The Persistence of Institutional Sexism in Africana Studies

While institutional racism under the current U.S. administration is identified as being more prominent and therefore more recognizable, institutional sexism, its twin, remains largely overlooked in many institutions.¹ Universities, considered the locations for the most advanced thinking and practices on these matters are by no means exempt as they still end up reproducing these societal ills. Black women, often the recipients of these twinned social ills, are the most disadvantaged in these institutional practices. Based on my own ongoing research on pathways to leadership for Black women, I am able to conclude that while we may assume that such inattention to gendered “diversity” is operable at the corporate level, premier institutions of higher learning are also culpable. Harvard University recently asserted its leadership in moving assertively to intervene in this untoward practice with the appointment of four Black women as deans of major colleges. However, reports from colleagues in a number of universities reveal that this is an area that has been left unaddressed in most institutions.

Such is the case at Cornell University, which perhaps has prompted its Provost to engage in a study of diversity and whose report has documented precisely this failing. The case of Cornell’s Africana Studies Department, which I know best having been on its faculty for the last ten years, demonstrates precisely how this pattern of institutional sexism continues. While it would be considered reprehensible if for fifty years of any unit’s history, there appeared to be no woman capable, groomed, or prepared to function as its department chair or director and therefore with the ability to impact the department significantly for the usual term of office, this is the situation at Cornell University’s Africana Studies Department. After decades of scholarship on the intersections of race and gender, as these function in the larger society, the Cornell experience reveals that practices of institutional sexism and racism continue unabated.

From its founding in 1968 up to the current moment, Cornell’s Africana Studies Department has never had a woman as its fully-appointed director, even though there have been women on the faculty with the experience or potential to function in this capacity.² It is also telling that its peer institutions with comparable departments—such as Penn, Harvard, Yale and Northwestern–have long since corrected this anomaly and several have already had stellar women chairs. While a few Black women have had administrative positions in other units at Cornell, in the Africana Studies and Research Center’s fifty-year history, the higher administration at Cornell has not deemed male exclusivity in leadership a major concern and they have not addressed or challenged the male faculty towards a more evolved position on this issue.

At its inception under the leadership of the legendary James Turner, the founding director who created the Africana model, the imperative was to secure the footing of Africana Studies as a field within the larger Eurocentric university context. At that time, Africana, with student activism, negotiated an appropriate administrative arrangement by which it reported directly to the provost. This served the unit well, but the result was that Turner served for sixteen years without cultivating or grooming younger leadership of any gender. Still, under Turner’s progressive leadership style, Africana grew, established a building of its own, and became the place that scholars and writers around the world saw as the leading model and center for the advancement of the field.³

Following Turner, subsequent directors have included a long line of Black men. In one instance, a male scholar who came to Cornell as a post-doc made his way through the institutional ranks to become director, served for two terms. Another individual without Africana or administrative experience was made director despite being in the department for only two months. Still, no women were deemed good enough for leadership, even when these scholars, some of the most distinguished in their fields, held leadership positions in other units or organizations. Despite having extensive administrative experience, they were all deemed incapable of assuming the leadership of Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell. What is evident for Black feminist scholars–like this writer studying and experiencing this intense marginalization–is that there are layers to this institutional sexism as it pertains to Black women faculty at Cornell with which the institution seems comfortable, and that there are limited avenues for achievement, service, recognition or reward internally.

The complicity of the higher administration in the maintenance of this institutional sexism is further clarified at the dean’s and provost level. In a highly contested and public process, Africana was moved by then Provost Fuchs into Arts and Sciences, placed under receivership and administered by two associate deans jointly. Since then, Arts and Sciences deans have selected its leadership based on private polling of faculty members. While this may work in other units, this process reinforces male exclusivity in Africana Studies. Significantly, leading up to, during and following receivership, another group of faculty was recruited, including four women, three at the associate level and one full professor (this writer), who prior to Cornell served successfully for nine years as director of an African Diaspora Studies Program and as president of several organizations. Even with this new more gender-balanced faculty representation, the obvious and continuing pattern of institutional sexism continued as still no woman, however willing or qualified, was seen as capable of serving fully in a capacity that would give the department a less-sexist direction and profile. As a result, Cornell’s Africana remains a department with tensions generated by these historic and contemporary gender biases, amassing additional more egregious ones along the way such as graduate students being referred to by an egregious sexual-racial epithet by a faculty member and no internal remedying of the residue of this situation. Significantly, male faculty have developed a kind of relay arrangement, passing the chair’s baton to each other–endorsing and supporting each other’s practices with the blessing of the administration.

This Cornell scenario provides us with an excellent case study of how institutional sexism works particularly as it intersects with racism. These two pertain to the treatment of Black women and how this affects students in general. I have been prompted to write about this precisely because of this untoward experience and with a deep political sense that it is important to also challenge misogyny in Black institutions. However, the larger institutional arrangements solidify a decidedly racialized sexist pattern of leadership at both departmental and college levels, which reinforces institutional sexism as described above and in which Black women are decidedly disadvantaged.

It is my sense that similar critiques apply to the academy in general. Since institutional racism is now recognized for its structural arrangements and institutional sexism is often left unaddressed as it pertains to Black women and other women of color, an intersectional analysis is warranted in examining academic institutions like this one, especially in a context in which diversity is indicated as one of the institution’s core principles. Abundant scholarship certainly exists to explain how race, gender and sexuality intersect in institutional leadership paradigms that produce continued and normalized patterns of gender-based discrimination.

While a 2005 outside evaluation of Africana flagged sexism in Cornell’s Africana and was the basis for hiring more women, including this writer, a recent report indicated tensions and problems in faculty relationships without addressing the underlying issue of gender bias which generates these problems. Such scrutiny has never been more urgently needed than now when a woman is serving as the institution’s president who created a 2018 Presidential Task Force on Campus Climate. Sadly, this report on ways to limit bias and improve campus climate did not address the specifics of how Black women faculty and other faculty of color are treated at the department level and in the larger institutional context. Since this openly-practiced gendered institutional bias seems to be co-signed by the Arts and Sciences Dean’s office,  it is heartening that the recent Cornell University Provost report has as one of the recommendations to “require deans to report on their efforts to diversify faculty and staff and their progress at the department and college level.”

Clearly, this situation is not unique to Cornell. While institutions like Harvard have made deliberate attempts to ameliorate this condition, it is important to recognize that institutional sexism is as significant as institutional racism. Black women are caught in between these, or are subject to, two types of historical inequities.⁴ Such practices inhibit the possibility of radically innovative pedagogy, lowers departmental expectations and morale, affects faculty health, and reduces the student population. They also undermine the larger historical intent of Africana Studies as a transformative field of study. In the racial and sexist moment in which we live, the academy–even if it challenges the larger racist narratives and practices–must also be a place where interconnected gender biases and male exclusivities are recognized as harmful to an institution’s overall intellectual and social climate.