Hazing is the dark side of campus life. Desperate to be accepted into an exclusive club, bright young people will tolerate long periods of psychological abuse, often being forced to perform onerous tasks which established members consider below their dignity.

One of the paradoxes of higher education is that the most psychologically brutal initiation rites don't take place in fraternity houses but in academic departments. Those rites are called "coming up for tenure."

And as bad as coming up for tenure is for young White males, it is worse if you're not.

"For faculty of color, [enure is torture," says Dr. Alice Brown-Collins, an African American social psychologist who - along with Dr. Phyllis Bronstein, a tenured professor at the University of Vermont - is conducting a qualitative research study analyzing the lives and careers of thirty scholars who have focused their research on feminist and multicultural issues.

"Whether they receive tenure or not, a very large percentage of Black and female academics find the tenure process bitter and traumatic," Brown-Collins says. "Because even if you get tenure, unless every vote was unanimous it means' that now you get to spend the rest of your life with some people who thought you weren't good enough to be there."

In the past year or so, the subject of tenure has been widely debated - not only in academic journals, but on National Public Radio and in the pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post and other major publications. Many of the stories focus on proposals to change or eliminate tenure, and they mostly cast the issue as one that pits academic freedom against the efficiency needs of administrators.

But the fact that tenure is almost universally torturous to women and faculty members of color has been largely ignored, thus missing a window of opportunity to look into some of the reasons higher education as a whole is questioning the system of tenure as it now exists.

Starting in 1900 when Stanford University fired economics professor Edward Ross for political activities, it took forty years for tenure to be widely accepted in the United States. Ultimately, the Ross case led to the formation of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and in 1915, the association issued a report stating that academic freedom was a fundamental principle of a university.