Culture of Hegemonic Collegiality: Pre-Tenure Women Faculty Experiences with the “Fourth Bucket”

This qualitative study is an examination of how 20 tenure-seeking Women of Color and White women academics at a public research-intensive university define collegiality and its perceived role in rank advancement. By engaging culture of hegemonic collegiality, we identified two salient themes: (a) collegiality is defined through weapon and survival metaphors; and (b) collegiality makes a gendered-race difference inconsistently in tenure decisions. Collegiality is and will likely remain relevant in tenure and promotion processes. We offer transformative collegiality, an equal power sharing of authority among colleagues that normalizes anti-oppressive norms, to possibly create and sustain dignity affirming faculty communities.