How Black Engineering and Computing Faculty Exercise an Equity Ethic to Racially Fortify and Enrich Black Students

ABSTRACT

U.S. universities are fraught with institutional barriers that challenge Black faculty members’ ability to thrive in academia, while they also make attempts to broaden access and participation in fields like engineering and computing. The diversity-related service requested of Black faculty members can negatively complicate their chances for tenure and promotion. This qualitative research centers on the narratives of 39 Black faculty members in engineering and computing, guided by the equity ethic framework, which we use to understand their motivations to reduce racial inequities in their fields. We found that due to being overburdened with service requests, Black faculty responded by guarding their time and energy to focus instead on self-initiated, diversity-related service. In this paper, we focus on how these Black faculty members work to broaden participation in their fields by mentoring Black students during critical academic junctures while offering supportive anti-deficit teaching and mentoring. We argue that their self-initiated activities are a form of service that is critical to widening Black participation in engineering and computing and should not be overlooked in reviewing yearly raises or in the tenure and promotion process.

KEYWORDS:

• Black/African American faculty
• engineering
• computing
• diversityrelated service
• equity ethic
• tenure and promotion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We use the terms technology, computer science, and computing interchangeably to refer to jobs that apply technology to solve human problems, using computers, programming, and software.

2. The term “racially minoritized” acknowledges a system of policies and practices that racialize people of color, and not the passive “minority” implying some inherent (and normalized) state-of-affairs. Instead, they are rendered minorities, by overrepresentation of White Supremacy that actively creates a society that elevates and normalizes a hegemonic worldview to the detriment of nonwhite people (McGee, 2020).

3. Despite increased representation, Asian STEM faculty endure racial marginalization, while experiencing barriers to management and other leadership opportunities (E. McGee, 2018).

4. We asked a series of demographic questions at the end of the interviews. One question included, “what gender do you identify with, if any?”

5. We accepted all faculty members who responded to our request to be interviewed, which yielded one life science faculty member.

6. We have used the more encompassing term “Black” instead of “African American” because the participants are not all descendants of enslaved Africans in America. In this section both terms “African American” and “Black” are used, depending on how the participants self-identified.