Professional Life Part 1

As the 4 of you who read this blog know, I've spent my professional life as an economist. I've worked at a few universities over the decades. I have made some mis-steps along the way. One was staying at the University of Alabama (UA) about a decade longer than I should have. Another was ever stepping foot on the campus of the University of Oklahoma (OU). Both places were so steeped in racism that I found it suffocating to even exist. In this mini-series I'll try to detail some of the things that happened at both places. I'll change the names to protect the guilty, however.

I arrived as the department chair of the economics department at OU in January of 2015. The department had never had a black faculty member and definitely never a chair. One of the things that a department chair must do is go to these monthly meetings where the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences tells chairs information which is then passed down to the faculty. The chairs must also attend an annual "retreat" for a weekend where they were supposed to connect and share information about running departments.

At the first retreat that I attended in August of 2015, I was sitting there with the 25+ other chairs and program directors listening to speakers talk about class scheduling, website repair, etc. There was only one other black in the room besides me. She ran a program not a department. It was standard boring stuff. However, the dean was proud to introduce a young white lady (probably 23 years old) who had just completed some sort of MBA and would be handling the finances of the entire college. A multi-million dollar endeavor. As she rambled on, I stopped to ask her what her accounting strategy would be. What she was saying might impress a philosophy professor who had no clue about finances but she was just speaking nonsense. To my surprise, not only did she not have one, she didn't know what the term meant. So, I explained to her some things I had learned over the years. After all, I had spent nearly 17 years in a business school and interacted with accounting professors often. Let's also not forget that I do have a doctorate in economics.

This lasted for a bit until the dean stepped in and said that we should move on. No problem to me, he probably hired a cousin or friend who had no qualifications for the job. I found that at OU (and most schools) being a friend will beat out being qualified any day. Apparently, after that session, the young lady was in tears at being called out by the mean black guy. How dare a black man who has a doctorate call out a young and unqualified white girl? It was a scandal of epic portions. Most of the white women went to comfort her and demand that the dean take action.

I didn't know any of this at the time but apparently the dean went to the provost of the university to ask what to do. After all, we can't have blacks on campus who "don't know their place". The provost suggested that the dean have the only other black person who was a department chair have a talk with me. That department chair had not been at the retreat. He had long since given up on such nonsense. Later that fall semester I got a call from that chair wanting to meet for lunch. I agreed and figured that he wanted to introduce himself to me as a gesture of good will. We agreed to meet that next spring. When I met him, he told me how dismayed the entire college was and that almost every chair was talking about me. Why? I had apparently called out a fragile white woman about her incompetence. This was unheard of. I asked him where all of this was coming from and he said from the dean who had asked him to talk to me.

I was a bit surprised since I had interacted with the dean at least 50 times after the retreat and he never mentioned a thing. It was then that I knew that these people were on some old school racist BS. I thought about what this other chair had warned me about and then decided that I'd speak out even MORE and confront any crony behavior I saw with hard facts and complete authority. Clearly not the reaction they were looking for. Over the next few months, I'll detail on this blog about a half dozen tales of what being a black chair at a place who only valued the look but not the input of a black chair. They found out that my abilities to do the job extremely well was their worst enemy as I always spoke from absolute fact. I took a department with 125 majors when I arrived and left it with over 700.

So what happened to that dean? He left at the end of that spring semester to become a college president. About 2 years later he reached out to me to ask if I'd consider being the dean of the business school at his new place.