Identity and Community in the Academy: Ascription and Affiliation

Identity formation depends on who is assigning what identity to whom and under what premises. Ultimately, questions of identity shape every facet of academic life.

By Kristen A. Renn

Affiliations: Identity in Academic Culture

Identity and Difference in Higher Education: "Outsiders Within"

Identity in Democracy

On the second evening of an academic conference I was faced with too many choices. I had invitations to receptions hosted by the women's caucus, the lesbian and gay studies caucus, and my own institution. The conference program book listed additional activities of interest, including a session on qualitative research and one on historiography. As I had done before, I would skitter from one hotel ballroom to the next, hoping to see and be seen by the Important People in each location. Because the conference began on Easter weekend, I had already missed spending the holiday with my family and singing with my church choir. I stood in the hall, invitations in hand, a white, Congregationalist, lesbian pretenure faculty member who does qualitative and historical research and who would rather be home for the holiday. And while I may be alone in this particular combination of identities, I am not alone in having to make choices related to identity, identification, and community in the academy.

Identity in the academy is the subject of a substantial subset of scholarship on higher education, which examines the individual and collective identities of students and faculty. Philosophical analyses of identity and its democratic contexts may also shed light on identity in the academy, which can be seen in a number of ways, depending on who is assigning what identities to whom and on what premises. My discussion of academic identities in this essay is informed by arguments made in three recent books: Affiliations: Identity in Academic Culture, edited by philosopher and literary theorist Jeffrey DiLeo; Identity and Difference in Higher Education: "Outsiders Within," edited by feminist sociologists Pauline Anderson and Jenny Williams; and Identity in Democracy, by philosopher Amy Gutmann.

Cutting across the three books are the ideas of identity as "ascriptive" or "affiliative." Ascriptive identities are those perhaps most familiar to individuals in the academy who follow (or instigate) identity politics. According to Gutmann, ascriptive identity groups "organize around characteristics that are largely beyond people's ability to choose, such as race, gender, class, physical handicap, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age." By contrast, affiliative identities are—or at least appear to be—within people's ability to choose. Affiliative identities result from choices of academic discipline, graduate school, mentoring networks, and employing institution. Of course, these affiliative choices are circumscribed and limited by ascriptive identities, so that white academics from the upper classes have more access to professionally valuable affiliations than do academics of color or those from the lower classes.

Contributors to DiLeo's volume address complicated questions of affiliation in U.S. academic culture. Premised on DiLeo's definition of affiliations as "relationships that confer value and identity on individuals, disciplines, and institutions" and that "have a formative and formidable role in determining the status and self-image of these persons and/or entities," Affiliations takes up the issue of how such relationships constitute "one of the most primal yet unacknowledged aspects of academic life." Several essays rely on personal narrative and on philosopher and literary critic Edward Said's description of filiation and affiliation as a network of alliances and allegiances to define academe as highly stratified by institutional type (community college, "regional" comprehensive institution, private liberal arts college, research university), academic discipline (education, business, social science, humanities, physical science), and professional role (graduate student, part-time instructor, non-tenure-track faculty, pretenure faculty, tenured faculty).

As presented by contributors to Affiliations, identities of affiliation affect every facet of faculty life, including job placement, working conditions, and career trajectory. While it would be tempting to dismiss some essays as well-crafted complaints by those who have not benefited from affiliations or who do not have the goods to excel in a supposedly meritocratic system, evidence points away from such easy dismissal. While few contributors directly acknowledge a privileged location, several—such as Michael Bérubé, Paterno Family Professor in Literature at Pennsylvania State University, and Stephen Watt, chair of the English department at Indiana University Bloomington—write from high status positions that resist a "sour grapes" explanation of their motivation to critique the affiliative system.

Essays in this volume will not surprise anyone who is or aspires to be a professor. They echo academic conference receptions where, as film and media theorist Paul McEwan notes, conversations last only until the more influential participant spies the name badge of someone even more influential. Analyses of the phenomenon of "acade-mostars" join discussions of personal and institutional prestige, disciplinarity, postmodernism, and Marxism.

Contributors lay bare the myth of an academic meritocracy, provide insight into the importance of relationships among individuals and between individuals and their institutions, and analyze the influence of personal, disciplinary, and institutional relationships on professional identities. Some essays are original to Affiliations, but nearly half have been published elsewhere; they are brought together in an effort to present a consistent "meta-professional discourse" on academic professions. The effort is effective, though the discourse on affiliation may not be as new as DiLeo proposes it to be.

Readers seeking direct address of the fundamental inequities perpetuated by the affiliative system in the academy will be disappointed by the majority of the essays, which discuss affiliation theoretically. Written primarily by faculty in English and literary theory, the essays illuminate a troubling aspect of academic culture but do little to suggest alternatives. Also given scant attention is the influence of ascriptive identities of gender and race on the availability of various affiliative opportunities, although social class and cultural capital are discussed in several essays.

Compared to the DiLeo volume, Identity and Difference is less concerned with affiliative identities and focuses instead on the interactions of ascriptive identities with institutions. Where Affiliations looks at academic roles and institutional and disciplinary locations inside the academy as the central issues in identity, Identity and Difference examines academic roles in relation to socially constructed categories that exist both inside and outside the academy. Specifically, Identity and Difference features the perspectives of the women, people of color, and working-class and first-generation college students who are relatively recent arrivals in British higher education. Basic identity questions—such as Who are we? and Why are we here?—surface in debates about who belongs in the British academy in an era of "mass" higher education. Identity and Difference does not attempt to answer these questions but provides narrative accounts of students and faculty to "link conceptual questions [about identity] to empirical ones, to illustrate how identity formation and change takes place in particular educational settings, how power is institutionalized and experienced, and to explore the gendered, classed, and racialised differentiations which take place."

Whereas contributors to Affiliations take similar theoretical approaches, contributors to Identity and Difference bring a variety of theoretical perspectives to their topics. The result is a book that sometimes seems to treat identity as essential or fixed, while at other times makes manifest the ways in which gender, class, race, and ability are socially constructed. The combination of theoretical approaches is refreshing in a literature that largely segregates scholarship along these lines. Refreshing, too, is the introduction of an international comparative perspective, albeit the Western one on which U.S. higher education was founded, to the discussion of identity in the academy.

Anderson and Williams organize the book around eleven themes (the key signifiers of difference in higher education, for example, and aspects of racialized, gendered, and classed identities that are experienced as incompatible with academic identity). But the book lacks a consistent approach to narrative analysis. Many of the contributors present narrative data related to ascriptive identities, but fail to analyze the influences of such identities on the experience of higher education and the influences of higher education on identities. For example, sociologist Carol Thomas presents four accounts of higher education by women with disabilities, but she fails to discuss whether disability identity shaped the women's experiences, or whether their stories reflect the instrumental influences of being on campuses not prepared for people with different abilities. What do these stories mean for British higher education policy and practice? Too frequently, questions like these remain unanswered in Identity and Difference.

In Identity in Democracy, Gutmann turns outside the academy to a larger context in which identity operates, and provides a lens that can be used to look at academic identity. Although Gutmann writes as a philosopher, her text is accessible to the nonspecialist interested in analyzing core issues of diversity, identity, and community. Her proposition that "identity groups occupy an uneasy place in democracy" can be applied to the place of identity groups in higher education. While colleges and universities are not (and perhaps should not be) democracies, Gutmann's analysis of identity groups is instructive to those who seek a more complex understanding of the tensions between expressions of individual identities and the creation of an equitable community.

Identity in Democracy offers a philosophical approach to the study of four types of identity groups—cultural, voluntary, ascriptive, and religious—that operate in democratic settings. Gutmann uses a more far-reaching definition of "cultural identity group" than that often used in higher education: a cultural identity group "represents a way of life that is (close to) 'encompassing' or 'comprehensive'" and "shapes individual identity in a comprehensive way." Contributors to Affiliations and Identity and Difference would likely agree that members of nonmainstream cultural identity groups have not always had access to the academic affiliations that bring the most influence.

Voluntary identity groups derive from enacting the principle of free association and include civic, educational, religious, political, and service groups, among others. Groups such as parent-teacher associations, the National Rifle Association, B'nai B'rith, and the Ku Klux Klan are associations in which "individuals join with others to express social parts of their identities, to pursue instrumental aims, and to offer mutual support." Gutmann identifies a central tension related to voluntary identity groups: "Freedom of association entails some substantial freedom to exclude people; yet to enjoy equal freedom of association, individuals must also be free from discrimination." Affiliative identities as described in DiLeo's book could be said to derive from voluntary associations with institutions and academic disciplines, and Gutmann's analysis of the tension between freedom to exclude and freedom from discrimination might be used to understand the elitist academic affiliative system described by DiLeo and his contributors.

I have already described ascriptive identity groups as those related to involuntary identities such as race, gender, class, and so forth. While these groups may form around involuntary identities, ascriptive identity groups may also be voluntary associations that have their own cultures and political agendas (for example, the National Organization for Women and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).

Ascriptive identity groups in a democracy—or on campus— may be about advancing the interests of group members, but they are also ideally about meeting the needs of group members for affiliations and seeking a more just society. While Affiliations is largely silent on the issue of ascriptive identities, Identity and Difference uses them as a core unit of analysis.

Finally, Identity in Democracy addresses religious identity, making a case for appreciating the legitimate role of religiously based arguments and religious identity in a democracy and, I would extend, in the academy.

Of course, cultural, voluntary, ascriptive, and religious identity groups are not mutually exclusive, nor does Gutmann argue that they are. Rather, they overlap and interact in ways that inform individual and group identities, just as individual identities inform and interact with group identities. Applying philosophical rigor to examine the claims of the four types of identity groups within democratic society, Gutmann ultimately finds that

As long as group identities are neither comprehensive nor immune from interpretation . . . individuals can both identify with groups and live the lives of free people. An important underlying theme of this book is that group identities are best conceived as multiple and fluid; except under conditions of tyranny, they do not comprehensively determine the identities of individuals. Free people have multiple and alterable identities.

Free people, it also seems, have competing engagements at academic conferences, where various cultural, voluntary, ascriptive, and religious identity groups stake claims on individuals, just as they do on our home campuses and in our home communities.

Here is where it is useful to interpret the two books focused on the academy with Gutmann's focus on democracy writ large. Her arguments about democracy provide what is missing in Affiliations: a larger context in which to analyze the costs and benefits of operating in a social and intellectual marketplace driven in part by identity groups. The principles on which she bases her argument—such as civic equality and freedom of association—are those to which we in the academy also appeal. In Gutmann's terms, Anderson and Williams rely on members of ascriptive identity groups (white women, people of color, people with disabilities, working-class people) to shed light on the increasing democratization of British higher education. Academic identities formed through affiliation and ascription shape individual careers and identities; individual careers and identities in turn shape academic institutions.

What does it mean for the academy that faculty operate in dynamic networks of identity affiliation and ascription? First, we should notice how affiliations and ascriptive, voluntary, or religious associations privilege some while limiting the options of others. Often we are aware of how ascriptive identities constrict our options, just as the women in Identity and Difference describe limitations placed on them by their gender, race, class, or ability. I know—or suspect—that having gone to X graduate school or writing about Y identity was why I did not get a job interview, a grant, or a publication offer. Less often are we aware of the privileges accorded us by affiliation and ascription; I did get a job interview, a grant, a publication offer because of my academic pedigree, my identity, or both. Through higher education policy, education, and practice we have begun to address the inequitable influence of ascriptive identities related to gender, race, and class; we have not done as good a job understanding or countering the influence of affiliative identities. If we accept the ideals of equal advantage, equal freedom, and equal protection as presented in Identity in Democracy, it is imperative that we examine the ways in which affiliations, as well as ascriptive identities, affect academic culture. Cultural, affiliative, ascriptive, and religious identity groups are not necessarily good or bad for academe, but they are here to stay, and their influence is not as well understood as we may believe it to be.

A second implication of these networks of identity is the need to address the structures that perpetuate inequitable outcomes based on identities. Indeed, increased reliance on part-time and non-tenure-stream faculty has exacerbated structural tensions related to professional identity on many campuses and further delineated high-prestige institutions (which appear to employ fewer part-time faculty, whether or not that appearance is accurate) from those down the line that openly employ large numbers of part-time and non-tenure-track instructors. In her essay in Affiliations, Maria Damon notes that the second-class status of many interdisciplinary fields, especially those dealing with ascriptive identities (such as ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation), perpetuates affiliative inequity within institutions and within disciplines. Even within these fields, some subfields retain supremacy over others, further stratifying an already hierarchical academic culture.

I propose no easy solution to the questions of identity in the academy, but return to Gutmann's criteria for evaluating identity groups; if groups are freely chosen and do no injustice, then they should be permitted to affiliate freely on campus. Indeed, they should be encouraged as a source of challenges to one another and to the status quo. As pointed out in Affiliations and Identity and Difference, the problem is that members of privileged affiliative and ascriptive identity groups often do not use their freedom of association and inquiry to challenge the status quo. Instead, they use their freedom to perpetuate longstanding structures of inequality and to protect their locations in those structures.

Identities and identity groups in academic culture may be affiliative, ascriptive, or some combination thereof. They may be troubled or troublesome, politically instrumental or purely personal. In any case, their presence may be cause for celebration or concern in higher education. Use of Gutmann's model, attention to concepts of power and influence presented in Affiliations and Identity and Difference, and careful application of clear principles supporting academic and associative freedom in diverse communities may lead the way to analysis of their contributions and costs.

Kristen Renn is assistant professor of higher, adult, and lifelong education at the College of Education, Michigan State University.

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