How to Create a Leftist Monoculture: Rising Scholars
by James A. Bacon
The University of Virginia’s “Rising Scholars” program in the College of Arts & Sciences, which dispenses graduate fellowships exclusively to racial, ethnic, sexual and gender minority students, has ceased accepting applications, according to a posting on its website.
The website provides no explanation, but the notice coincides with Trump administration initiatives to terminate Diversity, Equity & Inclusion dictates in federal rules and contracts and to enforce the principle of “colorblind equality before the law” across government and higher education.
Funded in part by a university-wide grant from the Mellon Foundation, Rising Scholars recruits graduate students whose research, practice and teaching center “race, justice, and equity, specifically in relation to Black and Indigenous Studies of the United States.” It is consistent with the recommendations of the Racial Equity Task Force, adopted as official policy by the UVA Board of Visitors in 2020, to recruit more minority graduate students and faculty.
Provost Ian Baucom, who was dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at the time, laid out the thinking behind the program in his “Race, Place and Equity” grant application to the Mellon Foundation, which he submitted in November 2020. It’s worth quoting at some length:
As UVA commits to graduating students prepared to sustain a flourishing, anti-racist and equity-driven democracy, we also need to play a key role in advancing the research and teaching of race, justice, and equity if we are to advance our vision of becoming a vehicle for social mobility, inclusion, and racial justice, simultaneously changing ourselves and contributing to change nation-wide. …
We thus … seek the Foundation’s support for an ambitious program of recruiting thirty Race, Justice, and Equity Postdoctoral Fellows … and hiring three new tenure track Race, Equity and Democracy faculty.
UVA would provide 1-to-1 matching financial support for the post-docs and share the startup costs of the tenure-track faculty members 50-50 for the first three years, and the full cost thereafter, Baucom averred.
Like many peer institutions, he continued, UVA has developed a “‘Target of Opportunity’ mechanism for appointments and hires that gives us the occasion to recruit exceptional candidates who add to our institutional diversity outside of a normal search process.”
In higher-ed parlance, “target of opportunity” refers in the abstract to opportunities to hire candidates who have not emerged through the normal recruitment protocols. In practice, it means hiring candidates with preferred demographic characteristics without the need for tedious job searches, advertising and interviews.
The post-docs who UVA was recruiting, wrote Baucom, would be invited to join one or more of the following communities geared to racial and ethnic minorities:
The Equity Center.
The Carter Woodson Institute of African and African American Studies.
IndigenousStudies@UVA.
The Institute for Global Humanities and Cultures.
The Democracy Initiative (also a Mellon-funded program), which maintains a concentration on race and democracy.
The Memory Project, an extension of the Democracy Initiative, which focuses on the “politics of memory” and the “contest between memory and
history.”The Center for the Study of Race and Law, the central premise of which is that lawyers cannot understand the American legal landscape without seeing the impact of race.
The Center for Race and Public Education in the South.
UVA, said Baucom, was moving forward on a parallel set of faculty-hiring initiatives “for scholars working on questions of race, justice, and equity” and “simultaneously, advancing our goal of doubling the number of faculty of
color at UVA by 2030.” Arts and Sciences had already committed, he added, to a round of fifteen Race, Justice, and Equity tenure-track hires (ten through a set of broad cross-disciplinary searches and five as Target of Opportunity Hires) to be completed over the next three years.
The Rising Scholars website does not explicitly say that heterosexual, non-Hispanic White males are ineligible. States the website: “Applicants have to demonstrate how their research, creative practice, and teaching center race, justice, and equity, specifically in relation to Black and Indigenous Studies of the United States.”
But as it happens, none of the scholars who pursue such studies happen to be white, heterosexual males. Of the 20 Rising Scholars profiled on the Colleges of Arts & Sciences (A&S) website, seven are Black, six Latino, three White (women or trans), and four Asian or Middle Eastern.
The Engineering School Rising Scholars website is more direct about its demographic preferences. “The University of Virginia is fundamentally committed to increasing the diversity of its faculty and staff,” states the fellowship application. “We welcome nominations of and applications from women, members of minoritized groups, veterans and individuals with disabilities.
Minoritized? Is that the same as “minority”? More or less, but the term is more ideologically loaded. “Minoritized” refers to races, nationalities, sexes, genders, and religions (think Islam) that as a result of social constructs have less power or representation than other groups in society. In this ideological construct, they are said to often be mistreated or face prejudice.
As can be deduced from Baucom’s grant application, Rising Scholars has become a mechanism both for identity-based hires and an engine powering the drive toward leftist intellectual orthodoxy at UVA.
Not every Rising Scholars post doc is immersed in race, justice and equity. The research interests of the engineering students I viewed online, as well as three of the A&S students, are of a technical scientific nature. Thus, it can be surmised that the dissertation research of Ryan Richards, an African-American, on “the neutral weak force between electrons and nuclei using fixed target parity-violating electron scattering” is unrelated to social-justice ideology. But consider these other A&S fellows:
(Note: at the request of a UVA professor, I have deleted the students’ names and used their initials instead.)
M.A: “His research interests include the poetics, performances and aesthetics of Afro-diasporic artists and intellectuals, Black internationalisms in the Global South, race relations, anti-racist practices between Africa and the Americas, and Digital Humanities applied to spatial translation of aesthetics.”
A.A.: “Her research explores the way Black adolescents and emerging adults navigate their racial(ized) identities and cultural values (such as spirituality) to promote positive life outcomes in spite of anti-Black racism.”
E.B.: “His long-term research is grounded in a decade-long ethnographic engagement with the Amazonian Kichwa (also spelled Quichua) people of Ecuador’s Napo province. … His dissertation offers an ethnographic account of how Kichwa tour guides in Napo, the vast majority of whom are young men, negotiate the demands and expectations of the ecotourism industry and how, in the process, they produce and enact new understandings of their ethnic, gendered, and sexual identities.”
K.C. (they/them): “Their book manuscript interrogates how the presence and contributions of Black women and the attempts to erase them historically from geographies in São Paulo were essential to the formation and development of the city. Kat examines how criminalizing Black women’s presence was crucial to whitening ideology and practices in the early twentieth century.”
S.I.: “His research and teaching interests lie in modern and contemporary political theory, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the politics of race, class, and settler colonialism in the US.”
J.K.: “Her teaching and research are broadly concerned with diaspora, imperialism, and North American culture, examining overlapping processes of racialization, power, and language. She is committed to interdisciplinary research, specializing in theories of racial capitalism, the environment, disability, postcolonialism, the African diaspora, transnationalism, and legal studies.”
R.L.: “Her work mainly focuses on a transnational approach to the study of Black Popular Culture in the Caribbean basin (Francophone/ Anglophone) at the intersections of language, identity and power. … Her work highlights how speakers of Creole languages continue to challenge dominant language ideologies and embrace their multilingualism.”
S.O: “Her work is broadly concerned with the imbrications of disability, race, gender, and nation in the United States, specifically focalizing the relationship between disability and Blackness through literary and cultural analysis.”
L.R.: “Research areas include African American theatre and performance, Black feminisms, Black performance theory, and popular culture.”
E.S.: “Her book project tells an intellectual history of federal education politics from 1954 to 1994; she interrogates how federal bureaucrats and philanthropists, education researchers and practitioners theorized and developed non-judicial alternatives for large segregated school systems of the North and West untouched by Brown v. Board of Education.”
A.A.: “Her work largely investigates the science of plant medicine and healing in Texas and Mexico, and its complex relationship with the environment, colonialism, and transnational understandings of race.”
R.V.: “Rolando’s research «Kuna Indigenous Media and Knowledge in the Darién Tropical Rain Forest» focused on the politics of traversal and terrain, mapping and survival, and the geographies of collective labor and will as modes of indigenous resistance.”
YB: “Her interdisciplinary work encompasses Africana, Appalachian, and Performance studies. Her research and creative practice focus on Black women’s performance activism, with a particular emphasis on artists connected to the Appalachian region.”
JC: “Her research works broadly across the music disciplines and engages with Black studies, Indigenous studies, and the environmental humanities to ask how music and sound mediate our relationships to race, place, and the natural world. Her current book project studies how background music facilitated the expansion of American empire in the Pacific from the 1950s to present.”
IG (they/them): “Their work moves across political theory, ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and media studies to examine the crisis and crystallization of identity’s meaning, and those queer, trans, and nonbinary people of color who, through modes of illegibility, unruliness, and kin-making, refuse its capture.”
AR: “Her interdisciplinary research focuses on Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian representation and racialization in American popular culture, especially in the superhero genre.”
AS (they/them): “Stone’s book project, Desires for Form: Modernist Narrative and the Shape of Queer Life, explores the social crisis of form that Black and white queer communities faced in early twentieth-century America and the narrative strategies queer subjects employ in imagining what shapes their lives might take.”
The stated purpose of Rising Scholars is to create a pathway to earning a coveted tenure-track position at UVA rather than joining the PhD lumpenproletariat as a lecturer, instructor or adjunct professor like white heterosexual male David Austin Walsh (profiled here). An online search reveals that six of these fellows now have tenure-track jobs at UVA. At least two others have tenure-track jobs at other universities. The rest are still working on their graduate degrees.
