The Unwritten Rules of Cultural Belonging in Academic Departments

For so many of us, our first day as a new faculty member is watermarked into memory.

On my first day as a faculty member—three days after completing graduate school—I attended my first faculty meeting. Seated at the table, I calmed my frayed nerves by reminding myself that I possessed the formal credentials for the role. At the same time, as I glanced around the room, a constellation of differences came into view: I was the only nonwhite faculty member in the department (and, I would later learn, in the college), was markedly younger than my colleagues, spoke with a noticeable accent, and was the only faculty member not from North America. Before I had said a single word of introduction, an unsettling awareness of my cultural otherness had set in.

As the meeting progressed, I lapsed into a familiar first-day-of-school routine; I started scanning the room, searching for cues. Who sits together? Who aligns, and who dissents with whom? Which voices carry? I worked methodically to map everyone’s place—and to locate my own—within this new and unfamiliar terrain. As I busied myself with this social cartography, an unremarkable agenda played on in the background: teaching assignments, graduate admissions, committee roles, and a handful of quick updates. As the chair explained how the department functioned, my thoughts turned to what it would be like to live inside it. Would I connect to this new community? Would my strengths be seen and valued? How would my cultural connection to the community impact recognition of my work?

Twenty-three years and two institutions later, I walked into my first faculty meeting as department chair. Situated in a new meeting room on another first day, doubts about cultural belonging reasserted themselves—quiescent doubts I had assumed I’d outgrown. Once again, I found myself trying to locate my place within a living, shifting ecosystem of norms, histories, and relationships—reading faces, deciphering expressions, and studying exchanges as I worked out how to connect to, and within, this new culture. Recognizing the persistent undertow of cultural belonging, I realized my uncertainty was not about whether I could do the work, but whether my ability to connect within this environment would shape how that work would be received and valued.

In time, I came to see these first-day moments—separated in time but similar in theme—as part of a broader pattern I have observed throughout my academic career: Three organizing factors—power, privilege, and positionality—threading themselves through the cultural ecology of academic life.

These intersecting factors reflect a paradox discussed in a recent paper published in Perspectives in Psychological Science (Singh, 2026). Universities often present themselves as politically progressive—proficient in the language of equity, inclusion, and social justice—and investing enormous resources in diversifying their citizenry. They frequently communicate these inclusive values through policies, committees, and public statements. Yet entrenched norms can reproduce exclusion through day-to-day routines via unwritten rules about cultural legitimacy. The result is a persistent tension between stated aspirations and the behaviors around which academic life is actually organized. 

This tension is structured by power, shaped by positionality, and sustained by privilege.

Power—most saliently instantiated through tenure—affords the latitude to take intellectual risks, to drive policy, and to pursue scholarship insulated from sociopolitical pressures. It also provides an individual with the protection to question and dissent. These same protections highlight the precarity of the nontenured and contingent workforce upon whom universities are increasingly dependent, yet who enjoy far less protection. A close observation of how tenured and teaching-track faculty interact within an academic department, and how each group’s work is recognized by the other, offers one barometer of its lived commitment to inclusivity.

Tenure institutionalizes continuity by allowing particular voices, orientations, and preferences to solidify into practices. That continuity can be stabilizing, preserving institutional memory and enabling long-range intellectual stewardship. However, it also means that departmental cultures can calcify around the norms of those who were able to enter and remain in the tenured ranks. The impact of this becomes evident when one recognizes that tenure is distributed both by merit and by multiplexed advantages that accumulate decades before most individuals apply for their first academic position.

These advantages are linked to factors such as race and ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic background and family lineage, health status, language and immigration status, and proximity to the potent informal networks that confer professional advantage (e.g. Matias et al., 2021; Morgan et al., 2022). In this way, merit and privilege share a complicated connection: Merit-based accomplishments can themselves generate privilege, while accumulated privilege can shape whose merits are most recognizable and thus translatable to structural advantage.

Systems of power are not only structural (like tenure) but also actualized. The work of Debra Kawahara and others demonstrate the complex relationship between structural and actualized power. For example, Kawahara and colleagues show that even when Asian women are highly qualified, they can be perceived as less well suited to leadership because racialized and gendered stereotypes shape how their authority is received and this can impact their actualized power (Kawahara et al., 2013). Over time, sustained resistance and the cumulative toll of “battle fatigue” can push Asian women to step away from leadership roles prematurely or lead to their subtle displacement through isolation and exclusion (Võ, 2012). This example conveys how power in academic departments is embedded in pervasive cultural expectations about who looks, sounds, and acts like a legitimate authority.

Privilege refers to the unearned advantages that accrue to some individuals by virtue of proximity to institutional power. It interacts in complex ways with merit; however, unlike merit, privilege often operates beneath the surface. For example, longstanding faculty can sometimes establish norms and practices that disproportionately benefit them, whether it be via unequal teaching arrangements that become normalized over time, social dominance in decision-making settings, or in the ability to opt out of undesirable labor without consequence.

As departments undergo renewal, new members may be unintentionally guided to sustain privilege by beneficiaries or affiliates of those with privilege. This can surface in seemingly innocuous boundary-setting statements: “Let me explain how things have generally worked here,” “This is just how Professor X is,” or “That’s not really the culture here.” These effectively serve as claims to cultural ownership so often rooted in accumulated privilege rather than in evidence or expertise. 

Because privilege is often least visible to its beneficiaries, it remains especially resistant to scrutiny even as it molds opportunity, voice, and belonging. In one example, work by Nkiru Nnawulezi and colleagues has demonstrated that in racial consciousness, distancing oneself from one’s own privilege or that of one’s community can foster psychological distance from systemic inequity and thus lead individuals to evade their own privilege. By contrast, engaging in analysis of one’s own privilege can foster racial consciousness by making inequity visible, increasing a sense of responsibility and accountability, and opening space for reflexivity, dialogue, and meaningful institutional change (Nnawulezi et al., 2020).

Related content: Global Science Requires Greater Equity, Diversity, and Cultural Precision

Positionality, in turn, conditions how individuals are received within these structures of power and privilege. It reflects the reality that social and professional identities and locations mediate how one’s contributions are valued. These dynamics extend beyond formal credentials to include social cues associated with academic habitus as described by Pierre Bourdieu (1984). Accents, dialects, patterns of speech, modes of self-presentation, immigration status, dress, and even stylistic choices in argumentation can be read as markers of academic legitimacy depending on how closely they conform to dominant cultural norms. In this way, positionality shapes access to power and privilege by establishing conditions for inclusion.

When these dynamics remain implicit, they are easily misrecognized as idiosyncrasies of personality, style, or individual fit rather than as sources of exclusion endemic to academic culture. In some cases, these interactions reflect implicit bias or function as microaggressions; in others, they remain more ambiguous while still having exclusionary impact. A comment described as not “well articulated,” a colleague perceived as “nice, but not leadership material,” or a scholar whose work is characterized as “interesting but niche” are everyday signals of how power, privilege, and positionality jointly constrain the ability of departments and universities to make good on their rhetorical commitments to inclusion. Recognizing these dynamics is a necessary first step, but awareness alone does not disrupt institutional routines. What is required instead is an intentional reorientation of departmental culture—one that moves beyond aspirational commitments to equity and toward practices that actively align ideals, policies, and norms.

To that end, the framework I propose advances three orienting principlesdesigned to make the intersection of power, privilege, and positionality both visible and contestable:

1. Reconcile our everyday decisions and leadership practices with the values we say we hold.
2. Cultivate an intellectual climate where different kinds of knowledge, perspectives, and contributions are valued.
3. Build the structures needed for lasting cultural change, including accountability, incentives, and shared responsibility.

Reconciliation of ideals and practices

The first principle calls for the reconciliation of ideals, policies, and norms. Many departments publicly endorse values of equity, inclusion, and fairness via mission statements, vision statements, or diversity committees, yet informal norms can subvert these same commitments. For example, departmental policies may formally speak out against bias, but the norm may be to subtly respond to those who raise discrimination concerns through ostracism or private disparagement. Reconciliation requires departments to interrogate not only what they say they value, but how those values are enacted, or undermined, through everyday social behaviors. 

Cultivation of inclusive norms

The second principle is about building an intellectual climate shaped by acculturation rather than enculturation. Enculturation tends to reward people who already fit dominant academic norms and puts pressure on others to adapt to those norms simply to belong. Acculturation, by contrast, widens the boundaries of what counts as legitimate participation. In practice, that means valuing different kinds of scholarly contributions, recognizing a range of professional paths, and broadening the cultural norms of academic life. An acculturated climate does not require everyone to sound, act, or work in the same way. Instead, it makes room for difference without placing extra burdens on those who do not match dominant expectations. A clear example is accent or dialect: everyone speaks with an accent or dialect, but some ways of speaking are more easily treated as “scholarly,” while others can unfairly mark someone as less credible. Becoming more aware of dominant culture helps make these often-invisible standards visible, which creates opportunities to question them and change them.

This distinction helps explain a persistent failure in academic diversification efforts: Institutions often invest heavily in broadening the pipeline—recruiting faculty from historically excluded and marginalized groups—without making commensurate changes to departmental culture. A department may successfully hire a racially or socially diverse cohort, only to evaluate, mentor, and socialize those faculty using inherited frameworks that were never designed with them in mind. New hires might then be expected to adapt—to modulate their research agendas, communication styles, or approaches to teaching—rather than being supported in broadening the intellectual culture.

Sustainable cultural change

The third principle focuses on establishing the structural preconditions for sustainable cultural change. Cultural transformation cannot rest on goodwill alone; it requires alignment between values, incentives, and accountability. For example, departments often rely heavily on the labor of faculty from historically marginalized communities to advance equity initiatives while failing to recognize or reward this work in promotion, evaluation, or workload allocation. At the same time, those who benefit most from existing arrangements may face little incentive to alter them or may alter them in superficial ways (e.g.,

performative allyship). Structural alignment involves redistributing labor, embedding equity goals into evaluation criteria, and creating mechanisms to assess progress over time. Without such alignment, even well-intentioned reforms risk being undone.

Taken together, these orienting principles shift the focus from individual attitudes to institutional practices. They acknowledge that cultural belonging is not secured through rhetoric or representation alone, but through detailed attention to how departments organize authority, distribute opportunity, and define legitimacy. By grounding cultural belonging in these principles, departments create opportunities to align progressive ideals with everyday practices.

Returning to the first faculty meeting I attended as a young assistant professor, although I did not have the language for it at the time, I now recognize it as an early initiation into the outsized significance of cultural belonging in academic life. Even though I shared little with my colleagues by way of conventional markers of cultural background, in the months that would follow, I quickly came to feel at home. This did not happen through policy, committee mandates, or public-facing statements, but instead through the daily accumulation of internal micropractices that defined the department’s culture. 

These micropractices included the ways colleagues made room for one another in conversation, cared about each other’s well-being, and took shared responsibility—often unprompted—for the unglamorous labor that keeps a department running. Over time, I came to see that belonging is co-constructed through reciprocity, mutual respect, and care—expressed through the many acts, both spoken and silent, that signal one’s membership within the collective. And precisely because culture is often enacted in micropractices, inclusion cannot be outsourced to structures alone; it lives, succeeds, or falters in the norms we sustain and reproduce daily. 

For many, these formative experiences can serve as the first flickers of recognition of the unwritten cultural scripts that choreograph inclusion and belonging in academic life. If our goal is to rewrite these scripts in the service of true inclusion, then departments must attend not only to who is hired, but to how power is exercised, how privilege accumulates, and how positionality shapes whose voices are heard, thus attending to cultural belonging. Cultural belonging should not be something faculty learn to negotiate defensively and at the margins, but a bedrock principle that we design for and embed at the center of departmental life. 

Feedback on this article? Email [email protected] or login to comment.