Academic Integrity and Academic Inclusion: The Mission of the “Outsider Within”

Abstract

In the intensely entrepreneurial world that we live in today, the more economics-minded among us might find it hard to credit the story I propose to tell—of a diverse faculty, deeply committed to teaching, scholarship, and the life of the university, who freely invested large quantities of labor over the course of eighteen years and transformed the culture and practices of the University of Massachusetts Boston (UMB) and other institutions as well. Their work challenges the stereotype of faculty as lazy and conservative, reluctant to invest time or energy in teaching unless compelled to do so by top-down administrative sanctions and rewards. Although we have all encountered faculty who fit this description, the “feckless professor” may well represent something of a caricature of faculty behavior and potential. In the counternarrative that follows, a Russian historian emerges as a leader of diverse colleagues—they in turn become campus activists and successfully foster inclusive pedagogy, curriculum change, and scholarship at UMB and beyond.

Special thanks are also due to some of the most faithful veterans and supporters of the initiatives on this list: Wornie Reed, the late Ron Schreiber, the late Elsa Orjuela, Tim Sieber, former chancellor Sherry Penney, and Edmund Toomey.