2020 Annual Report

Our founders’ sentiment that faculty diversity has been “too little for too long” is as frustratingly relevant today as it was 20 years ago. Whiteness still reigns a generation later, soothed by the “tranquilizing drug of gradualism” that is higher education’s hallmark. We have certainly made progress, but race is the inexorable force of American history; its gravity is inescapable. Last year, we recognized that however well-meaning, COACHE has often been complicit in sharing the deficit narrative that leads to faculty policies and programs designed to “fix” minoritized faculty, not the broken structures that exclude so many of them. We implored our partners and prospective partners to enlist COACHE data and engage white faculty in becoming aware of and exercising their privilege to reform recruitment, workloads, rewards, recognitions, and departures.

In our 2019 Year in Review, we promised to sharpen our faculty welfare and equity work. “We are more emboldened than ever,” we wrote, “to spotlight uncomfortable insights about the ways in which our colleges and universities preserve the status quo.” Despite a year of calamities—some felt very personally—our team delivered on this promise across all four domains of COACHE’s research practice partnership.

This Year in Review captures how COACHE is reclaiming what we came here for. But are we satisfied? Of course not. As we listen to, learn from, and lift up our most marginalized partners, scholars, and allies, we will lean on higher education’s interests to expose and eliminate inequities, to interrogate parochial definitions of excellence, and to advance a more just and inclusive academy. We are unwilling to postpone these goals, and we choose to do these things together “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”