Supporting Our Faculty
April 23, 2021
Dear Brooklyn College colleagues,
We are pleased to announce more progress from the Implementation Team for Racial Justice. This progress report provides an update on our efforts to better support faculty. Last fall, we hosted two listening sessions specifically focused on racial justice for faculty. At the listening sessions and via our Community Feedback Form, we heard faculty members express a desire to diversify the faculty and enhance the curriculum. Faculty expressed concern about bullying and fear of retaliation. They also expressed concern about the disproportionate burden of mentoring students often carried by diverse faculty, and wondered how this important service to the institution counted in the promotion and tenure process.
Recommendation on Faculty Service in Promotion and Tenure
We recommended that the College develop ways to measure and count faculty service and student mentorship in the promotion and tenure process.
In response, the College had a series of in depth conversations about these matters with the Chairs of academic departments and Directors of academic programs at the Council on Administrative Policy (CAP). CAP had been developing a Memo on Expectations for Promotion and Tenure to enhance transparency and clarity about the standards for promotion and tenure under current CUNY and Brooklyn College policy. In so doing, CAP members deliberated thoroughly and specifically on service and mentorship, the ways that mentoring students and mentoring junior faculty members are different yet both important, and the placement and valuation of mentorship in the traditional categories of research, teaching, and service. CAP concluded that mentoring students should be considered in the category of teaching, and mentoring junior faculty members should be considered in the category of service. The Memo clarified how mentoring should be documented, assessed, and valued in the promotion and tenure process. CAP adopted the new Brooklyn College Memo on Expectations for Promotion and Tenure on April 8, 2021.
Recommendation on Faculty Mentorship
We recommended that the College select a Faculty Mentor, provided with appropriate course release, to help guide junior faculty members to achieve excellence in research, teaching, and service as they prepare for promotion and tenure.
In response, the College appointed five Faculty Mentors, one for each School, to support junior faculty members in their work to achieve promotion and tenure. The mentors are: Professors Stephanie Jensen-Moulton in the School of Visual Media and Performing Arts, Rosamond King in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Peter Lipke in the School of Natural and Behavioral Sciences, James Lynch in the Koppelman School of Business, and Maria Sharron del Rio in the School of Education. These Faculty Mentors are working to enhance the culture at the College to support mentorship for both junior and senior members of the faculty and to establish structures to support mentoring across the campus.
Recommendation on a Faculty Support Fund
We recommended that the College fundraise to support faculty initiatives to enhance diversity at the College, including new programming, curricular development, research, release time for outstanding service, outside facilitation for training, and faculty start-up packages.
In response, the College placed the development of an ongoing Fund for Faculty Support on its list of fundraising priorities. Although this is part of a long-term fundraising strategy, the College has already offered significant support for faculty initiatives this year. For example, the College raised funds to engage Inspire Justice to lead anti-racism workshops in the School of Visual, Media, and Performing Arts; reserve funds for an anti-racist consultant to the College; support a faculty member's participation in a leadership program for women in higher education; and grant release time to five Faculty Mentors, as discussed above.
Recommendation on Faculty Complaints against Faculty
We recommended that the administration review the process for complaints against faculty with CAP and Faculty Council and underscore the prohibition on retaliation.
In response, Brooklyn College Chief Legal Affairs Officer Tony Thomas developed materials designed to help Chairs understand how to handle complaints against faculty, and reviewed the process of handling student complaints about faculty with Chairs at CAP. Additionally, the College assigned responsibility for investigating complaints of bullying against faculty and staff to the Office of Diversity and Equity. In their discussions with faculty, Tony Thomas and Chief Diversity Officer Anthony Brown have both emphasized repeatedly this semester that retaliation against those who make complaints about faculty members is strictly prohibited. The President reported these matters at a recent Faculty Council meeting, again underscoring the prohibition on retaliation.
Recommendation on the Diversity of the Curriculum
We recommended that each School develop a list of courses within its departments that relate to diversity issues and discuss the diversity of the curriculum with the School Student Advisory Council, which we recommended all Schools create.
In response, each School is working to develop a list of courses that relate to diversity issues, and in the process, many are developing new courses to supplement that list. For example, Psychology faculty are developing a course on Cultural Psychology that includes an analysis of racism and cultural diversity. Chemistry faculty are developing a course entitled, “Professional Readiness for Chemists,” which includes a two-week module on creating an inclusive workplace and the legal rights of women and minority groups in the workplace. Accounting faculty are developing an elective on how accounting and tax measures engender disparate impacts on different groups in society. English faculty are developing new courses on cultural and political memory and trauma, migration and exile, imperialism, sexuality and gender, literary influence, genre fiction (e.g., detective fiction, Afrofuturism, the ghost story), Black contemporary poetry, and LGBTQ literature.
Other departments are restructuring current offerings and requirements. For example, History faculty are revising major requirements so that, in addition to ancient and medieval Europe, they include a course on any area of the world before 1500. Conservatory of Music faculty are developing a new degree track in American Music that will venture beyond the western classical canon, with a focus on American vernacular music. Judaic Studies faculty are reviewing curricula to incorporate more diverse readings and scholarship by authors of color. These are just a few of the many examples of faculty members working to enhance the diversity of their courses and programs.
We are pleased with these results. There is more to do, but we are headed in the right direction in terms of the key concerns faculty members identified last fall. Finally, we are pleased to announce the establishment of an External Consultant Subcommittee, which is a joint effort with the Anti-Racist Coalition (ARC). This subcommittee is developing a scope of work for an external consultant to assist in anti-racist work at the College. We appreciate ARC for its collaboration, and we thank everyone for their continued hard work on these vital matters.
We will continue to update you on the College’s progress in implementing our recommendations. As always, we welcome your questions and comments via e-mail or through our anonymous Community Feedback Form.
Yours sincerely,
Anthony Brown, Ron Jackson, and James Lynch
Co-chairs of the Implementation Team for Racial Justice
