![]() For all practical matters, she was being fired: faculty who have been denied tenure are required to leave Harvard. (Siskind is Argentinian.) But he was holding back tears. So, when Siskind notified her that Harvard had denied her tenure, she thought he was playing a prank-“ Me estás jodiendo” (“You’re kidding me”), she said, in Spanish. The tenure committee had unanimously recommended that she be promoted a second, higher committee had endorsed the recommendation. When another university had tried to poach her earlier that year, her department chair and two deans had encouraged her to apply for early tenure. She was a beloved professor many of her students referred to her, affectionately, as La Profe. Hired in 2013 as the only Black Latina on the tenure track at Harvard’s largest division, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, García Peña had created a Latinx-studies secondary field and area of focus, and collected numerous awards for her teaching and competitive fellowships. She had become a leading reference in the field of ethnic studies her first book, “ The Borders of Dominicanidad,” had been well reviewed and had received several awards a new book, on diasporic Blackness, was under contract with the same publisher as her first, Duke University Press. García Peña had reached that point in a scholar’s career when great promise crystallizes into solid achievement. showed that it was Mariano Siskind, the chair of her department, Romance Languages and Literatures, she smiled with anticipation. When her cell phone rang and the caller I.D. She had nine students coming over for dinner the next day, and she was in high spirits. On the night before Thanksgiving, 2019, Lorgia García Peña, a professor of Latinx studies at Harvard, was in her house in Arlington, Massachusetts, seasoning a large turkey. Photograph by Cody O’Loughlin / NYT / Redux Students rallied on campus after Harvard denied tenure to Lorgia García Peña.
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