The Leaning Ivory Tower
Latino Professors in American Universities
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Several narratives by Latino professors in American universities addressing issues of racism, marginalization, and self-valuation as the narrators tell their stories of survival and success.
Description
Latino professors in American universities tell their own stories of survival within academia. Each story is a perspective, a slice of academic life. Collectively, the multiple perspectives in this volume provide a totality that is penetrating and disturbing but essential if we are to genuinely diversify our present and future professoriate. The accounts capture and challenge the academic cultural terrain as it is constructed and perceived by the writers--a cultural terrain that has been created to limit and exclude, based on and bound to cultural, racial, gender, religious, and class manifestations and oppressive traditions.
Each author, struggling with her and his own reality, is a study in authenticity and the engagement of liberation through self-critique. Through struggle with an oppressive academic world, the authors not only pursue their own liberation but simultaneously serve as liberating sponsors by restoring humanity back to those who oppress them. Thus, The Leaning Ivory Tower is not just a metaphor for what it is. It also confronts, reconfigures, and challenges us to redraw our paradigmatic and conceptual borders so that the democratic process will be a liberating practice evidenced throughout academia.
Raymond V. Padilla is Professor in the Division of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Arizona State University. Rudolfo Chavez Chavez is Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at New Mexico State University.
Reviews
"There is virtually no other book that characterizes the tension, contradictions, and anxieties felt by Latino professors in American universities. I believe that The Leaning Ivory Tower will contribute immensely to the present struggle to create counter-hegemonic positions to the powerful reactionary forces in education that are re-shaping policy in education, such as the conservative attacks on multiculturalism and ethnic studies." -- Donaldo Macedo, University of Massachusetts, Boston