Fight the Tower: Asian American Women Scholars’ Resistance and Renewal in the Academy

By Shirley Hune, W P, Eliza Noh and 16 more

Asian American women scholars experience shockingly low rates of tenure and promotion because of the particular ways they are marginalized by the intersectionalities of race and gender in academia. Although Asian American studies critics have long since debunked the model minority myth that constructs Asian Americans as the ideal academic subject, university administrators still treat Asian American women in academia as though they will simply show up and shut up. Consequently, because silent complicity is expected, power holders will punish and oppress Asian American women severely when they question or critique the system.

However, change is in the air. Fight the Tower is a continuation of the Fight the Tower movement, which supports women standing up for their rights to claim their earned place in academia and to work for positive change for all within academic institutions. The essays provide powerful portraits, reflections, and analyses of a population often rendered invisible by the lies that sustain intersectional injustices in order to operate an oppressive system.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Oct 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781978806382

Book preview

Tower

Prologue

Taking Action: Asian American Faculty against Injustices in the Academy

SHIRLEY HUNE

Abstract

This study contextualizes the academy as a site of social change pressed to democratize through diversity, while at the same time the status quo of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other inequities persists in and outside of its institutions. From the mid-nineteenth century to the present, Asian Americans have carried out a long historic struggle for educational rights, access, and equal treatment through kindergarten through twelfth grade and higher education institutions in the United States. Focusing on the experiences of Asian American academic women since the 1970s as they oppose being construed as incompetent and strive to be treated justly and to advance through the faculty ranks, this prologue highlights their biased treatment as other faculty and not real academics, like white males, which contributes to their negative evaluations. These analyses provide a backdrop to examining the current struggles of Asian American women faculty for a more just academy. It features key pioneering Asian American faculty warriors of the 1980s, whose actions, such as litigating against their tenure and promotion denials, have forever changed how the academy must respond to racial and gender discrimination. The prologue brings to light Asian American contributions, including landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions, to advance civil and educational rights that benefit Americans and academics in general.

Misguided Stereotypes

Peoples of Asian descent, hereafter referred to as Asian Americans,¹ are presently the fastest growing racial or ethnic group in the United States. Even so, they are only about 6 percent of the nation’s population at present. Through mainstream culture, Asian Americans are stereotyped as hard workers, high achievers, and economically successful—a model minority group that, in this view, no longer encounters the racial discrimination of the past. In practice, this purportedly positive label is a double-edged sword. Asian Americans dispute being socially constructed as a model minority because of the characterization’s intended negative, divisive, and harmful consequences and in light of the enduring racism toward them, now often found in subtle forms of microaggressions instead of overt discrimination (Sue, Bucceri, et al., 2007). In addition, the stereotype can lead any group in the United States to consider all Asian Americans to be successful. In so doing, American society denies the realities of poor, underserved, and educationally disadvantaged Asian Americans, who may as a result experience disruptions to their civil rights and their access to opportunities, services, and resources. For example, many Asian American students are not provided with academic supports and services because educators perceive them as a model minority without academic needs, issues, or concerns (Lee & Zhou, 2015).

The bigoted view from a previous era of Asian Americans as a Yellow Peril and threat to U.S. society also continues in a more muted form (E. D. Wu, 2014). Still today many Asian Americans are treated as undeserving permanent foreigners and second-class citizens despite their birthright, citizenship, and contributions to the nation. The dominant group’s efforts to reframe Asian Americans as honorary or near whites does not make that true nor has the model minority stereotype ended racist policies and practices against them (Chou & Feagin, 2008; G. Li & Wang, 2008; F. H. Wu, 2002). Asian Americans find they are triangulated between Blacks (and other minority groups) and whites and oppose being pitted against other minorities with whom they share much in common in regard to social justice issues. This buffer position, they argue, serves to solidify the prevailing power structure as it manages majority–minority group relations to maintain racial and other hierarchies and is a detriment to Asian Americans in their everyday lives (Kim, 1999; Ng, Pak, & Hernandez, 2016).

The idea that Asian Americans are a quiet, hard-working, and docile people who do not rock the boat is a gross misunderstanding of their realities. Mostly, it is a narrow pigeonhole of desired behavior for employees that those in power prefer and reward in both educational and capitalist institutions, thus securing the privileged status of those at the top. Sometimes such behavior is a necessary strategy of minority groups and women for them to survive and persist in racialized and gendered situations where they have less power and are outnumbered (Banaji & Greenwald, 2013; Berdahl & Min, 2012). A fuller story of Asian American agency against injustice must include an analysis of Asian Americans’ oppositions to racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other inequities. This chapter highlights the Asian American fight for equity as part of a larger struggle for transforming educational institutions.

Fighting against Racism and Xenophobia for Educational Access and Rights

Asian Americans are a historically disadvantaged racial minority group. The discrimination that they face in education has a long and ugly history grounded in racism and xenophobia. Their educational environment has been consistently inhospitable, oftentimes hostile, and in stark contrast to the common belief that Asian Americans are somewhat advantaged in the education sphere. Early examples from kindergarten through twelfth grade (K–12) education shed light on racist practices and help explain the anger that Asian Americans feel when they are ceaselessly deprived of their dignity, civil rights, and access to education.

The historic but less known contribution of Asian Americans to the struggle of people of color to desegregate schools in the United States precedes the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision initiated by African Americans, as illustrated by examples from the efforts of Chinese Americans. From the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth century, while Chinese immigrant parents contributed to the nation’s development and paid taxes to support public schools, their American-born children were being denied access to them. Despite having limited civil rights as foreigners prevented from naturalizing as U.S. citizens, Chinese parents fought for decades to have their children educated by petitioning school boards and retaining lawyers to contest the legality of segregated schools. In a California Supreme Court decision (Tape v. Hurley, 1885), the middle-class Tape family in San Francisco won the right for their daughter Mamie to attend a public school with whites, but state officials and the local school board circumvented implementing the decision. Instead, by establishing the Chinese Primary School² that year for Chinese children, they were able to maintain racial separation in public schools for decades (Kuo, 1998; Ngai, 2010).

In the Mississippi Delta, the numbers of Chinese were very small; nonetheless, being neither Black nor white, they were caught in a dilemma in the Black/white binary of U.S. race relations. Which school could they attend? Schools for white children were accredited; schools for Black children were lacking by many standards. Jeu Gong Lum’s petition in 1924 for his daughters to attend the white school eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1927 Gong Lum v. Rice, the Court determined that because the Chinese could attend the public school for colored students, they were not being denied public schooling. With this decision, the U.S. Supreme Court expanded de jure racial segregation beyond African Americans to the Chinese, and another effort led by the Chinese to break school segregation by race failed (Berard, 2017).

In both cases in two different parts of the country and decades apart, officials based their findings on the separate but equal doctrine of the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court Plessy v. Ferguson decision that justified and reinforced Black–white segregation in public venues as part of Jim Crow practices. These landmark decisions reveal the willingness of Chinese immigrant parents to fight for their children’s education through the U.S. courts. (Cases involving other Asian groups followed.) They also exposed the extent to which American society sought to maintain and expand a policy of segregated schools by treating the Chinese, and subsequently other Asian groups, including the U.S.-born and hence citizens, as inferior and a danger to the nation, requiring racial separation from whites (Kuo, 1998; Low, 1982).

Only the reluctance of many communities to fund separate schools allowed Asian Americans to attend schools with whites. Nonetheless, some remained in segregated schools in parts of California and in Mississippi until the 1930s and 1950, respectively. Although school desegregation existed in principle after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, still today de facto racial segregation continues in practice, with many Asian Americans and other students of color attending predominantly minority public schools with low funding and poorly prepared teachers because of residential segregation based on income while wealthier and white parents choose to send their children to private schools (Lorgerie & Smith, 2015).

In 1970, Chinese Americans filed a class action suit in federal courts arguing that limited English proficient students were being denied equal opportunities to an education. It resulted in the 1974 U.S. Supreme Court Lau v. Nichols decision that recognized the rights of linguistic minorities to equal treatment in facilities, teachers, and curriculum. This groundbreaking ruling led to the establishment of bilingual and English learner programs in schools and was subsequently extended to people with disabilities and those requiring language assistance with social services, in voting, and in other areas to the benefit of Americans overall (Wang, 1976).

Consistently in the past and today, Asian American K–12 students, families, and community organizations raise their voices to teachers and school and public officials to address bullying, limited resources for English learners, the lack of culturally competent teachers, overly Eurocentric curriculum materials, too few Asian American teachers and staff, and the low priority given to school-community engagement, but their concerns are rarely heard and addressed (Coalition for Asian American Children and Families, 2004; Hune & Takeuchi, 2008; Pang & Cheng, 1998; Park, Endo, & Rong, 2009; Soodjinda, 2014). They also oppose Asian American youths being treated as model minorities with higher standards expected of them instead of recognizing student individuality and differences in abilities, interests, and behaviors. This stereotyping particularly fails to acknowledge disparities of family support given wide variances in income, parental education, and knowledge of the U.S. education system, especially among new Asian immigrants and refugees³ (Hune, 2015; Hune & Takeuchi, 2008; Lew, 2006; Louie, 2004; Park, Goodwin, & Lee, 2003).

Asian American educators call for recognition of socioeconomic differences among Asian Americans by ethnic group and within each ethnic group to enable economically and academically disadvantaged Asian American students, who tend to live in low-income communities with underfunded schools and staffing, to receive academic and financial supports. Moreover, many youths whose working-class parents have limited resources, English skills, and education have multiple family responsibilities unlike most middle-class families, such as babysitting, elder care support, translating for adults, and even helping out in small family businesses after school (Lew, 2006, Louie, 2004; Park et al., 2003).

Asian American demands for fair and unbiased treatment and to be viewed as individuals rather than as a falsely presumed homogeneous group and a model minority extends beyond K–12. They are also making known their anger and frustrations at having their inequities and concerns persistently ignored by authorities in higher education institutions and other entities.

The Academy in the Context of Social Change

From the 1880s until the mid-1940s, anti-Asian immigration restriction laws adopted by the U.S. government primarily against Asian male workers, and also categories of Asian women, limited new migration from Asia and curtailed family formation and new births as wives could not join husbands, and women tended not to migrate independently. Consequently, the Asian population in the United States diminished in the years prior to World War II. Given the small number of U.S.-born second-generation youths, poverty, racism, and the need for many of them to work to help support their families, there were few college-going Asian Americans before the 1960s, despite some who attended through the GI Bill as veterans. In contrast, the highly visible population growth of Asian Americans in recent decades and their diversity in national origin, ethnicity, and socioeconomic background are largely a result of more open U.S. immigration laws after 1965 and legislation after 1975 that assisted refugees from the U.S. wars in Southeast Asia to resettle in the United States. These legal changes over the past five decades have brought large numbers of Asians and Latinos into the country, and many of their youths are in today’s colleges and universities (E. Lee, 2015).

Asian Americans strive to achieve academically and to attend college both to fulfill their parents’ aspirations and sacrifices to make a better life for their families and to pursue the American Dream for themselves, like other Americans. Most Americans today view college as a necessary step to enter the middle class, and for racial minority groups, college degrees are even more important. Education is viewed by many people of color as a hedge against the persistent racism and xenophobia that continue to block their opportunities in the larger society; they may assume that additional degrees are essential if they are to be considered for the same position in the workforce held by whites with less education. For low-income Asian Americans, especially, some of whose parents came as refugees, limited economic resources and the lack of social networks can be debilitating. These conditions often contribute to students experiencing physical and mental health issues and poor academic performance and may lead them to decide not to attend college and, in some instances, to drop out of college. In short, first-generation college goers generally face more challenges in achieving academic success than the U.S.-born population and students from middle- and upper-class backgrounds (J. Lee & Zhou, 2015; Teranishi, 2010). Nearly 20 percent of Asian American and Pacific Islander first-time freshman students in the California State University system drop out before their third year of college (CSU Office of the Chancellor, 2016).

Like students of all backgrounds, many Asian American college students from the 1970s to the present day have been actively engaged in social justice struggles on and off campus. These include fighting for Asian American studies and more student diversity; for the rights of immigrants and the undocumented; against racial stereotyping and hate crimes; in support of faculty diversity hires and tenure; and for other issues (see chapter 4 of this volume; Ching & Agbayani, 2012; Museus, Maramba, & Teranishi, 2013; McEwen, Kodama, et al., 2001; on student support for faculty tenure, see Katayama, 2009; Matsuda, 2009; and Valverde, 2013).

Increasingly, some faculty, including Asian American faculty, are documenting the challenges they face as first-generation academics, namely, being the first of their family or ethnic group to obtain a doctorate and to work in the academy (Berry & Mizelle, 2006; Stockdill & Danico, 2012). Being the first and other factors affect Asian American women faculty as they navigate institutions whose campus cultures devalue them, privilege white male faculty, and normalize middle- and upper middle-class Eurocentric norms and mores.

My experience in the academy as a faculty member and academic administrator spans four decades. As a third-generation Chinese American, and the first member of my family to go to college, I met few Asian Americans who were undergraduates and even fewer who were graduate students in the 1960s and 1970s. It was a period of social activism and diversity efforts that included implementing affirmative action. Even as new campuses were being built during this time to incorporate the large numbers of baby boomers and to broaden access for women and minorities, there were few female and minority faculty, a result in part of the small numbers of those with doctorates who would be eligible for faculty positions.

The post–Civil Rights era on campuses was marked by antiwar protests against the U.S. militarization and bombing of Southeast Asia, student rallies against racism, and a feminist movement among graduate students and faculty. Demands for higher education reform focused on diversifying the academy through student admissions’ policies and practices, minority faculty hiring and retention, and new curriculum and degree-granting programs. People of color and women called for new methodologies, such as ethnic studies, women’s studies, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies, for example, to ensure that the views and experiences of marginalized groups were justly incorporated into mainstream teaching, courses, and research to diversify learning and to be more inclusive of the history and experiences of different communities within the nation’s heterogeneous population (Maher & Tetreault, 2007; Stockdill & Danico, 2012).

Not all Asian or Asian American faculty are scientists and engineers whose fields garner more acceptance in the academy than those in humanities and social science fields. In the groundswell of social change in the 1960s and 1970s, Asian Americans like myself and other faculty of color sought to make a difference through ethnic studies, women’s studies, and other interdisciplinary fields because these fields represent new ways of knowing, being, and doing that challenge dominant group approaches to knowledge and research. Others sought to change traditional disciplines to be more inclusive from within. Accordingly, Asian Americans view themselves and their scholarship as assets and not deficits in the academy. None are immune to being challenged as authentic scholars; however, those in the newer interdisciplinary fields (like Asian American studies) tend to face more scrutiny from traditional academics, as do Asian American scholars in traditional disciplines who may also find their research invalidated (Hune, 2011; G. Li & Beckett, 2006). Likewise, Asian American administrators, even at the highest level of president or chancellor, value their leadership skills and the services they provide to their institutions, which are too often questioned and underrecognized (Chen & Hune, 2011; Ching & Agbayani, 2012; Davis, Huang, et al., 2013).

There remains an ideal that higher education institutions function as a beacon of hope for the common good and the disadvantaged and as tools for expanding American democracy, but this ideal has yet to be met. Nonetheless, then as now, there were change agents, among them distinguished white male campus leaders, seeking to transform the academy into a more diverse, caring, and just place (Kerr, 1994).

The Academy as a Workplace and Pipeline

Higher education institutions are not simply places of learning. They are workplaces that mirror social hierarchies and contested politics. Global competition and the adoption of corporate models after the 1990s are having a noticeable impact on the academic workplace environment. Asking some faculty to do more with fewer resources, while retaining the power and privilege of others, has strained campus relations and governance. Wide-ranging demands from different groups of students, the public, and legislators are also disrupting institutions as administrators, students, faculty, and staff battle among themselves and with external political, economic, and social entities (Mettler, 2014; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004).

These additional pressures can exacerbate the negatives of the academic workplace environment for all faculty. Asian Americans are among the graduate students, postdocs, adjuncts, tenure-track and tenured faculty, and staff members who have supported tenure, unionization, and more family-friendly policies. To ensure a more humane academy, they have also challenged the unfair wage structure, especially for contingent faculty; resource allocation practices; deteriorating work conditions; and efforts to diminish health and retirement benefits (see, for example, chapters 2, 7, 8, and 13 in this volume; and Woo, 2000).

What has happened to the goals of creating more access and diversity and democratizing the academy in the contemporary political and fiscal climate? How have Asian American women been affected? Today’s campus battles suggest that as things change, much remains the same. Given the slow progress of campus diversification, many studies have questioned the lack of sincerity and the disingenuous practices on the part of institutions to increase the numbers of faculty of color and especially to retain them (Aguirre, 2000; De Welde & Stepnick, 2015; Gainen & Boice, 1993; Smith, Wolf, & Busenberg, 1996).

Educators often use the term pipeline as a metaphor to describe the progression of students as they move from K–12 to college and beyond. The major concern for the future of the workforce and the nation’s economy, as well as for individual gains, is that the large numbers of young people at the beginning of the pipeline are reduced significantly, being leaked out along the way, most notably at the points of college entry and completion. The term pipeline is also applied to faculty who also leak out as they advance through the ranks. This can begin with undergraduate and graduate students when a lack of courses pertaining to their interests and limited faculty support can marginalize Asian Americans and discourage them from pursuing a faculty career (see chapters 4, 5, and 6 of this volume). More leakage occurs at the faculty hiring stage, and later at the critical junctures of tenure and promotion, and beyond, resulting in few Asian American women full professors (Chen & Hune, 2011; Woo, 2000).

Pipeline data on faculty by race and by gender separately are easily available, but intersectional data by both race and gender are necessary to analyze the status of Asian American women, and these are not generally reported or even collected. Moreover, intersectional data would be most meaningful at the individual campus level, where advancement (or the lack of it) through the faculty ranks can be more precisely assessed, but institutions are reluctant to provide this information.

Intersectional faculty data findings raise questions of minimal advancement for Asian American women that demand investigation. In 2013, Asian American and Pacific Islander women faculty⁴ comprised 6 percent of assistant professors, 4 percent of associate professors, and 2 percent of full professors,⁵ compared with their Asian American male counterparts at 7, 7, and 7 percent, respectively. White women have made gains and were 38 percent of assistant professors (2 percent higher than white men), 34 percent of associate professors, and 26 percent of full professors. In contrast, white males were 36 percent of assistant professors but 44 percent and 58 percent of associate professors and full professors, respectively (National Center for Education Statistics, 2016). These statistics demonstrate that white men still dominate the professoriate as in the past, notably at the senior ranks. Other studies show that given the relatively higher rate of achieving tenure by white men than other groups, most of them are likely to continue to meet little resistance in the tenure and promotion process (chapter 2, this volume; Chen & Hune, 2011; Matthew, 2016).

As noted above, more Asian American men than Asian American women are tenured and eventually promoted to full professor. While white women show a decline in representation in rank from assistant to full professor (38 to 26 percent), the rate of decline is far more severe for Asian American women. Their representation was two-thirds less at the senior level, being 6 percent of assistant professors but only 2 percent of full professors in 2013 (National Center for Education Statistics, 2016). This suggests that Asian American women are underrepresented by race and by gender as faculty and that tenure denial is a critical juncture point where their pipeline is severely constricted.⁶ This is consistent with other findings (Chen & Hune, 2011; Yeung, 2015). Given that since the 1980s, women students are matriculating in college at higher rates than their male counterparts, can it be that women, including women of color, such as Asian Americans, are that much less competent than white males? Or are there systematic biases and barriers that structurally engineer this leakage of qualified women in the faculty pipeline? I expand further in the next section.

Asian Americans, like other women faculty of color, seek a permanent place in the academy. They oppose being treated as expendable (part of the revolving door of diversity hires who are not retained). They also reject their critical leakage from the pipeline, while being faulted for not being good enough to be tenured (Gutiérrez y Muhs, Niemann, et al., 2012; Huang, 2013; Woo, 2000). Without a firm footing in the institution in numbers or power, Asian American women are seen as more easily disposable than nonminority faculty at any time (chapter 2, this volume; Huang, 2013).

Faculty diversity is about both representation and the many ways that a diverse faculty contribute to academe. It is also about faculty of color and women enjoying the same kinds of support and resources that dominant group members experience daily to succeed. Asian American women are not an anomaly in the academy but an integral and important component of educational institutions.

The Persistent Adverse Campus Climate for Asian American Women

There have been more than four decades of analyses of gender discrimination in the academy. The groundbreaking chilly climate studies of the 1980s identified gender biases and patterns of behavior that isolated women in the academy (Hall & Sandler, 1984; Sandler & Hall, 1986). Peggy McIntosh’s (1988/1997) account of white privilege and male privilege that diminishes women’s hiring, advancement, and well-being is regularly taught in many disciplines on campuses still today. These studies reveal discriminatory actions that mirror those documented throughout the history of U.S. education, although current exclusionary tactics, such as racial and gender microaggressions, are often subtler and hence require different approaches to prove (Lin, 2010; Sue et al., 2007).

Studies on Asian American women faculty have discussed how their experiences differ from those of white women faculty.⁷ Asian American women are constantly navigating multiple intersecting hierarchies of race, ethnicity, nationality, class, skin color, accent, and other biases with gender stereotypes. They are seen in personal terms as racialized sexual stereotypes: passive/demure (good worker) or exotic/erotic (sexual objects subject to sexual harassment) or a dragon lady, a negative term to stigmatize strong, confident females, often in leadership positions, who are viewed as too assertive and hence dangerous to the status quo (Cho, 1997; Hune, 1998, 2011; P. Li, 2014;). These images have been popularized and amplified in theater productions, films, and television (Parreñas Shimizu, 2007).

The model minority and perpetual foreigner stereotypes further define Asian American women as different and heighten both their invisibility and hypervisibility. When white male peers are considered traditional, normal, or real faculty, Asian American women, even those who may be second- or third-generation American and speak only English, are deemed foreign. When their race and ethnicity are considered liabilities in the classroom rather than as assets to be valued for the expertise they bring, Asian American women are marginalized as other or not regular faculty (Ho, 2002; G. Li & Beckett, 2006; TuSmith, 2002). Faculty who are deemed other report that their teaching, research interests, and publications are severely scrutinized. They and their scholarship are often delegitimized by being termed nontraditional (chapter 7, this volume; De Welde & Stepnick 2015; Fryberg & Martínez, 2014; Gutiérrez y Muhs et al., 2012; Hune, 2011; Vargas, 2002).

Departments can be dismissive of the scholarly work of faculty of color because it is less known to so-called traditional faculty, despite being positively recognized by other experts in and outside of their disciplines. This has been shown to be harmful to Asian American women in tenure and promotion reviews. Also, institutions still rarely compensate faculty of color for assisting their campuses with diversity work. Such services, often mandated by law and campus mission statements, are extra demands on them and more accurately seen as unpaid labor (chapter 10, this volume). This practice only advantages the far more numerous regular (white male) faculty, giving them more time to develop their careers. Asian American women faculty, then as now, are suspect because their racialized, ethnic, and gendered persons, teaching, research interests, and commitment to use their expertise to benefit their communities differ from what supposedly real faculty do and, therefore, are considered less significant (Ho, 2002; Hune, 1998, 2011; G. Li & Beckett, 2006; TuSmith, 2002).

Research literature on Asian American women records their efforts to be taken seriously as academics. How is it that they are judged to be less competent and unworthy of being hired, tenured, or promoted when their academic credentials and scholarly work are comparable to and, many times, even superior to those of their white male and female peers? Why is it acceptable to view them as sexual objects and not as subjects with intellect? (Cho, 1997; Hune, 1998, 2011; G. Li & Beckett, 2006). Some findings also document their denigration and abuse by colleagues and campus authorities when Asian American women seek fair, equal, and transparent treatment in review processes (Cho, 1997; Duncan, 2014; Loo & Ho, 2006; Valverde, 2013).

Quality of teaching is often used in cases of tenure and promotion denials. However, the primary sources to assess teaching are evaluations by peers and students, both of which have been shown to be problematic in general but especially in terms of their gender bias (Flaherty, 2016; MacNell, Driscoll, & Hunt, 2014; Subtirelu, 2015). Yet, despite research that shows the unreliability of student evaluations, institutions still weigh them heavily in tenure and promotion reviews when they are a known detriment to a fair faculty review for women overall and notably for women of color. For example, students have been known to penalize Asian faculty with mixed or low ratings when the instructor is not behaving in ways that fit their stereotype of Asian American women, such as being compliant⁸ (Boring, Ottoboni, & Stark, 2016; Flaherty, 2016; Hune, 2011; G. Li & Beckett, 2006).

Asian American women are similarly penalized in a range of administrative positions, including serving on university committees. Those who speak out, critique, or voice an opinion are often dismissed and even punished, while the same critique or opinion expressed by a white man or woman or a man of color would be seen as a demonstration of leadership qualities. These experiences have a chilling effect on Asian American women and other women of color seeking positions of responsibility in academia and are further examples of how the existing power structure confirms the Western, white, and male manner of communicating and leading as the norm and diminishes women’s ways and contributions.

An American Council on Education report (Davis et al., 2013) has called attention to the scarcity of Asian American and Pacific Islander Americans in higher education leadership and how their leadership qualities (falsely presumed to be too different from the white male norm to be effective) go unrecognized. It also highlights the ways in which both groups can be undervalued and undermined in the hierarchical path in the academy toward administrative leadership and even within campus presidencies (chapter 14, this volume). Here again is evidence of a leaky pipeline and glass or bamboo ceiling that Asian Americans face in the academy, challenging the assumption that they are a success story and a model minority (Woo, 2000).

What has changed, if anything, after decades of studies detailing women’s unequal treatment in the academy? As noted in the previous section, the gender gap for white women faculty is closing, but the gains are modest for Asian American women, especially given the roadblock at tenure and again at promotion to full professor. Overt racism and sexism have been replaced by subtle nuances of discriminatory behavior. Research studies on microaggressions, for example, explain some of the less visible insults and inequities that Asian Americans experience with regularity, but the overall unwelcoming campus culture remains the primary problem (Guzman, Trevino, et al., 2010; Lin, 2010; Sue et al., 2007).

New terminology also seeks to justify unequal treatment. The concept that bias is unconscious or implicit has gained favor to explain away discriminatory actions. The term unconscious bias implies that dominant group members are not necessarily biased against an outgroup, that is, they are not racist, sexist, or xenophobic; they are simply unintentionally favoring their own ingroup (Banaji & Greenwald, 2013; Greenwald & Pettigrew, 2014). Regardless of the explanations, the consequences are the same for faculty of color: real faculty are privileged, advantaged, and advanced. In their positions of power, they determine the fate of others. In turn, Asian American women are too often judged unacceptable to be hired, tenured, and further advanced in the pipeline, and the status quo is preserved (Chen & Hune, 2011; Woo, 2000).

Faculty Warriors: Breaking the Silence, Fighting against Injustices

My (very small) generation of Asian American faculty are retired or near retiring; a few have died. Some were forced out in tenure denials. Others left pre-tenure, and some even left post-tenure. Some found productive academic lives at more supportive institutions. Others chose careers outside of academe. But there were and continue to be a special group of bold and brave faculty warriors who resist their campus efforts to deny them tenure, promotion, and other opportunities to advance. In pursuing legal action against the academy with its significant financial and legal resources, time on its side, and a tradition of defending its practices, including denying the possibility of bias and unjust treatment even when presented with evidence to the contrary, faculty warriors face formidable challenges. They jeopardize their professional mobility and bear monetary and emotional costs to their careers, families, and personal lives, including their health. In some cases, the administration may claim that any denial or other lack of advancement, including merit recognition, with their concomitant financial remuneration, is based on the faculty member’s failure or incompetence and may exert shaming and even labeling someone as crazy for standing up for themselves or others (Duncan, 2014; Loo & Chun, 2002; Loo & Ho, 2006; Nakanishi, 2009; Valverde, 2013). They are, therefore, courageous to do so.

The hiring and retaining of Asian American faculty have been a concern of Asian Americans since they first entered the professoriate. While there are many cases of Asian American faculty who are fighting for their rights presently or whose cases have been recently resolved, for this study I have chosen to focus on four historic cases from the 1980s that (1) show that Asian Americans have long been faculty warriors who fight for their rights and are not passive nor silent; (2) reflect biases and structural issues that continue to plague Asian American faculty today; (3) highlight how their struggles have laid significant groundwork for the rights and benefit of all faculty; and (4) bring attention to continuing injustices despite more than four decades of diversity and other reform efforts in higher education institutions.

The tenure and promotion cases of Jean Jew, Rosalie Tung, Marcy Wang, and Don Nakanishi (three women and a man) were highly publicized at the time and resonate with similar cases today.⁹ They demonstrate that little has changed for current faculty in terms of bias toward the individual, the subjectivity of many departmental and institutional reviewers, violations in procedures, and abusive actions toward Asian American academics in their reviews. They also reveal the inclination of institutions to stonewall and drag out legal actions even as it becomes increasingly apparent that the Asian American scholar has been wronged in her or his tenure and promotion denial. Most important, the cases show the willingness and bravery of Asian Americans to fight back against recalcitrant senior faculty and administrators and their powerful, well-funded institutions that aim to punish them for seeking to advance and even to reject them from the academy through negative tenure and promotion decisions.

In each case, the institution concluded that the faculty member’s national origin, race, gender, research focus, community interests, demeanor, and other personal attributes and their publications, professional activities, and reputation were inappropriate and inadequate for tenure or promotion and lacked importance. In each case, the faculty member was the solo or among the very few Asian Americans or females in the department during all or most of their time there. Being marginalized and tokenized, they were more easily disposable. In each case, the faculty member challenged the decision knowing that their scholarly record deserved tenure or promotion, had the support of external reviewers, and were comparable to or even exceeded the cases of their white male peers.

The legal actions of the four Asian American faculty discussed subsequently reveal institutional biases against them based on race, sex, or their research interests, methodologies, and publications. Their original research, even those studies funded by federal grants, largely because they pertained to racial and ethnic communities or other nonmainstream or less valued topics, were deemed not of significance. In addition to secrecy and a lack of transparency in the review process, there were major procedural errors in the ways in which campuses handled the reviews. The Asian American faculty in these historic instances and their dossiers were treated differently, more critically, from those of white male faculty, similar to what present-day faculty often find in their recent and current evaluations. Each case took years to finalize, and took a toll on the faculty member, but ultimately was decided in each faculty person’s favor or was concluded with a substantial financial settlement.

Jean Jew was tenured in the Anatomy Department at the University of Iowa in 1978 and was the only female faculty for many years but was turned down for promotion to professor in 1983. She had endured years of a fractured department where some faculty, especially a senior member, were actively hostile to her, in part, because she was a productive scholar and sought to advance. She was also demeaned and referred to in racist sexualized terms (stupid slut, whore, Chinese pussy), and negative comments were written about her on the wall of the faculty men’s room. Such hostile actions sought to keep Jew in a more submissive place (Cho, 1997; Woo, 2000).

She pursued actions against the university through the U.S. District Court of Southern Iowa and other courts. In 1990, the institution was ordered to promote her to full professor retroactively (relatively unprecedented) with back pay and benefits and to pay her attorney fees ($895,000). But it was only after community outrage and a national appeal effort by the Jean Jew Justice Committee organized primarily by women colleagues to publicize her abusive work environment that the university finally ceased defending her harassers and paying for their legal expenses. Jean Jew stayed at the University of Iowa. As part of her settlement, it was required that the university administration meet with Jew annually to ensure that her work conditions were acceptable to her (Cho, 1997; Woo, 2000).

Jean Jew brought into the open one of the first cases of a hostile work environment in academe, a situation generally grounded in white male privilege and norms. She also exposed a level of race hate and misogyny against an Asian American woman that exceeded so-called locker room behavior. Her case also showed the power of going public and that the support of colleagues is meaningful to achieve justice. It also revealed, however, the willingness of administrators to use university funds to continue to defend perpetrators, thus reinforcing their privilege and prolonging injustice.

Hostile work environments and sexual harassment for women, especially for women of color, remain far too common in any workplace and are under addressed by campus administrators. With the #MeToo movement, more women are speaking out and are being believed. Hence, greater attention is being given to sexual harassment and assaults primarily against women in all spheres of life, locally and globally, carried out mainly by powerful men who are protected by institutional and gendered practices. Nonetheless, the grievances of Asian American and other women of unacceptable mistreatment aimed at driving them out of the academy are still mired in secrecy. For them, justice is slow and delayed.

Justice for all faculty would be even more difficult to achieve were it not for Rosalie Tung, whose case has forever changed how the academy operates its tenure practices. Initially, her tenure review in the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business was proceeding well given her strong record and distinguished reputation, but it became mired in additional procedures beyond what was considered normal. Subsequently, Tung was denied tenure in 1984, and she concluded that the denial could not have been caused by her scholarly work. She took an unprecedented action and filed a charge of discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission based on race, sex, and national origin as a Chinese American woman (Cho, 1997; Woo, 2000).

Prior to Rosalie Tung’s action, tenure decisions throughout academe were held in secret, with confidential materials compiled by the department; the faculty member was denied access to her or his own file. Some items in the dossier could be false, unsolicited, missing, and even added or deleted after the submission deadline. Because Tung’s charge was one of discriminatory or differential treatment, the U.S. Supreme Court opposed the university’s argument of the need to preserve confidentiality. In its 1990 decision (University of Pennsylvania v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission), the university was required to release to Tung her confidential file, those of five white male faculty subsequently tenured in her department for comparison, committee deliberations, and related documents for any appeal. Henceforth, all universities must disclose the confidential tenure materials of a complainant and other faculty for comparability in an employment discrimination charge (Cho, 1997; Minami, 2009; Woo, 2000).

In gaining access to her dossier, Tung found it to be fraught with procedural violations and distorted with added negative letters and inappropriate comments about her race, gender, and national origin, part of a backlash from the chair (another case of sexual harassment), who was rebuffed by Tung when he sought a personal relationship with her. In short, her file had been manipulated to boost the department’s tenure denial decision without her knowledge. Later Tung uncovered evidence suggesting that the Wharton School did not value research work on China, an area of her expertise, despite the recognition of the importance of her work by other scholars. She concluded that people of Asian descent and research pertaining to Asia, despite being important elsewhere, were considered expendable in her department. Before the Supreme Court decision was concluded, however, Tung had been terminated. She was immediately hired by the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1986, where her research was recognized, and she has continued an outstanding career there and elsewhere (Cho, 1997; Woo, 2000).

In seeking justice through the courts, Rosalie Tung forced universities to adopt more open, impartial, and consistent review processes that benefit all faculty (see subsequent discussion about Nakanishi). Academics in general have yet to fully recognize how Tung’s actions have gained them more rights and transparency in decision making in the academy. Although this ruling set a precedent in faculty rights of access and procedures, institutions can still find ways to include biased materials in their review files.

Marcy Wang joined the Department of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1979 and soon learned it had a reputation of sexism and favoritism that isolated minority and female faculty and created a chilly climate for both students and faculty. Because she supported minority and women students and their issues, some of her colleagues determined Wang to be uncollegial, a highly subjective and politicized term in academia that is too often used to justify termination. The department declared she lacked presence or leadership skills, despite strong and verified documentation of her professional and research distinction on and off the campus.¹⁰ The evidence in her dossier, only later disclosed to her as part of her legal action, demonstrated to the contrary and that the department’s views of Wang as lacking were unsubstantiated and even biased. As with Jew and Tung, Wang’s solid record, positive external letters of accomplishments, and grants did not matter. Instead her file was deliberately skewed with questionable unsolicited letters to defend the department’s decision to dismiss her (Cho, 1997; Woo, 2000).

Marcy Wang was denied tenure in 1986. Her appeal was rife with obstructionist procedural errors. She waged a decade-long struggle for justice involving seven years of grievance procedures through university channels to no avail. During this time, she left academe for private practice and pursued action in the courts for another three years, with the goal of changing the institution’s hostile work environment, declaring it was the worst she had ever experienced. Like Jew, Wang eventually won a court victory in 1995 and a record $1 million settlement in a lawsuit based on race and gender discrimination as an Asian American woman (Cho, 1997; Woo, 2000).

Marcy Wang’s decision to leave the academy was a loss given the few Asian Americans in her field, but her substantial financial settlement was a clear indication that the campus was in error in her regard. The campus had gambled on winning by dragging out her appeal but ultimately lost and paid a penalty in compensation, a lesson for all institutions, who apparently are willing to expend their financial resources in defending their evaluation process and the status quo of racial and gender bias, although retaining talented faculty ought to be in their best interest for students, teaching, and research.

Jew, Tung, and Wang fought their battles within established disciplines in the academy. In contrast, Don Nakanishi’s¹¹ three-year (1986–1989) fight against his tenure denial at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), became a landmark case for the institutional recognition of the interdisciplinary field of Asian American studies. Because he was an academic leader in an emerging field, which some still today find less worthy than older disciplines, had Nakanishi been denied tenure, it would have jeopardized the legitimacy of Asian American studies and present and future students and faculty. Although others before him in Asian American studies (and other ethnic studies programs) at UCLA and elsewhere had been denied tenure and left academe, Nakanishi took on the risky challenge not to be the next one and fought back (Minami, 2009; Nakanishi, 2009).

Nakanishi came to UCLA in the mid-1970s as a national leader of the emerging Asian American studies field at a time when campus leadership had stated its support for student and faculty diversity publicly and was dedicating resources to develop four ethnic studies centers to support research on African Americans, American Indians, Asian Americans, and Chicanos. With degrees from Yale and Harvard (including a doctorate in political science), he first held various staff, teaching, and researcher positions in the 1970s through which he supported the development of Asian American studies on campus and nationally (Ishizuka, 2009).

Nakanishi was an activist as well as a scholar reflecting the social activism of the day. Using his expertise, he challenged the campus on equity and diversity matters—for example, its admission practices toward Asian Americans that he suggested limited their numbers.¹² This brought unwanted attention to UCLA and complicated his relationship with campus leaders and many faculty. Subsequently, he was appointed to a tenure-track position in education and Asian American studies in the Graduate School of Education. He was recommended for tenure by his department in 1986 but was denied by the dean the next year. The chancellor defended the dean’s decision, despite the overtly positive votes of Nakanishi’s department in support of his tenure and promotion through five grievance procedures (Ishizuka, 2009; Nakanishi, 2009).

A civil rights advocate (his Japanese American parents were in internment camps during World War II), Nakanishi and his legal team launched both a legal case and a national political campaign of letters and petitions to oppose his tenure denial.¹³ Rosalie Tung’s Supreme Court ruling enabled Nakanishi to gain access to his dossier. It revealed racial bias against his person (fat Jap, dumb Jap) and procedural errors. The national campaign in his defense was a testament to Asian American political empowerment. The size, scope, and collective actions across the country of Asian American studies faculty and students, community organizations, the media, California state legislators, local officials, alumni, and donors (some aimed to withhold large sums of funds from UCLA) were unprecedented (Ishizuka, 2009; Katayama, 2009; Matsuda, 2009; Minami, 2009; Nakanishi, 2009).

With this mounting pressure, the UCLA chancellor in 1989 promoted Don Nakanishi to associate professor with retroactive tenure to July 1988, providing him with back pay and benefits, a recognition of unjust behavior on the part of the institution. In so doing, UCLA acknowledged the validity and worth of the new interdisciplinary field of Asian American studies. It also recognized Nakanishi as a positive campus force, one whose ideas and actions on behalf of Asian American issues, greater inclusion for all racial and ethnic groups, and related social justice issues were not to be feared. Sadly, after Nakanishi’s case was settled, many on campus acted as if all the abusive efforts to exclude him had not happened. And, ironically, as a tenured associate professor, he was eligible for an administrative position. The campus now recognized his leadership and the potential of Asian American studies and appointed Nakanishi the director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center (AASC).¹⁴ Over two decades (1990–2010), he developed the center into the largest teaching and research unit of its kind in the nation and raised millions of dollars in endowment, research, and scholarship funds for UCLA and the AASC. His leadership and contributions would have been lost to UCLA had he been denied tenure and forced to leave (Amerasia Journal, 2009).

Despite the demonstrated value of Asian American faculty to their institutions and the actions of many faculty warriors, little has changed over four decades. Asian American women faculty (and men) still seek to be viewed as real and authentic academics like their white male counterparts (and, increasingly, their white female colleagues) and to have their person and scholarship respected. When Asian American women are eliminated as competitors and pushed out of academe, others, namely, majority group members, are most likely to benefit, as evident in the U.S. Department of Education statistics (National Center for Education Statistics, 2016) that I provided earlier.

Restricting the number of Asian American tenured faculty has repercussions further along the pipeline. Fewer of them are eligible to assume administrative positions where they can provide insights, expertise, and leadership. In 2016, of the more than 4,000 U.S. campuses, only seventeen were led by Asian American female chancellors or presidents, and they were almost exclusively at two-year institutions.¹⁵ The impediments that Asian Americans encounter have been termed a glass or a bamboo ceiling with institutional and systemic barriers that severely block their career mobility in the academy and other professions (Gee & Yamagata-Noji, 2016; Huang & Yamagata-Noji, 2010; Woo, 2000).

Fight the Tower: Asian American Women Scholar’s Resistance and Renewal in the Academy, edited by Kieu Linh Caroline Valverde and Wei Ming Dariotis, provides a fresh framework, empirical studies, narratives, and poetry on the contemporary experiences and struggles of Asian American academic women. The authors represent a generation of scholars who entered the academy following decades of endeavors to diversify the student body, faculty, curriculum, and fields of study, yet they find little progress. They are the new Jean Jew, Rosalie Tung, Marcy Wang, and Don Nakanishi. For the most part, they have only known a retreat from support for equity issues, shrinking fiscal resources, and a politically contested campus environment that questions the democratic ideal of greater inclusion of disadvantaged groups and the value of courses, pedagogy, and research that seek to rebalance biases and omissions in mainstream studies.

In a powerful introduction chapter, Kieu Linh Valverde and Wei Ming Dariotis provide a new theoretical model—social engineering—to explain the persistence of the socially constructed model minority stereotype and other biases and actions that harm Asian American women and their academic careers. Their analysis of Asian American women scholars as the privileged oppressed, that is, viewed as successful from outside the academy given their education and titles but rendered as less competent as well as subjugated and sometimes harassed within it, expands the discussion on how and why talented women can be positioned to be disposable in the revolving door of institutional diversity. Identifying their actions to fight back for justice and equity is a woke moment for Asian American women, the editors explain, and is exemplified in this volume and other venues.

The anthology is rich in details of and by courageous Asian American women. They include students who protest, organize, and even hold hunger strikes, to get their campus to respond to their grievances, and faculty who are emboldened to take legal action to be treated fairly in tenure and promotion cases to gain their rightful place in the academy. As a new group of warriors speaking out and fighting back against stereotypes, unjust policies and practices, and institutional violations that seek to derail their goals and success, they challenge the image of Asian American women as docile. Different groups of Asian American women share their strategies and choices for more fulfilling lives and make recommendations for a humane academic environment for women faculty and students overall.

Fight the Tower is also a wake-up call to academia. It offers alternatives for building higher education institutions that will treat the intellectual labor of faculty and students with dignity and humanity, especially that of those most marginalized in academe. It also calls on institutions to hear and act on their concerns. The academy needs to listen to students who seek courses, degree-granting programs, and faculty that are inclusive of the nation’s diversity and a fair allocation of institutional resources to which they and their families directly and indirectly through taxes have contributed tuition funds. And, given the investment made in graduate training, the revolving door of female faculty of color is a waste of institutional resources and a loss of a valuable talent pool. Moreover, great professional and personal harm is done to too many distinguished scholars who are required to jump over high hurdles. Those who choose other careers or who are limited in advancement deprive the academy and the nation of their contributions as teachers, researchers, and leaders.

This volume is a significant contribution to the study of Asian Americans taking action against inequalities in the U.S. educational system. The chapters call for new research and policies to reform the academy and to address biases, penalizing practices, and the high cost of litigation for persons involved and their institutions in light of the many cases of tenure and promotion denial that are clearly unjust and are later overturned. Most important, in raising the level of analysis, Fight the Tower powerfully breaks the silence of the mistreatment of Asian American academics as students and faculty and demonstrates the agency of Asian American women in defying injustices in higher education