The Leaning Ivory Tower

Latino professors in American universities tell their own stories of survival within academia. Each story is a perspective, a slice of academic life. Collectively, the multiple perspectives in this volume provide a totality that is penetrating and disturbing but essential if we are to genuinely diversify our present and future professoriate. The accounts capture and challenge the academic cultural terrain as it is constructed and perceived by the writers--a cultural terrain that has been created to limit and exclude, based on and bound to cultural, racial, gender, religious, and class manifestations and oppressive traditions. Each author, struggling with her and his own reality, is a study in authenticity and the engagement of liberation through self-critique. Through struggle with an oppressive academic world, the authors not only pursue their own liberation but simultaneously serve as liberating sponsors by restoring humanity back to those who oppress them. Thus, The Leaning Ivory Tower is not just a metaphor for what it is. It also confronts, reconfigures, and challenges us to redraw our paradigmatic and conceptual borders so that the democratic process will be a liberating practice evidenced throughout academia.