16 — Wednesday, November 11, 2020
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

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UNDER ONE ROOF!

Bring a bit of Ann Arbor

home for the holidays

statement

T

his week, I was on a Zoom call
listening to one of my professors
drone on about Sinclair Lewis,

when I realized that every single professor I
have this semester is a white man.

The realization wasn’t totally abrupt — it

crossed my mind before. Last semester, I re-
member thinking that it seemed dispropor-
tionate how many white professors I had,
but it was never an issue I’d spent much
time investigating. This week, after hearing
my white, male professor talk about how a
white man author was “kind of racist, but
still worth reading,” I got fed up and decided
to look at the statistics.

I started with my classes from this semes-

ter. I went down the list. History, yes. Eng-
lish, yes. Philosophy, yes. Creative writing,
yes. The only instructor of color I have this
semester is the discussion leader for my his-
tory class, and I have no female instructors.
Last semester was the same: white male pro-
fessors only.

Then I busted out my records — screen-

shots of old class schedules, Canvas archives
— and realized that in almost four years at
the University of Michigan, I’ve had only
three professors who weren’t white men:
Two were white women, one was an Asian
man. In my major courses, every single one
of my professors was a white man. I’ve never
taken a single class with a professor who was
a woman of color, or with any professor of an
underrepresented minority.

Maybe this shouldn’t have been a surprise

to me: academia is, and always has been,
dominated by white men. This disparity can
be worse in some fields than others. For ex-
ample, disciplines like women’s studies and
sociology tend to have better representation
of women than fields like mathematics or
physics, which are particularly gender-strat-
ified. My own major, philosophy, is one such
subject area.

Of course, many universities, including

the University, are aware of this disparity.
But even when efforts are made to fix the di-
versity gap, changes often come at the level
of lower faculty, diversifying non-professor-
ship before professor appointments and ad-
junct positions before tenure or tenure-track
jobs. For example, the front page of the Uni-
versity’s diversity statistics touts a faculty
and staff composed of 44% women and 26%
ethnic minorities, numbers at least some-
what close to representative of the U.S.’s gen-
eral population (which is composed of 51%
women and 40% ethnic minorities).

But the numbers for diversity among pro-

fessors lags behind faculty and staff diver-
sity as a whole. An in-depth report in 2019
showed 73% of all professors are men, and
though 23% are racial or ethnic minorities,
only around 8% belong to underrepresented
minorities, a crucial distinction to make. The
term “racial or ethnic minorities” generally
refers to people belonging to racial or ethnic
groups which are not the majority group in

their societies — in the U.S., this means non-
white groups. However, underrepresented
minorities refers to people who are dispro-
portionately excluded from a setting or field
— in this case, academia. At the University,
that includes people who identify as Black or
Hispanic/Latinx, Native Americans and Na-
tive Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders — groups
which collectively compose a full third of
the U.S.’s population. Another University site
said 49% of the University’s tenure-track fac-
ulty are white men as of 2018.

This may be, in part, due to the built-in

delays in the tenure system which prevent
older professors from being replaced. Once
a professor receives tenure, it’s very difficult
to fire them. More and more professors are
working past the standard retirement age, re-
sulting in an aging workforce that, due to his-
toric disparities in hiring, remains primarily
composed of white men.

But regardless of the reasons behind it, it’s

still a problem. Firstly, a lack of representation
in higher education can be discouraging for
minority students and female students. When
diverse students don’t see themselves reflect-
ed in their teachers, they can feel dissuaded
from pursuing a particular field of study or
pursuing post-graduate education. They can
also often struggle to connect with profes-
sors. Young women and people of color may
feel less comfortable speaking to older white
men than their white peers. This can become
a barrier to education, but it can also limit
networking opportunities or the growth of
mentor-mentee relationships, which can lead
to letters of recommendation down the line.

LSA junior Sophia Raines, an African

American woman, described this phenom-
enon in a phone interview.

“It takes me a while to feel more comfort-

able with (white male professors) than I think
it would if I were a white person,” she said.
“I’m in a lot of writing classes, and when I
write my script, I think they definitely tend
to be more (written from) my perspective as
a Black woman and my identity, and so I usu-
ally am very wary of what the professors have
to say and kind of more on guard with them.”

There’s also the issue of content. White

male professors may be less likely to teach
material from or about women and people
of color. Take, for instance, an English class
I’m enrolled in this semester. Taught by a
white man, the syllabus includes 13 authors
that we’ll read in depth. Of those 13 authors,
nine are white men, three are white women
and only a single author is a man of color. Re-
search has shown that white male professors
are less likely than their diverse peers to as-
sign readings by diverse authors. Even when
professors try to diversify their syllabuses,
it’s often with one of a few oft-cited women
or minority voices. It will probably come as
no shock that the single author of color in
my English class is William Carlos Williams
— a very popular author whose work is often
taught in both high school and college.

There’s also the fact that white men teach

content differently than women and people
of color — they teach from a white man’s
perspective. This reinforces the structuring
of knowledge on their terms and allows the
view of the white man to become the base-
line which other perspectives are seen as
branching off of.

The predominance of white male profes-

sors can also lead to specific problems when
discussing issues of gender and race. For ex-
ample, earlier this semester, I remember one
of my professors commented admiringly on
a book saying that, “this author is one of my
favorites, because his women characters read
like real people, which was not common at
the time.” I heard that and thought: is that
it? Is that really where we’re putting the bar:
that women are written about as “real peo-
ple”? If that’s truly the standard by which we
define great books, it seems like we should
read more books by women with more real-
istic women characters.

And that’s a relatively benign example of

the bias of white men: others can become
much more problematic. In our interview,
Raines also recounted in a phone interview

an incident that occurred in a history of film
class taught by a white man.

“There was this one instance, we were

talking about … this movie called ‘The Jazz
Singer,’ (which is) about minstrelsy and the
guy puts on blackface to become a minstrel
performer,” Raines said. “And the profes-
sor … he goes cursorily over the movie, but
he doesn’t talk about those elements, and I
felt that it was a little problematic. And I said
something in the chat (on Zoom), and he sent
an email out saying he saw what we put in the
Zoom chat and wasn’t delighted by that and
wanted us to read this article that discusses
the film and what cultural work it does. And
I was like, ‘cultural work?’”

Raines explained that the next day, they

had a discussion about it in her class. “(I
said) I think it’s important to acknowledge
that this movie is inherently racist. And he
kept throwing out questions and more, like,
discursive topics, and I was like, ‘I don’t want
to discuss it. I just want you to admit that this
film is racist.’”

I’m sick of learning
from old white men

BY WILLA HART, STATEMENT COLUMNIST

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