Mun Y. Choi, Ph.D., UM System President and MU Interim Chancellor   
University of Missouri, Columbia, Mo.  
 
Dr. Choi:  
 
Greetings from the other MU, Miami University of Ohio.  I write to ask that you and your institution reconsider the recent decision not to grant tenure to Dr. Ashley Woodson.  I have attached that petition, along with the signatures and comments from 11,486 academicians, students, politicians, and just plain people.  Among these are a large number of current and former students, black and white, graduate, and undergraduate from Missouri University.  Of note is that this petition was only circulated, over social media, for little more than 72 hours, and yet this outpouring of support.   
 
Let me be honest, I doubt if you will either read the petition or the comments, much less reconsider a decision that you have already made, and apparently doubled down on.  So, let me approach this in another way.  Let me share part of my story.   
 
I have been teaching at Miami University for 29 years and 11 months.  I am a full professor with tenure.  And I have been in the same position as Dr. Ashley Woodson during the early days of my career.  In fact, Miami was the third University I landed at, before I finally obtained tenure.  Part of the problem is that tenure is assumed to be an equal standard applied fairly across all prospective candidates.  The issue is that such an equal standard only works if indeed the playing field is equal.  In my case, being the sole black person in the department, charged with exclusively teaching Critical Race and Ethnic Relations courses, to predominantly white students were often met with hostility, frustrated students, and poor student evaluations.  In fact, I consistently then and now get some of the worse student evaluations at my institution.  As an aside, I teach a summer bridge program exclusively to incoming football players here at Miami.  Each year I get upwards of 20, black and white, freshmen in their first college class at Miami.  The course I designed specifically for them is an Introduction to Black Studies with a target student population of honor’s students.  I set the bar extremely high, we engage in critical discussions about race, white privilege, structural racism, slavery, civil rights, and black lives matter to name a few.  The students work harder in this course than in any that they have ever in their lives.  And they hate it, me, the subject matter, and their coaches for forcing them to take this course.  I have had both black and white students call home complaining about how unfair the course, the instructor and the subject matter is.  And the students, without exception, target me with the most critical and negative evaluations that Miami ever gets.  And these are average.  Strange thing, many of these very same students a year later brag about how well they are doing, as the overall grade point average for the football team has gone up each year.  But, if the University had looked at the student evaluations, and if I were not a Full professor with tenure, I would be out of a job long before the benefits of this pedagogical approach would have surfaced. 
 
I am also frequently tasked to sit on diversity committees, advise an assortment of students that are not my majors, and counsel colleagues about issues of race and difference.  As an untenured faculty member, I was without a mentor within my department that really understood what I was undergoing.  I was the only one of my kind in the department, and few outside of my discipline were even present at the university.  The lack of mentorship almost spelt doom for me, had it not been for external mentors across the country that helped me navigate the tenure process. 
 
My scholarship, on critical race theory, pedagogy, and analysis has at this point been acclaimed and celebrated, but as I stated I was a lone wolf, marginalized even within the discipline of sociology that celebrates theory, statistics, and the other core areas.  So, while I had the requisite level of publications, many in my department doubted its value.  Had it not been for some heavy hitters in the field that had taken me in, I would not have made it past this bar. 
 
Finally, as my service often went under the radar or was frequently dismissed, as it primarily focused on diversity and inclusion.   

All of these differences meant that when it came for a tenure decision, my institution decided that on a scale where equality is the standard, I did not make the cut.  But when equity was the standard, I was above and beyond the standard.  What is this equity standard?  Put simply, equality standards do not recognize that differential evaluations and outcomes are to be expected in critically engaged pedagogies and scholarship.   And they fail to capture the totality of what I did.  Equity did.  Equity, I argued, took into consideration that the standard of student evaluations was colored by their comfort levels.  As documented in a whole slew of research, student evaluations measuring learning in courses dealing with critical race, gender, and inequality are less likely to be well received.  Further, when taught by persons of color, and females in particular, students, both white and black, are likely to target the faculty with negative critiques.  It is typically not until these same students get into the real world that they see the value of the course.  Unfortunately, this might be too late for tenure for many professors.   

Why do I tell you all this?  I believe that you have a star in Dr. Ashley Woodson who with some mentoring, grace and patience will become one of the brightest in her field.   I therefore ask you to reconsider, grant a bit of grace, and invest in this talented professor.  Missouri University has so little to lose and so much to gain.  If not MU, then someone else will benefit from your investment. 
 
In love and Honor 
 
Rodney D. Coates 
Professor of Global and Intercultural Studies 
Miami University  
 
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Rodney D. Coates
Professor 

Global and Intercultural Studies

Sociology, Gerontology and Social Justice
Critical Race and Ethnic Studies

The Matrix of Race: Social Construction, Intersectionality, and Inequality 1st Edition
https://www.amazon.com/Matrix-Race-Construction-Intersectionality-Difference/dp/1452202699

http://miamioh.edu/diversity-inclusion/events/coates-mlk/index.html

FB: https://www.facebook.com/African-Americans-in-Higher-Education-169922867046/
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