The Pressure to Cover

Yale law prof Kenji Yoshino's work on "covering" has found an impressive new platform in today's New York Times magazine.  If you haven't read the basic thesis, here's a taste from the opening:

When I began teaching at Yale Law School in 1998, a friend spoke to me frankly. "You'll have a better chance at tenure," he said, "if you're a homosexual professional than if you're a professional homosexual." Out of the closet for six years at the time, I knew what he meant. To be a "homosexual professional" was to be a professor of constitutional law who "happened" to be gay. To be a "professional homosexual" was to be a gay professor who made gay rights his work. Others echoed the sentiment in less elegant formulations. Be gay, my world seemed to say. Be openly gay, if you want. But don't flaunt.

I didn't experience the advice as antigay. . . . I took my colleague's words as generic counsel to leave my personal life at home. I could see that research related to one's identity - referred to in the academy as "mesearch" - could raise legitimate questions about scholarly objectivity.

I also saw others playing down their outsider identities to blend into the mainstream. Female colleagues confided that they would avoid references to their children at work, lest they be seen as mothers first and scholars second. Conservative students asked for advice about how open they could be about their politics without suffering repercussions at some imagined future confirmation hearing. A religious student said he feared coming out as a believer, as he thought his intellect would be placed on a 25 percent discount. Many of us, it seemed, had to work our identities as well as our jobs.

Substitute a few words, and this could serve as an introductory essay for the religious lawyering movement.  For our purposes, the question will be whether this project would create space within the academy for religion only to the extent that it is tied to claims of personal identity and non-mainstream paths of self-creation, or would it also make room for religion as a set of truth claims?  In any event, it's worth reading.

Rob