In recent years, the University of Tennessee has been the site of several hate crimes targeted at various minority groups. Just last school year, “The Rock” was painted with swastikas, and UT currently ranks #3 on the Princeton Review’s list of the most LGBTQ Unfriendly Universities. Discrimination against minority groups here on campus is very visible and very real.

Dr. Matthew Theriot, Associate Provost for Faculty Development and Strategic Initiatives here at UTK, explained that the issue of invisible labor has recently come under discussion here on campus.

“I had the pleasure of working with a small committee of faculty and staff over the past year or so who have really helped raise my awareness and put on my radar the issue of invisible labor and how it affects faculty and staff on this campus and graduate students and all the way down,” Theriot said.

After the issue was brought to UT’s attention, Theriot and others decided that a great way to begin addressing the problem was to have an expert on the subject talk at UT.

“I asked the group to brainstorm some names and Dr. Christine Stanley was, I think, easily the clearest, most obvious choice,” Theriot said. “And the more I researched her background, I completely understood why her name was put forward as being a really top person in this area to help us start thinking about these issues.”

Dr. Christine A. Stanley, Vice President and Associate Provost for Diversity Emerita at Texas A&M University, held a discussion regarding the way that discrimination against minorities affects collegiate faculty through the burden of invisible labor. Invisible labor is the term for the service work that minoritized faculty are often expected to complete on campus (such as mentoring minority students, serving on task forces related to diversity, etc.) but for which they rarely receive proper recognition.

Stanley, a woman of color from Jamaica, has decades of experience working at a university and has had countless encounters with the struggles of minoritized faculty members.

She explained that the history of most universities reveals a foundation that is built on exclusion, and today, still, the stereotypical idea of a professor is a white male. When members of minority groups are employed on college campuses, they are often regarded as martyrs of diversity. Their non-minority colleagues expect them to constantly jump at the opportunity to work on projects related to diversity, and minority students constantly turn to them for support.

Minority students who attend predominantly white colleges, such as UT and Texas A&M, often arrive at school with the hope to discover who they are and where they belong. In this pursuit, they often turn to minoritized faculty members for support.

“It’s no surprise that they gravitate to, ‘I’m gonna go to so and so’s office just to talk about my experiences here in the community on campus,’ and a lot of times women and minority faculty are faced with that,” Stanley said.

However, she went on to explain, this service work often goes unappreciated. When a professor is reviewed for tenure, service work, such as that which is done so often by minoritized professors working on diversity issues, it is often regarded as less adequate than research work.

“There are various types of faculty work in the academy,” Stanley stated. “But it’s widely recognized that all these functions here, particularly when we talk about faculty work of teaching, research and service, are not always recognized and valued and rewarded equally in the academy, and this is a pervasive issue.”

This situation puts minoritized staff members at an automatic disadvantage from the minute they are hired; they are expected to complete extra work to improve diversity, yet they are simultaneously excluded from promotions because of that same work.

Although minoritized faculty may care deeply about their service work, the extra responsibility bestowed upon them comes not only at the expense of career improvements, but also at the expense of their health.

Completing large amounts of extra work, especially work that can be tolling and emotional due to the sensitive nature of the diversity topic, with little to no reward is very stressful. Minoritized professors working under the burden of invisible labor are prone to developing anxiety due to the taxing nature of their requirements.

She explained to the audience that it is up to everyone to address the issue of invisible labor and fight against its existence.

“Whether you’re an administrator in title leadership, whether you’re a faculty member, you’re a staff member, or students here in the room, we all contribute to this. What I tell folks all the time is particularly when we talk about our climate in our colleges and universities, we all contribute to the climate here,” Stanley stated.

It is up to everyone on campus to stand up for one another when a particular group is being targeted, Stanley continued. It is also crucial that non-minority faculty members remove the burden of invisible labor from their minoritized colleagues when a situation arises in which a minoritized colleague is unfairly expected to do a larger amount of work, simply because they represent diversity. The collaboration of all members of a university is necessary to address this problem.