A Tenure Project Conference attendee asks a question during the Dean's Panel at the Tenure Project Conference last week at USC Marshall. (USC Photo / Grayson Adler)
One thing noticeably missing in Zachariah Berry's undergraduate classrooms: Professors who looked like him.
A second-generation Mexican American, Berry grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, where his experience often felt far different from the faculty at his small liberal arts school. As he pursued higher degrees at more elite institutions - including a PhD in Organizational Behavior at Cornell University - doubts inevitably crept in: Could he do it? Were PhDs actually possible for students like him?
Berry joined The PhD Project during his second year at Cornell. He found a community of people with similar identities and struggles and a support system to push him through. PhD in tow, he joined the faculty of University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business just a month and a half ago.
His tenure clock started that very moment. Now, similar doubts are starting to bubble up again.
Zachariah Berry
"The tenure process is difficult and enigmatic for everyone, no matter who you are. But, when you look at the people who do have tenure, especially in my own field, many of them don't look like me or have the background I have. That starts to introduce concerns," says Berry, an assistant professor of management and organization.
Last week, he attended the third annual conference of The Tenure Project, this one hosted by his new employer, USC Marshall. Much like the PhD Project, the goal is to close the tenure gap for Black, Latinx, and Native American faculty in U.S. business schools.
"Something like The Tenure Project, where there are other Hispanic people on the same journey, it's really inspiring and empowering," he tells Poets&Quants.
The Tenure Project was founded in 2021 by two professors, Wendy de la Rosa of University of Pennsylvania's The Wharton School and Esther Uduehi of University of Washington's Foster School of Business. Both are past winners of our 50 Best Undergraduate Professors awards, Uduehi in 2022, and Rosa in 2023.
The USC Marshall School of Business has been a gold sponsor of the project since the beginning, and last week it hosted the project's third annual conference - the first non-founding school to do so. The conference attracted 65 senior faculty and 114 junior faculty from around the country. (It would have been more but a number of attendees were tied up in the disastrous CrowdStrike update for Microsoft that canceled flights around the world.)
"When I first heard about The Tenure Project, I thought, 'Obviously. Why has this not existed before?'" says Sarah Townsend, vice dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion as well as associate professor of management and organization. She led the charge to bring the conference to Marshall as well as the planning committee that organized it.
Sarah Townsend
"Getting into a PhD program and finishing a PhD program is hard, but so is tenure. It is such an important initiative because it offers junior faculty from U.S, business schools a space to come together, build community, and address issues that affect Black, Latinx and Indigenous faculty as they pursue tenure. This group of folks is going to have all the hurdles to pass that everyone else does, as well as a whole different set of hurdles."
At the conference, USC Marshall's Shaun Harper, professor of business, education and public policy, welcomed attendees by reminding them that beyond a professional milestone, tenure gives one power to help shape the vision of their institutions.
Several of the sessions focused on building community and connection, a focus for Townsend in designing this year's conference.
"Tenure is an individual pursuit - no one else can write those papers and teach those classes. But it is also equally true that no one gets tenure alone," Townsend says. "You do it with supportive mentors and sponsors and co authors and just friends."
Business school deans, professors, and admission directors are often quick to profess their school's commitment to DEI. B-school classrooms should rightly reflect the diversity of the communities they serve, and diversity of thought -- of learning from and listening to people with viewpoints and backgrounds that are different from your own -- better prepares students for increasingly globalized workplaces.
But not every b-school practices what it preaches, at least when it comes to tenure.
In a 2021 report, the AACSB (the main accreditation body for business schools) found that in U.S. b-schools, less than 4% of faculty are Black, less than 3% are Hispanic, and just 0.3% are Native American. That compares to an undergraduate student body that is about 8.6% Black and 16% Hispanic, and a U.S. population that is about 36% underrepresented minority.
In their research to organize the first Tenure Project conference in 2022, Rosa and Uduehi found that just about 150 scholars currently employed in pre-tenure faculty positions at U.S. business schools are Black, Latinx, or Indigenous.
Tenure is an intense and stress-inducing process for everyone. It is a years-long scrutiny of everything a professor contributes to their field and institution: The volume, quality, and impact of their research. Their teaching and institutional service. How other scholars judge their work, reputation, and influence.
But, junior faculty from underrepresented groups often must overcome other challenges as well.
Sarah Townsend, Vice Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion opens the Tenure Project Conference at USC Marshall. (USC Photo / Brian Morri)
The Imposter Syndrome Berry describes is a big one: Having few mentors or role models that look like you or understand your experience, and feeling like it's not the path for you.
How one's background informs their research questions and interests is another. "You study things that you observe in your environment and that you think are important, but if you're in the minority, then the discipline as a whole might see that as very niche. That can be harder to publish and make your case," Townsend says.
Minority faculty also often have more students of similar backgrounds seeking mentorship than non-minority faculty simply because there are fewer of them to go around. Rewarding, sure, but it also takes up time that could be spent on research.
Similar requests may often come from the business schools themselves.
"One of the challenges some of my peers talk about is getting asked to do more school service than other junior faculty. It comes with a great intention of making sure diverse voices are heard, but that can certainly add up quickly, especially if you are one of, if not the only, person of color in your department," Berry says.
Geoff Garrett, USC Marshall's Robert R. Dockson Dean's Chair in Business Administration, from left, moderates the Dean's Panel with Ian Williamson, Dean,University of California, Irvine Paul Merage School of Business; and Frank Hodge, Dean,University of Washington Foster School of Business. (USC Photo / Grayson Adler)
The community Berry built and nurtured at the conference was one of the most valuable parts of the experience, he says. They started WhatsApp groups, and there was talk of starting an informal writer's group on Zoom just to hold themselves accountable. Not a lot of talking, but just to have someone there to keep you on task while working through research or other projects.
Another highlight: Sessions organized by discipline and institution type - R1 Research universities versus a teaching-focused university - to help faculty wade through different tenure expectations. It helped Berry better understand the process for management and organization professors at a big research university like Marshall. His peers asked questions he wouldn't have thought to ask.
For his own research, Berry is interested in morality and ethics - why good people do wrong, how our relationships can corrupt us in subtle ways. He believes things like The Tenure Project are important not only to help people like him get published and stay on track, but for the schools themselves.
"As we continue to diversify the student body - which is amazing - you absolutely need diversification of faculty. As a 17 or 18 year old going to college, having an Hispanic business professor would have hit me very differently. Just to see that can be really really empowering," Berry says.
"At Marshall, we're training individuals, these young undergraduates, to be the next business leaders, to create organizations, and to lead existing ones. I think it's really important to ensure that every student, especially those from historically underrepresented backgrounds, feel empowered to create and to join these massive endeavors that many of their other peers are going to."