Being Brothers, being keepers, being Kept: Re-Theorizing Malone & Ford’s Tenure-Track Autoethnography

This article re-theorizes Malone and Ford’s (2023) account of Black male faculty navigating the tenure track by situating their experiences within broader formations of racialized institutional life, gendered being, and academic marketization. The article treats autoethnography as archive and analytic site, engaging these narratives as fragments that reveal how Black faculty life is constituted through ongoing forms of slow, affective, and epistemic violence. The analysis examines how processes such as cultural taxation operate not as deviations from institutional norms, but as conditions of academic life. In doing so, the article advances the concept of ontological aversion to describe how faculty navigate the academy. It concludes by calling for a reorientation of faculty evaluation and institutional practice that centers relational, affective, and community-grounded forms of labor. In reframing Black male professorship as a site of theoretical production, the article contributes to ongoing efforts to rethink the meaning, value, and future of academic life.