Who's Afraid of a Visiting Assistant Professor?

I'm sure you all want to know what happened.

Doubt loomed from the moment my all-white department began to talk to me about their plans for a tenure track hire there. Any time it was mentioned, coworkers told me I, a current Visiting Assistant Professor, would be competitive for it. They whispered, “Will you apply?” in conspiratorial tones as if we were school playmates sharing secrets. I had at least two different meetings with both the search chair and the department chair about my intentions to apply. In one, I was assured that the job ad was written with me in mind: they promised to search for someone who could produce and teach a very particular mix of scholarship and creative work on media representation informed by Black feminisms, queer theory or indigenous theory.

Sometime after I informed them that I had applied elsewhere and was looking to leave the department, the original schedule for the search (Fall 2024) was moved up and expedited, with the intention of completing a hire before the end of the spring 2024 semester. I heard the familiar refrain return: “Will you apply?”

After three semesters of teaching the department’s introductory media studies classes, as well as specialty classes of my own design, and three semesters of exceptional course evaluations from students, I decided to apply. I had come to love teaching my students: I had amassed an odd flock of students of all kinds, including a large number of division 1 athletes across many sports, but primarily football. I found them all brilliant, curious, and singularly creative—even if underestimated by others. I could imagine a future in which I continued to teach them and write my unique mix of scholarship and creative projects. 

As promised, I was put through the typical tenure track hiring process, albeit with an all-white search committee: application, first round interview, campus visit, letters of recommendation. During my campus visit, my students showcased exceptional displays of support: they were engaged during my student meetings, asked questions that they knew the answers to so that I could shine in front of the search chair, telling other faculty members in no uncertain terms that they wanted me. They came to my research talk and in a room full of full professors, my students bravely asked questions about my work and publicly offered how much I had taught them over the last two years.

My students were unified beside me. I had protected them as they learned during their time in my classes and they rose to the occasion when it was clear it was their turn to reciprocate.

I knew when I left campus on the day of my visit that I could have done no better. I had laid everything on the table. The students had been clear about the direction they wanted their education to take. I knew that whatever happened next would be a result of systems much larger than me and I was at the mercy of folks who were cocooned in privilege.

I had hoped that the department would do better than they had previously shown me, that they would prioritize their students, that they would do right by me. Unfortunately, I suspected from the beginning that they would not. 

I was right.

The call that I received informing me that the search committee had offered the position to another candidate came two days after the last big department event of the semester. Based on the timeline they had given me, they had already known they would not offer me the job for three days prior to the call and so smiled in my face as we sent the seniors off.

I was then offered a new Visiting Assistant Professor position, an offer I composedly told the search chair I would review but that I was not inclined to return to the department. A few hours later, I received an email a few hours later from a department member who wrote that this new VAP was a “powerful” display of support on the part of the University and the department. Often, a situation like this would result in a non-renewal of contract and the visiting would separate from the university.

A “powerful” display of support on the part of the University and the department would have been to offer me a permanent, tenure track position—a job complete with additional funding and job security. 

Instead, they offered me continued contingent labor, which I was advised to receive with gratitude, because after all: “look how much we value you.” This consolation prize made it evident that any “value” I offer the department was what they could extract and exploit without appropriate compensation and protection. In a moment of this witch hunt that is the erasure of diversity, equity and inclusion work, fear of critical race theory and a larger trend of anti-intellectualism that largely impacts marginalized scholars, I know my story is but a symptom. 

This is but one instance in which a Black woman scholar was urged to be caught in a cycle of perpetual adjunctification, a process that devalues and demoralizes marginalized scholars who push the boundaries of what has traditionally been accepted and valued as knowledge until they are pushed out of academia. And that is wholly the point.

The University and the department do not support me. They do not value me. They seek to exploit me.

This email was the only communication I received from my department to date since being informed of the results of their search. I informed my students immediately, as I promised I would let them know the results of the search as soon as I knew. I received countless messages from them in the last several days, expressing everything from sadness to shock, from misguided hope I might still return to a “you were always too good for them” mentality. 

I have not been contacted by the department chair at all. 

Perhaps they hope that if they keep quiet and weather the storm, it will blow over soon.

Unfortunately for them, I am a hurricane.

I know the line will be, “We weren’t racist because we hired a woman of color!” Hiring a woman of color in the end does not exempt you from accountability to the Black woman you harmed in the process. It’s never about who gets the job. I have no doubt that whoever got the job was exceptionally qualified and likely good people. I take no issue with them. 

I take issue with the morally bankrupt way this department has handled this decision, treating me as disposable and women of color generally as effectively interchangeable, and the silence they have used as cover in the wake of their actions. 

Stand on your decisions. Look me in the eye and see if you can find a principle to cling to, and quickly—the moral high ground on which you stand crumbles at your feet.

Look your students in the eye and tell them you care about their agency, that you respect their ability to request what they want out of their education and you will listen.

Long after I am gone, your students will be clear-eyed about how much you value them. You have shown them. They will not forget the time that they rallied to protect and support a Black woman professor and were ignored by the very faculty who profess to care about them. The injustice will be etched into their memory the same way the university disregarded the suspicious death of a Black student on campus and continued on, business as usual, less than four days later. Silence in the face of genocide and protests, in the face of campus wide displays of racism…your students will remember it all. And they will remember what the department did regularly speak out against: “the athletic problem.” Your students are well aware that this “problem” is not one that extends to the all white golf or lacrosse team; “the athletic problem” has become shorthand for, at best, disinterest in, and at worst, disdain for, the Black boys on the football and basketball teams. 

You are rhetoricians. You taught students to find meaning and power in language. 

Do not be surprised when they do.

Truthtelling is contagious. It catches like fire. In speaking my experiences out loud, it is unsurprising that the light drew others with similar stories of mistreatment from this very department. 

We know the truth, and we will continue to speak it.

When you hear the whisper—“Will you apply?”—ask if they will say it with their chests. Are they prepared to support the type of scholar they seek, and do it loudly? Or will their whispers of desire fade into a silence woven with shame?

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A note: If any former student of mine happens across this post, never doubt that I loved teaching you.