VISTA members into agreeing on issues. For example, I know many a people who proudly identify as Latino but do not speak Spanish. Often because of an active decision by the parents to infuse the child with the culture but out of fear that too much of a Spanish accent would hurt the child. It’s a shame that a child loses the chance to be bilingual in my opinion, but speaking Spanish is not the end-all of Latino identity, and you treating it as such is far too much of an oversimplification.
August 18th, 2005 at 3:09 pm
Sorry, I should clarify. When I said “This process seems pretty standard at most institutions where my friends have been recently hired (but those tend to be institutions larger than Williams),” I meant that pretty much every school I am familiar with asks new faculty to self-identify in a survey. Williams probably does the same.
As for whether or not a dean COULD place people into a category, I don’t see why not. The data is used internally — they can what they want. But my guess is that Williams probably follows the same proceedure that most schools do.
August 18th, 2005 at 3:21 pm
On data collection, (d)avid notes that “My guess is that the Dean’s Office relies upon a questionaire filled out by new hires.” That seems plausible enough to me, and I appreciate (d)avid taking the time to educate the rest of us on how things go for him and his peers in academia. But, in the context of Williams, this can not be the whole story since there are minority faculty at Williams that have been there for decades. I find it hard to believe that, deep within the bowels of Hopkins Hall, their new hire questionnaire is saved for handy reference. Again, I bet that someone, somewhere is doing some counting — not in an evil way, but in a someone-needs-to-answer-this-question sort of way.
(d)avid also writes:
Who said anything about lying? As we see with the Common Application, these sorts of questions are generally worded in such a way that it is almost impossible to “lie”. The person filling out the form gets to decide. It is her call. The very act of checking the box marked “Hispanic” is, virtually by definition, the same thing as being Hispanic.
As to what our hypothetical great-granddaughter would do, what if her name is Hernandez? She does not speak Spanish, has a typical academic social circle and grew up in Westchester. Does she check the box? I don’t know. Jonathn Landsman ‘04 gets huge props in my book for honestly discussing his thoughts on a similar choice.
But, if I were her friend, I would urge her to check the box, to identify herself as Hispanic for the purposes of the nose-counting game that is, on occasion, academic hiring in the US today. She doesn’t make the rules; she just plays by them.
August 18th, 2005 at 3:53 pm
Rory asks “Can a college really decide to count someone as a part of an ethnicity if he/she decides to not check the box?” I think that the answer is “Yes”, at least in the context of something like the Diversiy Initiatives tables.
Rory asks “Does David Kane think Williams’ faculty is appropriately diverse for its current students, its future students, and the rest of the community?” I can’t imagine that too many people are interested in what I think on this, but my main beef with Williams is that they do not value teaching ability/commitment as highly as they should in hiring/tenure decisions. As long as the teachers are excellent, I couldn’t care less about what boxes they check. I have other thoughts on the whole topic of what Williams should be like, but my point in starting this thread was to figure out just what the facts at Williams are right now.
Rory claims that:
Where did I assert that speaking Spanish is the “end-all” of Latino identity? I think that you and I (and VISTA) would not be in too much disagreement over what it “really” means to be Hispanic. I think that we would all agree that speaking Spanish if often, perhaps even mostly, a part of it. We would all agree that it is not a requirment.
My point is that the stated rational for counting and caring about the number of “Hispanic” professors at Williams is that the very fact of their ethnicity provides them with special tools for teaching Williams students, both Hispanic and non-Hispanic. The reason that we do not count or care about the number of Germanic professors at Williams is because no one believes that Germanic culture is especially relevant today for students at Williams, both Germanic and non-Germanic.
Fine. This is a plausible argument. But, to make sense, it must be the case that “Hispanic” means something concrete, some special set of language or culture or experience or outlook or magic pixy dust that provides Hispanic professors
with insights that other professors lack. Language is not a bad signal to other aspects of culture/experience/outlook. As Rory correctly notes, it is not a perfect signal.
Again, my goal is purely informational. How many of the Hispanic professors at Williams speak Spanish? How many grew up in a Hispanic community? How many strongly identify with Hispanic culture? How many participate in, for example, VISTA events?
August 18th, 2005 at 4:23 pm
I quess that I have received the answer to my question - obliquely.
August 18th, 2005 at 11:53 pm
Frank asks two questions.
No. The ultimate objective of Williams College is to provide the best undergraduate liberal arts education in the world. We are many, many years away from the happy day in which people are “indifferent to a person’s racial or ethnic backround.” Of course, a great deal of progress has been made. People at Williams now care much less about whether or not someone is Irish than they did 100 years ago, Jewish than they did 50 years ago or black than they did 25 years ago. But paradise still eludes us.
In this context, it is perfectly reasonable for the College to care about, for example, how many black students and faculty are present.
I, at least, am endlessly interested in all the Kabuki theatre and PC preening that seems to accompany so many of these sorts of discussions at Williams. When speculating about the actual number of Hispanics teaching at Williams, I am not making an argument that the number is too large or too small. I am offering commentary on how the powers-that-be at Williams think about the issue.
As long as Williams thinks in racialist terms, it will be necessary for Eph bloggers to use the same sort of framework in commenting on that thinking, however repugnant and out-dated we may find the framework itself.
August 19th, 2005 at 2:14 am
If we ignore it, perhaps it will wither and die!