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Lots of academic jobs this year are focused on race, racism and <discipline>. How do soft money environments, esp. public health, plan to protect those new faculty from institutionalized racism within the NIH granting system? https://diversity.nih.gov/building-evidence/racial-disparities-nih-funding
Don't get me wrong, it's great to see public health (and many other disciplines) invest in scholarship in race, racism and health. If it's not also an indictment that the gap on a school's faculty has persisted this long.
But isn't it just a set up for scholars whose work is harder to get funded, takes longer to do (CBPR, qualitative), etc.? What safeguards are in place so those faculty aren't critiqued (esp at tenure / promotion) b/c they don't have an R01 in hand, a track record of NIH $$?
Are these new lines hard money? Endowed with additional internal research support funds? In-kind support for Black and non-Black POC students as RAs? Dedicated funds for publishing in open access journals? Funds for external mentorship from Black and non-Black POC scholars?
What happens when the financial decisions of the package are coordinated by a (likely White identified) department head or Dean, and done behind closed doors? Who has helped construct the package, advocated for resources to offset these challenges?
Not to mention the many different ways unrecognized and uncompensated emotional and other service labor will be taxing to be in a PWI -- esp. an environment that all of a sudden realizes it needs scholars in race / racism and health?
I say this as someone whose institution will be doing one such search this year. Being hard money, more teaching and service oriented institution than externally funded research, the racism in the discipline feature *somewhat* less prominently (other than in course evals)
We've also had ongoing discussions (over at least the last year) about identity taxation and how that will factor into this search. We definitely don't have the answers, but we're working on it.
What are other institutions doing? Especially those that rely heavily on external research funding? We should be asking for transparency, both to support these new faculty colleagues and to gather lessons learned and best practices.
