Abstract:

There has been a marginal increase in the number of racial minorities
among college and university faculty, yet current attacks on affirmative
action and prevailing attitudes about the inferiority of non-white faculty
place an extra burden on these individuals in academia. Amado Padilla
(1994) introduced the concept of ‘cultural taxation’ to describe this
burden where additional responsibilities are placed upon non-white
faculty because of their ethno-racial backgrounds. These responsibilities
include serving on numerous committees, advising larger numbers of
students and serving as ‘departmental experts’ for their particular ethnoracial
group. These expectations of non-white faculty are not placed as
heavily upon white faculty, can impede career progress and affect job
satisfaction. In this paper, we explore how cultural taxation affects faculty
of colour in a research university. Additionally, we expand the analysis of
cultural taxation to include issues of legitimacy that challenge non-white
faculty’s sense of ‘belonging’ within their respective departments.