This book focuses on the experience of foreign language faculty in American colleges and universities, the challenges they face, and ways that academia can better support language faculty, and marginalized faculty in other fields, in their important work.

This study explored the experience of foreign language faculty in American colleges and universities. Foreign language faculty, because of the gender make-up of the field, their employment status, and their intellectual reputation are a particularly marginalized subset of the professoriate. Therefore, by studying their experience, it is possible to gain insights into the causes and effects of faculty marginalization in general--insights that are much needed in order to distribute academic power more evenly. In addition, in an increasingly globalized world, foreign language as a field of study and teaching makes important contributions to higher education, the U.S. economy, and more broadly, the promotion of cultural awareness and global understanding.
The study revealed that foreign language faculty population in terms of faculty status and rank. Women, faculty in the "less commonly taught languages," and responded to their marginalization in different ways, with faculty in the less commonly taught languages working most proactively to improve their status. Faculty administrative duties, such as committee service, appear to be a key way that faculty can work to alleviate their own marginalization, and participants also offered a variety of suggestions for institutional policy changes that would improve their experience.