Being a Professor
Alisha Menzies is an Assistant Professor at The University of Tampa where she’s been teaching since the Fall of 2016. She teaches a selection of classes in the field of Communications. I interviewed her to find out what it’s like being a black professor at a predominatly white institution.
- What made you want to become a teacher?
There was something that clicked for me about being a professor and having an expertise in something. I never had any interest in teaching high school and multiple subjects, but there was something about being an expert in a field and bring that to the classroom for real world experiences that I wanted to do. I did a long time in Corporate America and I understood that grind and I just wanted more time to hoan my own thoughts and ideas and being a professor allows for that.
2. With the Black Lives Matter marches and everything circulating them, Have you changed your coursework so that students can become more aware of the current events?
A couple of my classes do a unit on social protest and we’ve talked about the BLM movement. What I really get them to try and think about are the appropriate and inappropriate ways that the media says there is to protest by making connections to the civil rights movement. At that time people were doing sit ins, peaceful protest and they were thought of as unrespectable and disruptive. So that notion of what that means changes and I need my students to understand that.
3. Do you find that you’re entitled to talk about black history since your one of the few black professors here at UT?
I will always talk about identity. I’m never going to have a colorblind classroom because I don’t think we should be colorblind, there’s a way to acknowledge and talk about it. I do feel grateful to bring in my cultural identity and expertise in black cultural affairs because most of the time I’m looking at a class full of people that don’t look like me. I realize that sometimes I’m their first touch point to understand those things.
4. What do you not like about teaching?
The thing that I try not to get weary or pessimistic about is that unfortunatly I am dealing with a generation of students that don’t understand anything outside of the grade. I try everyday to tell them that you’ll never have such a concentrated chance to explore your intellectual curiosity and hoan your intellectual knowledge and that doesn’t always happen by if you get an “A” or “B” on a test. I just wish that my students had more trust in me as a professor to see them more holistically then a three point assignment. When I finally get that to my students, that that’s not the ethos of my classroom we have a really good time, but that’s really difficult these days.
5. How do you keep your bias from showing in your teaching?
In this current cultural moment and the last five to six years of my job, yes I am a professor and I profess knowledge, but I’m the best professor I can be when I use my skills to facilitate class discussion. I can’t teach the students anything new if I don’t meet them where they’re at and hear them out before I tell them exactly how I feel about it. 90% of my job is facilitating and that can be hard because I have to make connections around the classroom and I don’t always know what my students are going to say, but I try hard to do that.
Interview was edited for brevity, clarity, and style
