Biography
A Chicano writer, theologian, and executive leader, Patrick B. Reyes, Ph.D., is the award-winning author of The Purpose Gap (WJK 2021) and Nobody Cries When We Die (Chalice Press, 2017). He is the dean of Auburn Theological Seminary.
In 2023, he was inducted into the Morehouse College MLK Jr. Collegium of Scholars. The Council of Independent Colleges NetVUE selected The Purpose Gap as the Big Read for 2022-2023. He is the outgoing board President of the Religious Education Association, and has been an active member of American Academy of Religion. He previously served as Senior Director of Learning Design at the Forum for Theological Exploration, where he oversaw its doctoral initiatives and fellowships from 2016-2023.
Patrick serves on boards in theological and higher education, publications, and the non-profit sector, supporting the next generation of Black, Indigenous, and Chicano spiritual and cultural leaders. Patrick holds a doctorate and masters from Claremont School of Theology, an M.Div. from Boston University School of Theology, and is a proud graduate of California State University, Sacramento. He lives on ancestral land in New Mexico, embracing the cultural and religious traditions and communities he and his family inherit and belong to.
Candidate Statement
A few years ago, my daughter, Carmelita, attended a virtual paper session that one of my colleagues was giving at the AAR annual meeting. She turns to me about half-way through the paper to say, “Pa, I want to do what she does.” The presenter and I had just spoken the week before about their piecing together their livelihood, and certainly was not paid for the labor to prepare the paper or to attend the annual meeting. I did not tell my daughter that piecing together administrative, teaching, writing, speaking, lectures, editing, and workshops was the way our family had enough funds for our lives just years prior.
The business model is broken, and the work of scholarship is necessary for future generations. I am working to keep Carmelita's dreams alive. From almost a decade of supporting scholars of color and institutions seeking to diversify their faculties at the Forum for Theological Exploration, and coming off my term serving as the President of the Religious Education Association, the data is clear that colleges, seminaries, and universities are more reliant on contingent labor at the same time that the number of jobs shrink. An entire industry is designed around tenure and promotion, from publishing to guild leadership. Promises of alternative academic careers are never matched by the practical support and redesign of preparation programs for those careers.
I am interested in serving on the board as one of the AAR Contingent Faculty Directors, because I am committed to creating a strategic plan that accounts for the trend in labor in higher education: contingent labor is increasingly the standard, not the exception. My hope is to continue the steady progress of the last few years and provide a practical strategic plan to support:
- Contingent Faculty – direct support programs that help contingent faculty members navigate and build careers.
- Administrators – programming that supports administrators in participating in equitable structures for contingent faculty members and to become co-designers of solutions to a broken business model.
- Tenure solidarity, advocacy, and shared leadership – work with tenured faculty, who are across the humanities holding onto a very slim majority of the workforce according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Across all my service in and beyond academic guilds and on boards of institutions of higher education - from R1s to free-standing seminaries - my approach to leadership has been measured and collaborative. My hope is that we can reframe our collective support around those who have chosen – or not – the vocations of teachers, lecturers, adjuncts, independent scholars, alternative academic careers, and the many other categories that fall outside of tenured lines.