Chapter 5: “I Get Tired Every Day, But I Choose to Do This”: Faculty Perspectives

After four chapters of student experiences, we are now ready to hear eight of the faculty members that more than one student praised for helping them to succeed at PSU, for helping them to feel like they belonged here. We also interviewed four staff members from three of the programs that several students identified as particularly useful. All of these faculty and staff emphasized that New Majority students require personal investment from PSU faculty in order to thrive.

Extensive research by scholars of higher education confirms the inverse relationship between status and commitment to teaching, especially at research universities. This privileging of research over teaching is an elaboration or extension of an individualistic and competitive approach to learning and life nurtured in graduate school and in white, upper-middle class families more generally.

Faculty Interviews

Demographics of Faculty Interviewees

The demographics of the twelve faculty our students most commonly praise are interesting. Only four are tenure-track, two of them in a small program, Chicanx-Latinx Studies, and two in a large one, the School of Business Administration.

The eight non-tenure stream faculty are divided between three in University Studies (one also teaching in Social Work), two in Chemistry, and one each in: Women, Gender, and Sexuality (and also UNST); Psychology; and Child, Youth Family Services. Most (seven out of twelve) are people of color, seven are male, and several identify as queer. Of course twelve is a small sample size, but the faculty New Majority students most appreciate tend to be more diverse than the faculty in general, especially in their ethnic identities, and less likely to be tenure stream. All eight of the faculty we were able to interview were non-tenure track, so are expected to focus on teaching.

Reflections on Learning About Teaching

The professors have used a wide range of experiences to learn how to teach diverse university students, but teaching played, at best, a small role in their training as academics.

Shuvasree Ray, in Chemistry, recalled that there was “absolutely nothing . . . on how to teach” in graduate school, that she “more learned on the job.” Two weeks into her first job as a teaching assistant, and recently arrived in the U.S. from India, a student complained to the department about having to take a class “from someone with an accent,” and “that was a little blow,” but I very quickly got over it.” The content always came easy, classroom management was much harder, especially when she found herself with 300 students in a class at PSU, some with mental-health challenges. She credits “becoming a Mom” with teaching “me how to guide individuals and be their mentor not through authority but through kindness.”

Eric Sheagley, also in Chemistry, also learned little about teaching in graduate school (“I was there for Chemistry”) but had taught four years of high school and was trained in Boston for teaching in the inner city, which was his first experience working closely with students of color. At PSU, he has relied on teaching workshops with a national organization that supports science education. Christopher Allen, in Psychology, “didn’t receive any training in graduate school for how to teach.” He credits his mother, who “taught me from a young age how to talk to people in church” by thinking about “how’s it going for the person on the other side of the conversation.”

When he started at PSU in 2011, he felt his teaching could be more inspired, so “I hired an educational expert (starting at $100 an hour) and really started to get into the expertise of teaching,” meeting with her twice a month for seven or eight years. She prompted him to think about alternatives to lecturing and how to connect with students from a wide range of backgrounds, such as neurodivergent students. She also encouraged him to think about how being a white man raised in a Christian, highly educated family might shape the way he came across to students.

Óscar Fernández had “zero training about teaching” in graduate school, aside from narrow instruction on teaching writing mechanics, so “nothing on pedagogy” or how to work with diverse students. The first department he taught in did not emphasize teaching, so only after transitioning to UNST did he find himself among colleagues who made teaching their priority.

Nathan Gies had about a week of half-day training on teaching at Johns Hopkins University, which provided “a solid foundation,” then one-day orientations at the first two colleges he taught at. PSU required no teaching training, though he took a very useful course from the Office of Academic Innovation (OAI}. Like Óscar, he was pleasantly surprised to find UNST faculty so focused on teaching. They were “exchanging assignments” and discussing topics such as how to be emotionally available for students while not burning out. They were “exchanging assignments” and discussing topics such as how to be emotionally available for students while not burning out.

All of Keela Johnson’s formal training in teaching came through her UNST mentor training, though she also worked at Resolutions Northwest as a facilitation specialist.

Experiences Outside of Academia that Led to Teaching

Some of our interviewees described seminal experiences outside of academia that led them to teaching. Staci Martin, Children Youth, and Family Studies, recalls her internship with the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center in Chicago and asking a boy what his plans or hopes were. He responded: “If I make it to 14, I want to finish high school and get a job.” The “if” of that answer took Staci aback and “changed the trajectory of my career . . . to prevention and peacebuilding.”

She also recalls, at age 15, volunteering “with a local church to paint houses on an Indian reservation” and being “instructed not to enter their homes.” But as she painted a doorway, “a six-year-old took my hand and led me into her house,” and insisted that she stay and read to her, and [a]s I started to read the book, children came out the woodwork and I had four more children intently listening.” This experience taught her “that I wanted to be the bridge, the connection, between two worlds.”

In a profession in which getting a doctorate degree is often assumed to be the minimal requirement for becoming a professor, it is interesting that two of our interviewees assert that choosing not to get a Ph.D. was crucial to them focusing on becoming an outstanding teacher.

Vicki Reitenauer sat in on a seminar at the university she was planning to attend for graduate school, and the students “argued for about an entire hour” over a tiny question of word usage. She thought: “I don’t want to spend my time this way.” She instead spent years working for nonprofits, a domestic violence shelter, as a legal advocate, and, in one of “my formative experiences,” co-facilitating a “batterers’ intervention group” for cisgender men where she learned about the “systemic issues” that affected these men. “I got to know these men who had also been harmed,” as well as having harmed others, and how to both hold them accountable for those actions and have empathy for them.

She also worked extensively with reproductive health, sexuality education. “My own trajectory, which has been to be an outsider in the institution” working outside of academia with people who had been marginalized has of course helped her to empathize with students who feel like outsiders. Keela Johnson was well into her doctoral program when she decided that getting a Ph.D. “would be further alienating myself from the students by upholding the idea that a terminal degree was the only way one could be deemed intelligent and capable of teaching others at a university level. I want to help break that narrative and refocus the attention on the students, rather than on my personal research. . . .” “I needed to be in a space where I was making a difference,” she concludes, and getting a Ph.D. would have taken her away from that goal.

Prioritizing Personal Connections with Students

Indeed, all eight of our interviewees emphasize making personal connections with students. Eric humanizes himself by putting a statement in the syllabus and in Canvas about “Who I Am,” namely “not a very successful student” at first. “I like to use class time to talk about things I go through,” his own experiences of the “imposter syndrome” that so many of his students feel. Christopher talks in classes about “my own failures–from work with clients to struggles in personal relationships. “My goal is to create a space where growth is modeled, not just expected.”

Before coming to UNST, Óscar was told “who you are is not important” as a professor, that teaching was all about content. He now shares with students his own immigration story and other parts of his life, “as a Costa Rican, as an immigrant.”Before coming to UNST, Óscar was told “who you are is not important” as a professor, that teaching was all about content. He now shares with students his own immigration story and other parts of his life, “as a Costa Rican, as an immigrant.” He assigns many readings by people of color, as he wants his students from underrepresented backgrounds to see “you can do this.” He also gives students opportunities to write in their first language, whether or not it is English, and reminds them that “the world is not all English” by dropping words and phrases in Spanish and other languages into class. “Being multilingual,” he tells them, “is a treasure.”

Shuvasree noticed that after George Floyd was murdered, students “were much more opening up to me,” asking questions such as “why are we even doing this,” studying Chemistry? “That kind of pushed me out of my comfort zone. . . . to talk about my personal struggle.” She realized that “sharing my belonging story . . . added to the classroom.” Her own father passed away right before she was born, in India, so her mother was working when Shuvasree was born, and “what got her through, what got me through, was that job” of her mother’s, a job that was only possible because her mother had gone to college. “Grow up to be someone,” she tells students, “who can financially fend for oneself,” because you might well have to.

Nathan Gies shares with students about his gender identity, and [s]tudents have often said this makes a difference for them,” that “they’ve never had an out teacher or never had a teacher identify as gay or queer in the classroom at any level of their education, and that hearing it from me has made them feel more comfortable at PSU.” Like the other faculty, he tells students about his own failures and struggles that when, for example, he read Kant for the first time, he did not understand any of it. Knowing that students of color may find the field of political philosophy dominated by white males, he points out that the scholar who first “got me excited” about the field was bell hooks, a black woman.

“I’m a black woman, I have no choice” but to care deeply for students, remarks Keela. Having been so often “dismissed for being a black person, a black woman,” she is open to New Majority students’ pain. She believes that she must give everything she can to her students and speaks of her job as a calling rather than simply a job. “I get tired every day,” she explains, “but I choose to do this, and I choose this,” and “that means I have to give all of me, because that’s what they need.”

Devoting Time to Students

These faculty devote a great deal of time to their students. There’s an intimacy . . . to education,” remarks Vicki, recalling that one PSU professor was notorious for asserting “I don’t want to learn students’ names, because I don’t want that to bias me.” “Each person is a culture of one,” Christopher learned in his work as a family therapist at Lutheran Community Services, from his boss from Afghanistan. So “the best way to treat people is to explore people’s culture of one.”

Eric starts out with massive numbers in his introductory Chemistry classes, but by Spring, “I know a fair number” of them. He has about six drop-in hours a week, in a very nice room with lots of windows, tables, and chairs: “I invite everybody to come in.” And he looks for opportunities for “informal meetings in the hallways, labs.” When he spots someone he recognizes from class, “I’ll walk up to them and ask them, ‘tell me your story.’” In class, he and the TAs like to mingle among the small groups. “First, I just like to sit there and listen,” especially to their more personal stories, in the ice breakers.

Óscar doubts that most of his students are “going to receive this much personal attention” after they leave his FRINQ class, so he feels an urgency in making sure they are prepared for how to negotiate the long road ahead. Keela shares her cell phone, since texting is “when they share what they really need.” “I do everything I can to support them . . . I feed my students. . . . I buy pizza.” “You deserve all the support you can get,” is what she wants her students to feel, whether they are struggling with an assignment or with making rent.

Staci, who is Asian-American, writes “two responses every week” to 44 student posts, “which is a lot of work.” She does this because she wants students to critically think and engage in articles, interviews, and assignments. She especially reminds her underserved and underrepresented students that they should “feel free to meet with me and check with me about what’s going on.” “I want them to know that I believe their story,” she explains, “I want them to know that they belong in my classroom and their contributions are needed.”“I want them to know that I believe their story,” she explains, “I want them to know that they belong in my classroom and their contributions are needed.” Since “my classes” examine racism, the impact on students can be intense, and she often ends up spending much of her time helping them work through what can be “a painful journey.” She uses terms such as “I gently want to nudge you” to get students to reconsider their views.

This sort of intense engagement is hard to maintain. “I’m tired,” she reflects, “I’m just exhausted.” “I can say I don’t really have time” when a student is suffering, “but then I just feel bad.” “I often see BIPOC students who aren’t even my students,” and “I wish more students would feel comfortable to reach out to their faculty or vice versa.” It adds up to “a lot of emotional unpaid labor,” especially for faculty of color who make themselves available.

How Power Shapes Classroom Dynamics

The students we interviewed frequently talk about how difficult they find it to participate in class, and our faculty are sensitive to how power shapes classroom dynamics.

In Keela’s classes, students take on roles that they might normally avoid, and the leadership and speaking roles keep shifting, which “allows for the voices that take up too much space to learn to listen and work effectively as a unit.” She includes white students by addressing how “institutional and systemic oppression and the impacts on all bodies without shifting the focus from those most impacted. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t.”

Nathan’s syllabi lists many ways to contribute to class discussions, which can include “asking about terms or concepts that are unclear to you,” “directing our attention to particularly rich or significant passages from the reading,” or “meaningfully contributing to an online thread of ‘Further Discussion’ after class ends.” With students who take up a great deal of air space, his favorite strategy is to talk with them outside of class, inviting them to “work on . . . getting others involved” after praising their engagement. He also conveys his enthusiasm “about work with the DRC” for students with disabilities.

Seeking Feedback From Students

Our teachers seek feedback from students. “Is there something you need?” Keela regularly asks her students. One class activity entails students making a drawing with soil and a tree, with lots of space for them to write, in the soil, about what they are loving about the class as well as in the tree and leaves about what they wish the class could become. “What would you change and why?” Nathan appreciates the required mid-term check-ins in UNST. He also invites students to let him know at any point of the class if they are unhappy about anything.

Shuvasree reads her students’ feedback carefully, and “in a big class, there is no end to what improvements could be done.” So “I make . . . changes on a continual basis.” For example, two students pointed out that they were not motivated to do work that was not worth any points, so she changed that for the next class. She strives to keep asking herself: “Is there anything I could have done differently?” Eric, our other beloved Chemistry professor, offers students extra credit for providing him with broad feedback on the class. In one course, for example, he found that “self-advocacy was relatively low,” so they talked about this in class, and he provided students with resources, with tools on how to advocate for themselves in his class and in general, and he reminds students of these tools during drop-in hours and in class emails.

Enhancing Student Engagement

All eight of these instructors structure their courses to enhance student engagement, with each other as well as with the material. Óscar ditched his long, conventional lectures upon coming to UNST. “What was not working was me showing off my knowledge,” even though [s]tudents are institutionalized to think of professors as experts only when they lecture.” So he switched to shorter, more “interactive” lectures and spent most of the class “in a group workshop model.”

The class is divided into “success teams of three to four students” so they can learn how to collaborate, support each other, and problem solve in groups. Their research essays are about “a burning question from their life story” that they want to learn more about. He has high standards and expectations: “I’m here to show how to do it, not to tell you how to do it.” “The question of ‘who are you?’ is challenging, he remarks, and he finds it “patronizing” not to let students struggle at times with learning. He tells them that “deadlines are important,” but he works with students who are having challenges at home to establish revised due dates.

One of Keela’s many collaborative activities is to ask students to list and share four things that stood out to them in a film or other assignment, three new vocabulary words, two ways it relates to their own lives, and one question. At least half of Christopher’s class time is taken up by discussion, and he takes a series of steps to help students prepare for that, including a “one-minute meditation, a breath reflection” at the start of class. There are very small groups for more anxious people that last only a few minutes, and larger ones that last longer.

Staci teaches almost entirely online and fosters engagement by requiring students to post at least three questions they are curious about, which classmates then respond to. Eric started working with a colleague in Chemistry in about 2015, the two of them resolved “to reduce the achievement gap” through “better practices.” Since the department was then changing buildings, they designed a lecture hall with swivel chairs, so students could talk with each other more easily, and “we brought in a lot of group-learning activities.” The model they created features group work for half of the class meetings, and “even lecture day we peppered with check-in questions” that utilized reflection, pair shares, and clickers.

Vicki has gone much further than most professors in inviting or even requiring students to take ownership over their own learning. “I learn names as quickly as possible,” helps the students learn each others’ names, and early in the term asks them to write about “what do you need?” and “what can you offer” (to others). At the end of their term they provide “a pretty rigorous reflection” on their work in the class and “claim their grade” rather than simply waiting for Vicki to assign them one. The students teach and “develop their own modules” in her online classes. She wants the classes she teaches to express her belief that “we’re all experts on our own experience” and that “we’re all co-teachers, and we’re all co-learners.”

Opinions About the Role of Teaching at PSU

The eight faculty express a wide range of experiences and opinions about the role of teaching at PSU.

Vicki, who ended up in academia sort of by accident, first teaching capstone (fourth-year service-learning) courses for UNST and who has been in many leadership positions as a faculty member, believes that graduate school not only socializes faculty to prioritize publication over teaching but also subjects future professors to “aspects of bullying, running a gauntlet, hazing.” Graduate school offers an opportunity to be recognized for one’s intelligence, but with strings attached, that this recognition is contingent on continued performance. Such faculty “haven’t been able to work through their own pain,” and when such faculty encounter “weirdos” who say “we’re going to build community” rather than focus just on intellectual knowledge, they react by feeling and saying “that’s soft. . . . that is not what the academy is for.” “Most of us try not to be vulnerable,” particularly in academia, “and that makes it impossible to be a great teacher.”“Most of us try not to be vulnerable,” particularly in academia, “and that makes it impossible to be a great teacher.”

Some teaching faculty report being respected by their tenure-stream colleagues. Christopher, in Psychology, feels “quite supported in my department.” His colleagues have encouraged his classroom innovations and provided funding for developing new courses. “It often feels like I’m an essential part of the university community,” though “at the same time, I know that could change quickly if institutional priorities shift.” A few years ago he made a concerted effort to find a way to get more research faculty into undergraduate classes, as he could see that they had a lot to offer his students. That effort “fell flat.” But his “department is in a good place right now–with strong leadership and a culture of support.”

Shuvasree remarks that the Chemistry Department “is amazing,” that they “have supported me in everything.” Eric agrees that the Chemistry Department is “wonderfully supportive” and points out that it has a long legacy of focusing on teaching, including how to close the equity gap. Large chunks of departmental meetings have been devoted to how “to increase student success.” It would of course be nice to have more job security and not wonder from year to year if his position will last, but switching to a tenure-stream job would mean focusing on research, and “I don’t think I’d want to be there.”

Teaching faculty often struggle with lack of job security, especially as student numbers at PSU have declined. “I’m always on the chopping block,” remarks one, adding that the creation of teaching lines for promotion are welcome, but also difficult to understand and negotiate. Nathan cites the fall 2024 letter by some chairs at PSU that called for phasing out UNST, where all faculty are untenured, teaching faculty, as something that “did not exactly make me feel respected.” He continues to research, and he has had to “draw boundaries” about how much time he spends responding to students’ needs, though when choosing between “this abstract thing I could write” versus “the person in front of me, “ he usually “chooses the person.” When asked if focusing on teaching was good for his job security, he answered: “not exactly.” But sometimes his research on queer themes and his classroom experiences inform each other.

In fact at least three of the eight faculty we interviewed have co-published with their students. Vicki has done that in at least eight publications, Óscar has with several, and all of Staci’s conference papers, journal articles, and books have been co-authored with her co-researchers, many from her classroom. Staci has a very impressive research record, including major fellowships, including Fulbright and the National Institute of Health, and, in the 2024-2025 academic year, four published papers and seven conferences, five of them paid for. Most of this work is with people around the world in displaced communities, commonly referred to as refugees, and this research “always informs my teaching,” such as when she interviews past “co-researchers for my courses.”

Though Óscar teaches in UNST and is a teaching professor, “I am not fooled by talks at PSU that teaching matters.” He points out that PSU’s system of teacher evaluation lacks depth and rigor and that research shows that conventional teaching evaluation tools do not account for racial bias. He cites the fact that in fall 2024 the great majority of the 92 faculty who received notice of possible dismissal “were in teaching-intensive positions” as clear evidence that research brings much greater job security than teaching does at PSU. Changing that will require making “student-centered teaching” expertise and workshops a major part of promotion for tenure-stream faculty and providing more support, including the possibility of tenure, for UNST, “the home of student-focused teaching” at PSU.

The way PSU “treats its adjuncts” is telling, remarks Keela. “Ironically,” she remarks, students tell her that they “tend to learn more from us,” from non-tenured faculty with little job security, that they tell her: “we prefer adjuncts.” Indeed, one of our student interviewees, Anonymous 29, “found the professors who were adjuncts more approachable,” and one led him to an internship that turned into a job. “I’m a fan of the adjuncts,” he concludes. So PSU must decide, remarks Keela, “who are we?” UNST “definitely” has the most student-focused faculty at PSU, a group of people who “try really hard to live up to” the four UNST goals of communication, critical thinking, equity, and community, and to be flexible about how one can demonstrate communication skills, for example. “I don’t know that we know who we are as an institution,” she concludes. “Are we an educational institution, a real estate company, a government-run entity, or a corporation? These are things that my students have asked me.”

Staff Interviews

Students identified several programs at PSU that were particularly helpful to them: the Diversity Scholarship Programs, especially Gaining Awareness for Academic Success (GANAS), which serves Latine students; the Cultural Resource Centers; TRIO Student Support Services, and University Studies, particularly the Peer Mentor program that support students in FRINQ and SINQ. We were unable to interview any staff from the Cultural Resource Centers but were able to hear from staff from the others.

GANAS and TRIO

Emanuel Magaña, the Assistant Director of Multicultural Retention Services who has long overseen GANAS and Linda Liu, Director of TRIO since 2008, both stress the importance of relationships in their work. Linda reports that the staff strive to remember everything they can about their students, such as hobbies or pets, as these particular details provide a means to connect with them. “Having someone’s name right . . . and pronouns” is extremely important. So is staff being generous with their time. She tells students to “book an hour with me, because we’ll go down all sorts of rabbit holes.” For her, “it’s all about the relationship building,” because without that, students will not share what is really going on for them.

One student, for example, told Linda that “I have to care for my sister” for many hours a week, and then Linda could help her to “problem solve.” Another student needed to cry for a while before she was ready for a mental-health referral. Emmanuel’s program makes heavy use of peer mentors and group activities. GANAS brings its first-year students together the week before school starts so that right away they see people “who look like them, talk like them.” It is a time of intensive group work, asking students a lot of questions about their experiences and getting them talking with each other. The incoming students are “all super shy at the start,” but within a few days, “I can’t get them to be quiet.” They also learn practical skills, such as how to balance home responsibilities and school.

Not surprisingly, they urge faculty to follow their lead, to cultivate a sense of curiosity about their students. “Every single one of” your students “is going through their own thing,” remarks Emanuel. And professors should “never assume that the student already knows” anything. For example, he did not realize until his first term of university was nearly over that the syllabus had a schedule of assigned readings. He explains to students that many professors are very knowledgeable about their topic but not about teaching, but he wishes that professors would think more about how to teach “in a way a student can understand.” First-generation students often “don’t like to ask for help,” and some of his students report that faculty seem more eager to help white students.First-generation students often “don’t like to ask for help,” and some of his students report that faculty seem more eager to help white students.

Linda has found PSU faculty more accommodating to student needs than the University of Oregon was, where she went to college and worked, but “encourages faculty to demystify what may be common knowledge to non-first-generation students, but for many first-gen students, ‘office hours’ is akin to going to the principal’s office,” for example. She also recounts some of her own uncomfortable experiences negotiating white-dominated environments, how “when I walk into a space and I’m the one and only [person of color], I instinctively will code switch without realizing it.” She notes that some of her students in the helping disciplines criticize the sort of “white savior mentality” that can arise in majority white spaces where “they talk about inclusivity . . . but they don’t understand the community [of color] they are working with” and “don’t want to be challenged” about it. Faculty need to put themselves in the shoes of students who feel least comfortable in their classrooms.

Both of course cite money for more student support as something that would strengthen their programs. Linda would love to have “a counselor on staff,” since SHAC is often full, and it is often hard for her diverse students to find a counselor who understands their culture. She also suggests that academic departments at PSU “incentivize some sort of training,” a sort of “mental health first aid” course that goes beyond simply listing mental-health resources on the syllabus. Her staff completed such a class so as to better support students who are in crisis. Faculty and staff attentive to student-health need not and should not become their students’ therapists, but they can gain the skills needed to become a bridge that students can use to access more intensive assistance. Emanuel laments the cuts that GANAS has absorbed. They can no longer afford the family celebration that used to kick off each year, a place where staff could help students’ parents to understand questions such as “why are you [their children] still on campus?” late in the day. “I would love to take our students off site,” but that is too expensive, and the number of students mentors work with has roughly doubled.

Emanuel identifies a cluster of scholarship programs as being key aids for GANAS students, plus La Casa Latina and the Dreamer Center. The departments his students praise are Chicanx/Latinx Studies, the School of Business, and University Studies.

Linda hears good things about the many advisors and career coaches in the School of Business, the advising for Sociology/Psychology, and some of the faculty and mentors in University Studies.

University Studies

In fact we interviewed two staff members in University Studies, as so many of our student interviewees cited its faculty and peer mentors as key parts of their university journey. Dana Lundell became the Peer Mentor Program Director in 2010, and Rowanna Carpenter has been the long-time Director of Assessment and Research, so has a lot of insight into the extensive teaching-evaluation process that UNST has long featured.

Dana asserts that belonging is “absolutely crucial” for student success and that much of the training mentors receive, training that has been much reduced due to budget cuts, is devised “to foster” a sense of belonging among peer mentors and also a capacity to create it in their mentor sessions, among their students. UNST strives to cultivate an “ethos of care” among her mentors that normalizes struggle and vulnerability. She wants them to realize that when they talk to her, they are “not in trouble because [of] having trouble.”

Rowanna’s research in fact underscores how valuable the mentors are. FRINQ students who are asked to name someone who helped them to stay in school are always more likely to name their FRINQ mentor than anyone else. She has been collaborating more and more closely with students about how to measure and define student success and has set up a “student-assessment advisory committee” composed of students.

Both staff members are frustrated that UNST is often marginalized at PSU despite its many accomplishments. Rowanna would like to have FRINQ faculty who have a proven record in student engagement and retention share their methods with other faculty who teach first-year classes. But PSU has “ridiculous silos” that keep faculty who are facing similar classroom challenges isolated from each other. And in general education, “it feels like you have to be so careful, and prove your worth” constantly. PSU “is a hard place to work at the moment,” and “the discussion [around student success] can become disconnected from the reality of our students’ lives.”

“I find it mystifying,” remarks Dana of the widespread criticism of UNST at PSU. “Externally, we’re valued as an amazing model,” and in fact UNST’s mentoring program won a national award. The elimination of half of the peer mentor sessions in 2023 was especially discouraging. “We had all the evidence” to show how effective the peer mentors were, but “I got in a lot of trouble” for fighting it, “got very sternly rebuked” and “thought I was going to get fired.”

In sum, the faculty and staff we interviewed mirror in many respects the interviews we did with New Majority students. Though most had some very positive things to say about PSU and their work here, most also identified several points of tension, ways in which the university fell far short of its ideals, sometimes in ways that seemed both avoidable and puzzling. Certainly it is telling that the teaching program and the faculty most commonly identified by students as helping them, UNST, seems to be the most vulnerable, to have the least amount of job security.

Rewarding Research Over Teaching

The extensive and growing scholarly literature on college teaching illustrates that PSU is hardly alone in valuing and rewarding research more than teaching. The great majority of professors have been trained and socialized to research. “There is one core lesson that is inculcated into students in virtually all [PhD] programs,” asserts Brian Rosenberg, the former president of Macalester College: “research is more important than teaching. Not just more important but much more important” (81).“There is one core lesson that is inculcated into students in virtually all [PhD] programs,” asserts Brian Rosenberg, the former president of Macalester College: “research is more important than teaching. Not just more important but much more important” (81). Jacques Berlinerblau, a professor of Jewish Civilization, asserts that “doctoral study inculcates mental orientations that make it almost impossible for PhDs to ever succeed in the classroom” (23).

Even professors who try to overcome or dismiss this socialization once they start teaching face daunting obstacles: “The system is set up for professors to not care about you [students]. And, ironically, it punishes those who do” (141). Jonathan Zimmerman, in his aptly entitled The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America, remarks: “By the 1980s, across every kind of four-year institution, the amount of time faculty spent on teaching was inversely related to their salaries” (8).

The “Power of the Personal” for Minoritized Students

Research also shows that PSU’s New Majority students are hardly alone in wishing that faculty focused much more on teaching and on them. A study that examined thousands of student evaluations concluded: “What mattered most was the power of the personal,” that “students want professors who find a way of reaching out to them” (Kirp 78). The authors of “Latinx Students’ Sense of Familismo in Undergraduate Science and Engineering” identify “individualistic culture reinforced through large class sizes and impersonal professor-pupil interactions” as a major source of alienation among the undergraduates they interviewed (López, et al. 97). “Minoritized students,” the very people who tend to feel least welcome on college campuses, are the students who want “more from relationships. . . . deeper levels of authenticity,” report Annemarie Vaccaro and Barbara M. Newman, who interviewed fifty-one first-year students (938).

Authentic relationships require faculty to devote a lot of time listening closely to particular students. Reyes, et al. advocate for an Embodied Pedagogy of Care in which educators adopt “responsive teaching practices through their interactions with students and becoming part of their lives” rather than by “learning about culturally relevant teaching through a workshop or manual” (482). Enrique Sepúlveda III proposes a pedagogy of Acompañamiento, “the affirmation of relationships” (561). “‘Being there’ seems to be the top quality of a good instructor,” remark Fedelina Chávez, et al. after interviewing fifty indigenous, Hispano, and Mestizo college students (795). “Students had to be seen in their particularity as individuals” in order to generate excitement and engagement in a classroom, concludes bell hooks (7). A sense of belonging is critical to New Majority student success.

Challenges for Faculty of Color

Faculty of color often struggle to fit into academic culture precisely because it is so impersonal. Korean American Julia Lee describes academia as having “a poverty of spirit, a culture of intellectual stinting and hoarding” (156). Only when she found herself teaching “in a classroom where people of color were in the majority” did she realize that “I had spent years hiding behind my degrees and my clothes and my CV, using it to project an image of invulnerability,” that “I had to unlearn years of white supremacy” to teach these students effectively (174-75). Black faculty commonly report being punished for focusing on teaching and service at white-dominated colleges (Jones). Indeed, 58 percent of Black graduates of Historically Black Colleges and Universities in one study strongly agree that their professors “cared about me as a person” compared to just 25 percent at other colleges (Price and Viceisza 223).

“I was taught at an early age how to live relationally, how to meet the needs of others before taking care of myself,” remarks Jennifer Esposito, one of many Latina academics who cites her culture as a source of strength in her teaching. She challenges colleges to “begin to recognize the many benefits motherhood engenders” in faculty (285-86). Black women scholars and educators identify “othermothering,” the “sharing of self, an interactive and collective process, a spiritual connectedness that exemplifies the Africentric value of sharing, caring and accountability” as crucial to how they approach teaching (Thomas Bernard, et al. 105-06).

Brown faculty and students usually work within colleges that privilege or even assume both whiteness and individualism. Angela Judith Balcacer’s dissertation, “How Persevering Latina/o first-generation College Students Navigate their College Experience” at PSU reports that each of her “participants related white culture to college culture and privilege,” had a keen sense of being outsiders (268). And white collegiate culture is not much disposed to make such students, such people, feel at home.

Hyper-Individualism and Racial Privilege

William Dereciewicz reflects in his classic “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education” of how he realized in his mid-thirties, when the pipes in his new home needed fixing, that he not only knew nothing about plumbing, but that he could not even engage the plumber “in a few minutes of small talk.” His elite education had “taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, . . . . that such people were beneath me.” His education also bequeathed to him “a false sense of self-worth,” of “entitlement.” This sort of hyper-individualism, “the unrelenting pressure to perform, to achieve, to succeed,” means that even the winners “emerge triumphant but wounded,” with “a fragile sense of self-worth,” in the words of political philosopher Michael J. Sandel (180-81). Therapist Resmaa Menakem remarks on the irony of “white-body supremacy,” how a long legacy of using their privilege to elide or to impose on less privileged groups of people life’s inevitable “pain, grief, and disappointment,” has kept many white people from “building resilience” (211).

That white professors and other professionals are so often ineffective at and disinterested in forming relationships those who have been more marginalized seems, at first glance, odd. After-all, such people pride themselves on being cosmopolitan, of embracing a wide diversity of food, music, and fashion, to say things like “it takes a village to raise a child.” Yet they tend to donate less of their time and money than their brown, less well-to-do, or more conservative counterparts. They have fewer children. They are just as likely to choose privileged neighborhoods and schools as white conservatives are and even less likely than them to engage with people who have different views (Berg; Carney; Piff and Robinson; Putnam and Sifry; Ripley, et al.). “The professions,” remarks Thomas Frank, “are structured to shield insiders from accountability. . . . professionals do not have to listen” (37).

So much of educated white people’s radicalism is more discursive than susbstantive–”performative,” as some of the students we interviewed put it. This makes a certain amount of sense for academics. Professors naturally enough usually assume that they should spend most of their time professing, lecturing and writing about how the world is and should be. But much of this professing amounts to what sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron referred to as the creation and articulation of cultural capital, a sort of weapon used by the educated elite, as opposed to elites who simply have a lot of money, to assert their superiority over less educated people. What distinguishes the educational system from other mechanisms of status is “its peculiar ability to mask the contribution it makes toward reproducing the class distribution of cultural capital” (199).

Many of the students we interviewed have described how white professors and students seemed determined to use complicated language and terminology to demonstrate their superior intelligence, even–or particularly–when they were describing socially progressive points of view. People who have acquired taste or distinction can exercise it in many ways, from gardening to clothing to food to music. In the modern university, and among educated white people more generally, being highly sensitive to racism has become a key status marker that is often expressed symbolically, through professing progressive points of view, rather than socially, through collaborating with and listening to people from less privileged backgrounds. As George Packer observes, “confessing racial privilege is a way to hang on to class privilege” (132).

Kelefa Sanneh remarks that “the campaign against racism has often taken the form of an intra-white conflict,” a way for more educated white people to set themselves apart from their more ignorant, less educated, counterparts (19).Kelefa Sanneh remarks that “the campaign against racism has often taken the form of an intra-white conflict,” a way for more educated white people to set themselves apart from their more ignorant, less educated, counterparts (19). “Whites have built anti-racism understandings that construct the racist as always someone else,” remark Zeus Leonardo and Michalinos Zembylas, “the problem residing elsewhere in other Whites” (151). “Non-racism becomes an all or nothing game,” and “a form of image management for Whites” (156). Academic anti-racism work is often, well, just academic, does not much affect how white privilege continues to operate in higher education.

Cynthia G. Franklin’s meticulous study of academic memoirs points out that the writers accounts of their lives and their careers often obscure ”structural privilege, institutional hierarchies, and an individualism that reinforces the status quo” (6). Adam Begley describes these books as expressing “the ideology of ‘Moi,’” that the writers “are people who think they are left wing and yet are pure products of the Reagan era” of privileged self-focus. Indeed, particular students seldom appear in these memoirs, are rarely allowed to distract professors from their journeys of solitary self-actualization. Concern for less privileged people is advanced as an intellectual point of view, not as the basis for actually working with or on behalf of one’s actual students. White liberals, remarked the medical anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer, “think all the world’s problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves” (40). In the context of research universities, in particular, this amounts to a reluctance to sacrifice one’s research agenda on behalf of what one’s students need.

People with fewer privileges, as we have seen, tend to be more collectivist, more willing to make sacrifices for others, more interested and invested in the lives of particular people. “To change the world,” remarks the attorney and activist Bryan Stephenson, “we are each going to have to find ways to get closer to people who are living on the margins of society” (Mandery 283). “It’s actually in proximity to the poor that we hear things that we won’t otherwise hear, that we’ll see things we won’t otherwise see,” he asserts (Kelly). Likewise, Catholic theologian Roberto S. Goizueta laments that too often more privileged people imagine those who have been marginalized as “passive objects of our actions, rather than friends, compañeros and compañeras with whom we interact” (199).

Correlation Between Focusing on Students and Having Less Status and Job Security

The faculty and staff we interviewed would certainly agree with Goizueta that working effectively with New Majority students requires knowing them well. They also attest to how little or nothing in their graduate training prepared them for that work and how focusing on such people often locates them on the margins of PSU, with less job security and status than faculty who prioritize research. There is a strong correlation at PSU between focusing on students on the one hand and having less status and job security on the other.

This tragic relationship between being engaged with students and marginalized professionally exists across academia, is of course not limited to PSU. It has become a deeply embedded part of academic culture, especially in the prestigious institutions where the great majority of tenure-stream faculty at research universities are trained. But academic culture overlaps a great deal with the hyper-individualistic cultures that most academics have been raised in. As professor of education Patrick Roz Camangian puts it, most white academics “are not part of networks, collectives, or experiences that they see as larger than themselves and are not willing to take the risks or make the sacrifices that communities we come from need” (112). White professors commonly lack the resolution and life experiences needed to abide or walk with our New Majority students–on top of having very little incentive from PSU in particular or academia in general to do so.

Indeed, most of the faculty our students identified as being student focused come from more marginalized social backgrounds and are not tenure stream. Making students a priority therefore entails challenging and changing deeply embedded habits acquired both inside and outside of academia.