Brooke Coley, Assistant Professor at Arizona State University and Founding Executive Director at Center for RARE JUSTICE, works at the intersection of racial equity, mental health and qualitative research methods, making the ARC Network Virtual Visiting Scholars (VVS) program a natural fit.
The VVS program provides a unique opportunity for select scholars across disciplines to pursue research meta-analysis, synthesis, and big data curation on topics crucial to STEM faculty equity. Coley first became aware of the program when it was mentioned during a presentation at a staff meeting a couple of years ago to talk about faculty equity in the wake of COVID. Coley saw a rare opportunity to pursue a project based on learning from existing knowledge instead of expanding knowledge. “There’s a lot of information we need about interrelated topics, but those connections aren’t necessarily being made.”
As a minoritized scholar in the STEM field, equity has always been on Coley’s mind. She was a Meyerhoff scholar at UMBC, a program that supports students getting a PhD or MD/PhD in STEM and who are interested in the advancement of minorities in those fields. She was one of the few minoritized individuals in her class who ended up achieving that goal.
“I watched so many others leave the program, and I felt I was left with the responsibility of unpacking that phenomenon. Who was it acceptable to watch walk away? Nobody who goes through it forgets the experience, but everyone responds to it differently. Some go to industry and hire minoritized people. I wanted to stay in academia and answer these questions.”
After finishing her PhD in biomechanics, she pursued a policy fellowship with the American Association for the Advancement of Science and ended up at the National Science Foundation, where her work involved broadening participation in STEM fields. Her VVS project topic, STEM publication timelines, is deeply personal for her, as it is one the areas she struggled with during her tenure and promotion (T&P) process.
“When I attended that meeting focused on faculty equity, no one ever said “publications,” but they did repeatedly say “metrics,” and research and publications are one of the biggest metrics. COVID demonstrated that conditions facilitate very different outcomes depending on individual status and responsibilities in a way that wasn’t being factored into T&P decisions.”
Coley had started the tenure process in 2017, and several manuscripts she submitted for review in 2019 were still under review in 2021. While COVID was named as the reason for the delay, but Coley, served for those journals as a reviewer (and is now on the editorial board for one), knew that wasn’t the whole story. Journals are often not staffed appropriately with experts in racial equity, which negatively impacts the publication timelines of scholarship on those topics. These long publication times can then lead to adverse T&P decisions.
Coley hopes her VVS project will tangibly benefit future scholars.
“I wanted to create scholarship someone can cite three years from now to help them in their T&P process. This data shows the variance between publication timelines is highly significant and highly inequitable. And the paper that sparked my zeal for this topic, was not only eventually published, but won a significant award from the journal, so long publication times aren’t a sign of quality.”
When asked how long that particular paper took to be published, she laughs. “821 days.”
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