As expected, new faculty members spend most of their time focusing on their students, but where can a budding professor go to learn how to be a better instructor or how to survive in the institution? Who stands ready to help the young academician? Too often, the answer has been no one, but a couple of recent books can help fill the void.

***image1;left***The Black Academic’s Guide to Winning Tenure — Without Losing Your Soul, by Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Tracey Laszloffy, $22.50, Lynne Rienner Publishers (July 2008), ISBN-10: 1588265889, ISBN-13: 978-1588265883, pp. 261.

Why a “Black” guide to tenure? The authors have been challenged on that point and have explained it in the book something like this: Junior faculty members in any institution of higher learning are by definition vulnerable. For White, male junior faculty, this is a temporary condition experienced only within the walls of their school. For Black faculty, vulnerability is an ongoing condition, even if they get tenure, and it spills over into the world outside the institution.

“So, we take as our basic premise that there is a fundamental difference between the experiences of Black and White faculty,” the authors write.

Different experiences call for different survival skills, and the writers indicate that they want new faculty to thrive in academia, not merely crawl to the finish. They present as a given that race and racism will be factors in an academic career, but they don’t use those as excuses. Rather, the possibility that race will present challenges is viewed as a motivator and organizing principle that can drive the Black scholar’s career toward excellence.

Rockquemore is an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Laszloffy is a coach/therapist for Black and Hispanic faculty at predominantly White institutions. They are also founders of the blackacademic.com Web site, a mentoring portal for “underrepresented faculty making the transition from graduate student to professor.