Image: Leigh-Anne Francis
Leigh-Anne Francis wishes she had listened to her pregnant wife, who begged her not to leave the house that night. She could have been at home putting the finishing touches on her syllabi and lecture notes, instead of handcuffed to a bench at a local police station.
It was August 29, 2013, the night before the start of the fall semester at the State University of New York College at Oneonta, a midsize public college in the picturesque foothills of the Catskill Mountains. Francis, a Jamaican-born professor fresh out of graduate school, was prepping for her first lectures when she decided to make a late run to pick up Thai take-out. She was excited about starting her new tenure-track job in black studies and U.S. history at Oneonta—one she had landed months before earning a Ph.D. in history from Rutgers University. (I studied history at Rutgers, too, and I took a few courses with Francis.) Francis and her wife Jenny, who is white, had moved from northern New Jersey just six days earlier.
At around 9:30 p.m., as Francis was heading home with her food, a pair of state troopers pulled her over. She had been driving 41 miles per hour, over the speed limit of 30, near an underpass on State Highway 28. As one trooper ran her license through a computer, her anxiety grew. Because Francis wears suits and ties and is often misidentified as a black man, she expects to be racially profiled and stopped by the police.
A long 30 minutes passed. Another police vehicle pulled up. “This doesn’t look good,” Francis mumbled to herself.
When the trooper approached her car again, Francis says, he ordered her to step outside. Francis says she didn’t know why. “I panicked,” she says. “Without thinking, I locked the car door. It was an entirely futile attempt to protect myself. In retrospect I know it was a stupid move.”
It was only later, she says, that she was told why the traffic stop had turned more serious: Her license had been suspended in New York State, due to a 2002 ticket for driving with a broken headlight. Francis had failed to appear in court to respond to a summons for that violation. The summons, she said, must have gotten lost in the mail. (Dennis R. Nayor, chief of the Oneonta Police Department, said he was not aware of the details of Francis’s arrest, and officials with the New York State Police Department declined to comment.)
By that time, Francis says, the officer had dragged her from the car and tightly cuffed her. Francis says she tried to plead with him, crying as she told him, “I am a faculty member at SUNY-Oneonta.”
She hoped that explanation would demonstrate a valid connection to the area. “It was my way of telling the trooper that he didn’t have to be scared of me or hurt my body. I hoped it would keep me safe.”
She was wrong. According to Francis, the trooper responded by saying that he didn’t care that she was a professor.
A College Town’s Complex History
But there are plenty of people at SUNY-Oneonta who do care. The institution, like many universities with relatively few professors of color, is attempting to diversify its faculty. But doing so can be a stiff challenge, says Nancy Kleniewski, the university’s president.
“There’s a selection factor,” she says. “Some people don’t want to work in a rural area.”
On the one hand, today’s tight academic job market helps Oneonta out. Many new Ph.D.’s like Francis are taking positions in regions of the country where they wouldn’t otherwise expect to live—areas in which their race, ethnicity, or gender presentation might make them stand out.
On the other hand, incidents like a new professor’s run-in with the police can be serious setbacks. That’s especially true at SUNY-Oneonta, an institution whose history still plays into present-day hiring discussions.
The university made national headlines in September 1992, when an elderly woman said she was assaulted in her home, near campus, by a young black man. A dean gave police a list of black and Hispanic male students, and in the days following, police interrogated about 85 black male students and many more town residents. Some students were pulled from classrooms, dorm rooms, and public buses for interrogation. In the end, no arrests were made.
The student outrage and the impact on the college town were profound. Many students transferred to other institutions or dropped out. Enrollments declined over the next five years. More than two decades later, many faculty of color say they remain wary. And candidates of color, Francis included, still hear about the incident when they come to campus.
So at Oneonta, there’s an added urgency to the questions now being asked at many institutions. Administrators wonder: How can we convince a diverse group of faculty that ours is a welcoming environment? Professors already on campus ask: How honest should we be when wooing candidates of color? And everyone wants to know: Once we’ve managed to recruit underrepresented professors, how do we keep them around? The issues at Oneonta may be particularly complex, but the situation there contains lessons relevant to diversification efforts everywhere.
A Department Steps In
Robert Compton, chair of Oneonta’s department of Africana and Latino studies, awoke in the middle of the night to a phone call. A fellow faculty member was on the line, bearing news of Francis’s arrest. His newest professor, Compton soon learned, had been charged with resisting arrest and obstructing governmental administration, both misdemeanors punishable by up to a year in jail. She was also slapped with four traffic tickets and ended up with a large bruise on her arm. Her car sat at the impound lot, uneaten Thai food rotting in the front seat.
Compton and his colleagues in the department scrambled to locate Francis. Kathleen O’Mara, a white professor of history and Africana Studies who is known to keep bail money from her own pocket ready for faculty and students, got out of bed and drove to a number of police stations. (Oneonta is a city of about 14,000 people, but it has five police jurisdictions.)
By that time, Francis had already been set free. She had appeared before a judge, who set her bail at $2,500. Francis told him that she only had $200 in her pocket, $40 in her checking account, and a couple of hundred dollars left on a credit card. She wouldn’t receive her first paycheck from the university until the end of September. The judge accepted the $200 she had on hand, and Francis avoided having to sit in jail until her court trial toward the end of September.
The next day, Francis canceled her very first classes to deal with the fallout from her arrest. O’Mara loaned her $500 to get her through to her first payday. Compton, meanwhile, worked to arrange for a pay advance that covered Francis’s $1,200 attorney bill and the impound fees on her car.
Compton and O’Mara say there was never any question about helping Francis; in fact, they portray it as part of their jobs.
“Helping Leigh-Anne comes naturally to the entire department and to me,” says Compton. “The Africana and Latino Studies department is a community. Given our marginalized location in academe, as reflected in the lack of resources and respect that mainstream departments have for entities such as us, we place strong emphasis on solidarity and doing the right things to our colleagues.”
And there’s a pragmatic reason to lend a hand, Compton adds: “Given Oneonta’s continuing battles with issues of race, I want Leigh-Anne to stay here.”
But Compton says that incidents like Francis’s put him in a bit of a bind: On the one hand, he’s eager to do his part to recruit professors of color. On the other hand, he says, the university has a responsibility to be frank with candidates about the environment they’re entering. So an odd thing happens: He and other faculty members end up providing the very candidates they’re courting with cautionary stories of past run-ins with police. (One popular tale, Compton says, is that of a black male candidate who was stopped on his way to a job-interview lunch with a hiring committee. The search committee members watched the incident from the restaurant window.)
Professors of color say they walk a bit of a tightrope when talking with faculty recruits. “We encourage them to come here despite the numbers,” said R. Neville Choonoo, a South African professor of African and African-American literature. “But we have to remind them that they are living in a small, white town with very little experience communicating with people of color,” he says.
Erik Drew Fritsvold, a criminal justice professor at the University of San Diego, says being honest with candidates is an uncomfortable but essential step to building a diverse faculty.
“The institution and committee doing the hiring have a fundamental obligation to engage in a full disclosure with the potential candidate,” he says. “Even in a job market that is not so robust, let candidates know the past history of the community and law enforcement environment, so that if they do come on campus it’s not a surprise. Otherwise, the institution would be culpable for not being honest.”
So what can Oneonta do to help make the sale? Professors at the university tend to focus on two options. The first is simple: Offer underrepresented faculty what O’Mara describes as “combat pay.” As Choonoo puts it: “You’ve got to make it worth their while financially.”
Salary is one way of getting at the problem. It’s something Oneonta is trying, according to Hal Legg, the university’s director of communications. Legg notes that the institution recently invested $500,000 to increase pay for 48 of 90 assistant professors and 27 of 98 associate professors.
But that program doesn’t focus specifically on underrepresented faculty. In any case, “combat pay” can take other forms. For example, some faculty members at Oneonta have suggested that faculty of color receive housing stipends so they can live in neighboring communities that are more diverse.
The other frequently-discussed concept is cluster hiring. Proponents argue that by hiring not one, but many professors in a given department or discipline, Oneonta could help build critical masses of diverse scholars, creating small scholarly communities that help strengthen recruitment and retention efforts.
The college has made some forays into cluster hiring, says Legg; they just haven’t borne fruit. “Although we haven’t been met with success, we certainly haven’t ruled it out.”
Ultimately, professors say, attracting faculty of color is a sort of chicken-or-egg challenge. “You’re not going to get people with excellent qualifications,” Choonoo says, “where there’s no social network.”
A President Looks for Answers
Creating that social network is slow going. In the 2012-13 academic year, the university doubled the number of temporary pre-doctoral dissertation fellows of color per year, from one to two. The campus is still without an African-American male professor.
Improving those numbers is a task that falls to Kleniewski, the university’s president. Kleniewski joined the institution in 2008, but she sounds emotional when she speaks of the 1992 “black list” incident, and she says she was “disturbed” by Francis’s encounter with police. She admits that her institution has had a troubled history with race relations, but says she has been attempting to emphasize recruiting more diverse faculty and students.
“We’re not trying to sweep things under the rug,” she says. “It’s about educating people and assisting. That’s just me, the mushy liberal talking here.”
Kleniewski points to a number of steps the campus has taken to create a more welcoming environment for underrepresented students and faculty. Many are attempts to provoke discussion and inclusion on campus. Last year, for example, she organized a commemoration of the “black list” incident. Oneonta paid $30,000 to Cornel West to come and speak.
Every year, the university holds a “common read”—in which all students are asked to read one text—that tackles topics of diversity, she says. “It’s about taking something that hurtful and shameful about the past and turning it into something that we can all learn from.”
Then there are the attempts to tackle specific fears of racial profiling. Kleniewski has initiated weekly meetings between the campus chief of police and the City of Oneonta’s police chief. She’s held open forums on race and policing, though some faculty say they wish those events were better-publicized or more-widely attended. Another open forum is in the planning stages now.
Other discussions with police have emerged from a partnership between the university, the NAACP, and the City of Oneonta Community Relations and Human Relations Commission. An academic dean and two faculty members serve on the commission, which aims to make the community more welcoming in general.
When it comes to the hard process of hiring, though, the university is still looking for the winning formula. The first challenge, Legg says, is just getting more candidates of color to apply. To that end, Oneonta’s provost now requires each request for a new tenure-track position to include a plan to advertise in venues with a diversity focus, such as Insight Into Diversity.
“Our applicant pool for faculty positions has become more diverse,” Legg says. “The percentage of non-white faculty also has increased. While it’s too soon to attribute this directly to any of the changes we’ve initiated in the past year or two, the trend is certainly encouraging.”
Still, it’s clear that many faculty members want the institution to go further, either by restarting cluster-hiring efforts, providing housing stipends, or establishing a legal-defense fund for faculty who find themselves in predicaments like Francis’s.
“It’s difficult,” Kleniewski says. “We are making good progress, but we have these counter examples that pop up and tell us we have a long way to go.”
And it’s frustrating, she says, because “we have a good climate on campus”—a climate that often gets obscured. “Once people get here and start working, they usually like it here,” she says. “I think Leigh-Anne seems to like it here, and I’m hoping that we can keep her despite her unwelcoming experience.”
A Professor Picks Up the Pieces
Francis’s encounter with the police was not exactly a warm “welcome to Oneonta,” says William Schebaum, her attorney. “I don’t know how that’s going to sit with her as she tries to fit into the community,” he says.
After the incident, turning her attention back to teaching and research was a challenge. She said she had to temper her emotions as she first faced her students and colleagues. “I still had to prepare for classes, do a good job, and be nice to my overwhelmingly white students,” Francis says. “I still have to be a likeable and congenial person. I couldn’t sink into depression or be seething with rage over this. I have to be as engaging and approachable as any average white faculty member.”
She got her car from the impound lot after a couple of weeks, but with her license suspended, she couldn’t drive. So she has often relied on colleagues to get rides to work; other times she sits at the bus stop with students.
In November, good news arrived on the legal front: Each misdemeanor charge was dismissed, and Francis pled guilty to the minor traffic violations.
Months later, though, she is “still shaken” by the incident. “All the status and prestige of being a professor was stripped from me.” Francis says. “I still do not feel safe around the police. I make sure I don’t do anything to attract their attention.”
The biggest news since Francis arrived in Oneonta has nothing to do with the police. She’s now a mother: Her wife, who is on maternity leave, recently gave birth to twin sons, Langston and Rustin. Francis’s colleagues in the Africana and Latino studies department have continued to be hugely supportive, she says, helping out with childcare and stopping by with meals.
The professor says she’s grateful for their attempts to make her family feel more at home. The town, Schebaum says, will soon forget all about the saga: “There’s no permanent impact.” And caring for twins makes the relative security of a tenure-track position more attractive than ever.
So Francis has no shortage of reasons to try and make a go of it in Oneonta. Will she stay? She won’t say.
