ABSTRACT
This chapter critically examines challenges to “Diversity by Design” at three interrelated levels in the specific context of Library and Information Science (LIS) education situated within a hegemonic American tenure and promotion process. These levels include: 1) barriers that have historically emerged from favored “white-ist” realities (white + elitist) in an exclusionary context of the American academy at the broadest level; 2) biased trends in historical LIS education within a narrower, more specific mode of analysis; 3) a related hurdle in the economics of the scholarly publishing business and its murkiness within the contemporary neoliberal corporatization of the American academy. The chapter concludes with select strategies the author adopted during his career journey to resist entrenched intellectual spaces in LIS education via pursuing social justice and advocacy scholarship in a mid-southern land-grant university. Spotlight on intentional thematic approaches in LIS to integrate “Diversity by Design” might provide others useful strategies to successfully navigate the often restrictive and precarious stipulations of tenure and promotion guidelines in their own academic environments.
