“I Gotta Go to Grad School”: How Graduate Preparation Programs Allow Black Women to See Themselves in the Academy

Abstract

Background:

Black women remain significantly underrepresented among tenure-track and tenured faculty in U.S. higher education, despite decades of graduate preparation initiatives. Graduate preparation programs provide invaluable resources and experiences that support historically minoritized students’ pathways into the academy. Prior research focused on navigational challenges and barriers, but there is less insight regarding the role of graduate preparation programs in shaping academic pursuits and faculty bidirectional trajectories. The landscape for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs has endured cataclysmic shifts in recent years, so understanding the impact of prefaculty’s exposure to academia through undergraduate research preparation and resource opportunities is critical to their long-term success in higher education.

Purpose:

To better understand the influence of preparation programs, more understanding is needed on how to create academic spaces for Black women academics to flourish and not simply survive. Inquiring how Black women faculty persisted through programs that increased their cultural and social capital needed to navigate higher education into faculty careers is one way to reveal pathways for meaningful inclusion and retention. As such, in this paper, we asked: How do Black women faculty reflect on their graduate preparation program experiences? In what ways, if any, did their experiences in these programs facilitate their pathways into the professoriate?

Research Design:

We combined Black feminism and a bidirectional socialization model to contemplate the racialized and gendered experiences Black women faculty encounter during their socialization through the academy. This analysis drew data from a larger, explanatory sequential, mixed methods study focused on the ways that racial stress in the academy relates to Black women faculty’s health outcomes. We focused on the qualitative component, which consisted of two rounds of interviews with 54 faculty; in this analysis, we focused on the 17 participants who discussed graduate preparation programs and identified participation in these programs on their CVs.

Recommendation:

This article asserts that through these experiences a bidirectional possibility exists where Black women faculty are affirmed in their backgrounds, identities, and research interests through early exposure to be socialized as valuable knowledge producers. We recommend institutions and practitioners review missions and visions to ensure a bidirectional socialization is embedded where the Black women who are matriculating through these programs into the academy are also challenging and changing the program to be more intentional. As the sociopolitical landscape of diversity, equity, and inclusion programming has continued to shift in recent years, it is crucial to understand how the norms and resources needed to thrive in the academy influence Black women who participated many years after initial exposure.