Delving Into Expectations, Experiences, Exploitations, and Erosion of Tenure-Track Faculty: Disenfranchisement Attributed to Dysconsciousness

Introduction

Most institutions of higher education offer an array of courses for which tenure-track faculty are hired to teach. The goal of institutional personnel is to fill these positions with academic professionals who possess the appropriate education, experience, and expertise for the specific position and who fit with the institution’s overall culture, climate, and community. Concomitantly, professional educators applying for faculty positions also seek fit. The goal of professional educators is to find tenure-track faculty positions that enable them to fulfill their expectations, i.e., feel safe, function securely, foster innovation, and flourish holistically. The common goal is to establish mutually-rewarding career-long relationships.

Professional educators anticipate actuating their expectations, augmenting their experiences, and advancing their expertise; they aspire to the establishment of a welcoming and worthy sense of place in their new professional career home. However, many tenure-track faculty (TTF), particularly newly hired and pre-tenured TTF, encounter an array of direct, indirect, even undetected, distractions and diversions throughout their careers. Distractions and diversions contributing to both temporary and permanent disconnections tend to be engendered and extended primarily by their colleagues, i.e., administrators and tenure-track faculty (AaTTF). Too often, AaTTF interfere with and impede the abilities of both pre-tenured TTF and tenured TTF to accomplish their awaited expectations through the AaTTF’s acknowledged and/or unacknowledged explicit and implicit biases, prejudices, stereotypes, and discrimination. When any TTF detects careless distractions, continuous diversions, and cumulative (even calculated) disconnections, the perceived dynamics lead to feelings of marginalization, alienation, disenfranchisement, and dehumanization.

Marginalization is the state of feeling diminished in worth, isolated, and removed from the center (Collins, 2022d). Alienation is the state of feeling detached, turned away, and estranged like an outsider (Collins, 2022a). Disenfranchisement is the state of feeling deprived or stripped of a right, power, due process, etc. (Collins, 2022d). Dehumanizing is the state of feeling denied, divested of, or deprived of individuality and full humanness (Collins, 2022c). Throughout their careers, many TTF may occasionally feel overlooked, undervalued, and excluded from discussions and decision-making. When TTF begin to distinguish repeated patterns of prejudicial practice and can document recurrent exchanges and regular events of biased behaviors, their amassed feelings of marginalization, alienation, disenfranchisement, and dehumanization easily disorient their sense of comfort, confidence, and competence. Thus, in order to honor the constructs of fairness and fit, AaTTF must be receptive to and recognize interactions associated with TTF being intentionally or unintentionally overlooked, undervalued, and excluded from institutional and individual discussions and decision-making.

This chapter describes the expectations and experiences of TTF emphasizing the fractures of fairness and the fallacy of fit. This text also makes visible and gives voice (Jackson, 2009) to the exploitations and erosion accelerating their disillusionment of deference and degrees of disenfranchisement. TTF’s frustrations and fears reveal the need for AaTTF across all institutions of higher education to recognize dysconciousness, i.e., “the uncritical habit of mind that justifies inequity and exploitation” (King, 1991; King & Akua in Banks, 2012, pp. 723–726) by subjectively relying on the exploiter’s self-determined stance as the status quo.