Different Worlds and Divergent Paths:

In this article, Juanita Johnson-Bailey, a Black female professor, and Ronald M. Cervero, a White male professor, examine and contrast their academic lives by exploring how race and gender have influenced their journeys and their experiences. Using journal excerpts, personal examples, and a comparative list of privileges, the authors present a picture of their different realities at a research university. The depiction of their collective forty years in academia reveals that White men and Black women are regarded and treated differently by colleagues and students. Manifestations of this disparate treatment are evident primarily in classroom and faculty interactions. An examination of the professors’ relationships with people and with their institution illustrates that, overall, the Black woman is often relegated to a second-class existence characterized by hostility, isolation, and lack of respect, while the White man lives an ideal academic life as a respected scholar who disseminates knowledge, understands complexity, and embodies objectivity.


Juanita Johnson-Bailey is a professor and associate head of the Department of Lifelong Education, Administration, and Policy at the University of Georgia. She is a core faculty member in the Institute of Women’s Studies and an affiliate faculty member in the Institute of African American Studies, and is tenured in the Program of Adult Education. Johnson-Bailey teaches courses on race and gender in the workplace, narrative analysis, and feminist pedagogy. Her book, Sistahs in College: Making a Way Out of No Way (2000), received the Phillip E. Frandson Award for Literature in Continuing Higher Education. She is a coeditor of Flat-Footed Truths: Telling Black Women’s Lives (with P. Bell-Scott, 1998), a collection of constructed narratives. Her work, which has focused on the power dynamics in the classroom, the social experiences of Black graduate students, and the conditions of reentry Black women, has appeared in Qualitative Studies in Education, Feminist Teacher, The Journal of Higher Education, and Journal of Negro Education.

Ronald M. Cervero is a professor and head of the Department of Lifelong Education, Administration, and Policy at the University of Georgia. His research focuses on power and politics in education and on professional education. His books have received the Cyril O. Houle World Award for Literature in Adult Education, in 1989 for Effective Continuing Education for Professionals and in 2006 for Working the Planning Table: Negotiating Democratically for Adult, Continuing, and Workplace Education. He coedited Power in Practice: Adult Education and the Struggle for Knowledge and Power in Society (with A. L. Wilson, 2001). Cervero has received three Imogene Okes Awards for Research from the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education for his research into the politics of education.