Kerry Ann Rockquemore:
New career focus is on faculty diversity, development
By Leanne Silverman

Kerry Ann Rockquemore, executive director of the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity, never visualized becoming an academic when she was a child. Nor did she imagine eventually walking away from a hard-won tenured faculty position. But as Rockquemore frequently reminds readers of her Monday Motivator newsletter, one’s career is like a book with many chapters—and she is in the thick of a new chapter of her own.

“I come from a family of teachers and I always imagined myself as a public-school kindergarten teacher,” said Rockquemore. “But I realized, doing my student teaching, that not only did I not want to be a kindergarten teacher, I really don’t like children that much. So the idea of being with 5-year-olds all day every day....”

But that experience piqued Rockquemore’s intellectual curiosity: “I began to realize how unequal public education actually is. When you see how different little kids are—just walking in the door to kindergarten, because of resources or lack of them at home—all of a sudden I started to ‘get’ the structure piece, the inequality piece.” Seeking to explore how race, class, and gender shape people even before kindergarten, Rockquemore switched her major from early childhood education to sociology.

As a Michigan State undergrad, Rockquemore worked for one of her professors to earn a bit of extra money, and in doing so, embarked on the path to becoming a tenure-track academic. “This was literally the first African-American female professor I had had in my entire college experience,” she said. “I got to see what it was like, behind the scenes, to be a professor. And I thought, ‘this is The Best Job in The World!’ What’s funny to me now is that she was an endowed chair. At the time, I never realized that this was someone at the very top of her game who struggled for a long time before she got there.”

While working on her Ph.D. at Notre Dame, she became interested in biracial identity—an under-researched subject in the mid-90s. “Nobody thought it was important, but it really spoke to me,” Rockquemore recalled. The timing was fortuitous: Tiger Woods became a household name, the census debate over racial categories exploded, and Rockquemore was one of the few scholars with actual data and research on the biracial experience. She ultimately wrote two highly-regarded books in the field, Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America, co-authored with David Brunsma, and Raising Biracial Children, co-authored with Tracey Laszloffy, as well as numerous articles and book chapters.

But a successful research program didn’t automatically translate into a smooth evolution from student to professor. Over six years, Rockquemore held four different tenure-track positions. First there was the two-year community-college gig that involved a 5/5 load plus heavy service and office-hour requirements while she was ABD, collecting data and writing her dissertation; then Pepperdine, where the teaching load was lighter but time for research was limited; and then an R-1 campus: U-Conn. “It just wasn’t a good fit—I’m thoroughly urban and didn’t realize how living in a rural environment would impact my quality of life until I got there,” she said. Next came two years at Boston College. “I absolutely loved it, but Boston is so expensive, and my family is in Chicago,” said Rockquemore. She went out into the job market again, and in 2003, four years after earning her Ph.D., Rockquemore accepted a tenured position as associate professor of African American Studies and Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

“I had an unnecessarily miserable tenure-track experience,” Rockquemore said. “In grad school I learned a lot about research, but I didn’t learn anything about how to actually do my job as a professor. Figuring that out was like a second job. When you’re on the tenure track, your default assumption is that you can get everything done if you just work enough hours. But you get to a point where you just can’t do that anymore. I was always asking, how do people make this work so they’re not frantic, hysterical, a disaster, and working 80 hours a week? I always felt that if and when I got tenure, it would be important to make things better for people coming up behind. Everybody does not need to figure it out from scratch.”

Rockquemore launched a successful mentoring program for underrepresented faculty on the UIC campusshortly after her arrival. To reach out more broadly, she established an online discussion forum, BlackAcademic.com in 2005, penned The Black Academic’s Guide to Winning Tenure Without Losing Your Soul (2008), and began offering workshops about “surviving and thriving in academia” on campuses around the country. “Then it morphed,” she said. “I realized that I was working with a broad range of underrepresented faculty, not just black academics.”

Rockquemore resigned from her position at UIC in December 2009. “Everyone thought I had lost my entire mind,” she said. “No one leaves a tenured faculty position! But I had hit the point where I was asked to do so many talks on other campuses, it felt like I had two jobs.” She began offering Faculty Success Programs, a semester-long “boot camp” where the entire goal is to change people’s writing habits in a supportive community with a high degree of accountability. What began with Rockquemore working on a consulting model with individual academics evolved into the National Center for Faculty Diversity and Development (www.facultydiversity.org), which she established in June 2010. The Center currently supports over 3,700 faculty members at all stages of their careers.

Reflecting on her decision to leave teaching, Rockquemore said: “The ultimate unspoken question people face is ‘Do I really want to be a professor?’ And it’s necessary to say that it’s okay to ask that question. I want people to be successful in the academy, but it’s just not for everyone. For me, I’m so glad I was a professor, that I had that experience for so many years. And I knew it was time for me to go. You can have different chapters in your life. I’m in a new chapter, and it’s not about research. One of my fundamental beliefs is that by focusing on one thing, you can really do a lot. It’s hard to do because it means letting other things go. But letting go of my tenured faculty position, letting go of classroom teaching, letting go of my research, letting go of everything that goes along with being a professor has enabled me to focus full-throttle on creating and developing the Center. I’m going to keep razor focus on that, because that’s really where my energy and passion is. I never get tired of it.”

Leanne Silverman hung her shingle as a freelance writer and editor in Denver, CO after leaving a 12-year career in academic publishing.