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Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Tracey Laszloffy. The Black Academic's Guide to Winning Tenure without Losing Your Soul. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2008. Paper: $22.50. 261 pp. ISBN-13: 978-1588265883.
Intrigued by the title, I honestly cannot say what I expected when I started reading Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Tracey Laszloffy's book, but I found it to be both informative and entertaining. The authors dispense practical, no-nonsense ideas using a conversational writing style. I felt that I could easily have been sitting in one of their workshops from which many of the stories in the book are taken.
In Chapter 1, the authors admit that most of their suggestions for tenure-track faculty "can be used by faculty of any race" (p. 5), but they candidly indicate that their reason for targeting Black junior faculty is their perception that, in academe, racism shapes life for Black faculty; thus, Black faculty have challenges that may not exist for White faculty or even other people of color. If you doubted this perception, by the time you finish reading the stories and examples in this book, you will recognize its unfortunate truth.
The authors also use this chapter to make a number of assertions that underlie the rest of the book: (1) Institutional hierarchies bestow "onedown" status on all junior faculty but are exacerbated by this country's social hierarchies that tend to marginalize Black faculty; (2) Black faculty are beset by disproportionally higher service requests, such as advising Black students and serving on "diversity" committees; and (3) the general lack of mentoring to guide Black faculty successfully through the tenure process.
All three themes are addressed several times in the various chapters, producing a certain amount of redundancy. Most of the repetition, however, is appropriate and constructive, such as the recurring admonition to write daily and the repeated suggestion to seek therapy for help in,...