ABSTRACT
The academic and administrative hierarchy in historically white colleges and universities remains largely white and male, from the president to department chairs. Consider the subjective comments focused on personality traits rather than on academic accomplishments in a department chair’s tenure letter regarding Professor Cleveland Hayes, an African American male faculty member. The marginalizing and exclusionary barriers to their professional academic careers that Patricia Matthew, Cleveland Hayes, and Dorinda J. Carter Andrews experienced are far from isolated incidents in our colleges and universities. Many testimonials from the frontlines of academia emphasize the trifecta of physical, emotional, and other psychological ramifications of what are, in fact, macro-aggressions or macro-inequities. Shifting academic standards often occur in the situations, where negative racial and gender framing can come into play. The rise of subtle and pretextual forms of discrimination and widespread awareness of the penalties for overt discriminatory acts has increased employer avoidance of egregious or overt racist statements.
