Documenting Black Faculty Experiences in the “Stop Woke” Era

Abstract

The Black Faculty Recruitment and Retention at the University of Florida Oral History Project documented the experiences of prejudice and discrimination by current and former UF faculty and staff members. A total of 46 respondents participated, 23 male and 23 female, between the Summer and Fall semester of 2021. While several salient themes emerged from these interviews, this paper focuses primarily on the respondents’ experiences of silencing, prejudice, discrimination at UF, and anti-racist White allyship. Such experiences ranged from respondents being overburdened with the mentorship of Black and Brown students to overt episodes of prejudice and discrimination that drove faculty members to resign from their positions. For example, some respondents noted the silencing of dissenting Black voices at faculty meetings by White colleagues. Extant scholarship has documented similar themes, and the present study employs them to contextualize its findings. This paper concludes by emphasizing respondents’ advice for administrators to help mitigate the negative impact of prejudice and discrimination on Black faculty at UF and avoid tokenistic diversity initiatives that constitute ineffective diversity regimes.