The Costs of Staying: Experiences of Racially Minoritized LGBTQ + Faculty in the Field of Higher Education

This critical qualitative study illuminates how racially minoritized LGBTQ + faculty in the field of higher education navigate racist and heterosexist systems, leading to inordinate challenges related to tenure and promotion and deteriorating health and well-being. This system of higher education fosters isolation, hostility, racial battle fatigue, and LGBTQ + erasure offering limited support, negative institutional environments, and insufficient mentoring for faculty with multiple minoritized identities. With intersectionality as the theoretical foundation of this research, three themes emerged from the data including problematizing productivity, exposing tokenization, and the costs of staying in the academy. I posit that refusal is a necessary strategy for racially minoritized LGBTQ + faculty who navigate the neoliberal institution.