Great Essay on PoCs in academia
hat tip to unusualmusic over at snr.
Scott Bear Don't Walk was accepted to be a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. This is his account of what he found there.
Some of my f-list perhaps most of you will have been in situations a bit like this.
Here's my follow-up:
Great essay. Very thought-provoking. It reminds me of a panel that some of my indigenous junior age-mates organized at the national conference a couple of years ago. We've all graduated now and are (the ones who were in the room anyway) at least moderately successful in our chosen fields: one of us has been spectacularly successful in his own quiet way, the rest of us are scattered around more or less prestigious institutions both private and public. We teach, we write, we try to run our personal lives as best we can. We are the ones who made it.
What came home most forcefully as my junior fellows gave their presentations was a) how impressive they all were and b) how terribly the institution we all graduated from, and we their seniors had failed them as students and members of the community.
Certainly, like Scott Bear Don't Walk, they had overcome some pretty arduous obstacles to make it to “the big time”, and unlike Mr. Bear Don't Walk, they now have the terminal credential which did indeed open doors that would otherwise likely have stayed shut. So they (and I) are “successes” where he is “not”.
But they have succeeded in spite of the system rather than because of it. Or more accurately perhaps, they had each been able to find small ledges and finger and toe-holds on the cliff-face that stopped them from slipping and being hurled down the waterfall that is what passes for “training” in academic life and an academic career.
It’s a truism that this waterfall hammers everyone who tries for a life of the mind. It’s also true that people of color have a much harder time of it, even those of us who come from upper-middleclass backgrounds because we are FOR SURE in hostile territory. The same is obviously true (but perhaps in different ways) for working class folks who don’t assimilate, for women, for those who prioritize families and for those who are gay or religious or who are differently abled.
What isn’t made clear is that the process continues beyond grad school in many ways and really exerts the same sort of insidious, self-destroying, dehumanizing effect on those who engage with it, all the way through until at least tenure and perhaps beyond that as well.
Certainly academia is not for everyone, nor should academia as it is currently structured, be imposed upon anyone. But I personally believe that knowledge is for everyone, and that is one of the things that academia can do quite well (and would do even better if it were purged of the virus of competitive, paranoic individualism that is a feature of modern capitalist society).
Of course, academia is not the only place you can do that, and Scott Bear Don’t Walk is to be commended that he realized that he was not going to be able to nurture the kinds of seeds he was skilled at nurturing in the rocky soil of Rhodes Scholarship Land.
For me, the bigger picture is that those of us who are skilled in working that soil need to work to make the soil more welcoming to others. We don’t need to accept that the superfund nature of academic practice is the only way it can be or the only way it ought to be.
If we can stay connected to the genuine pain and confusion of our grad school lives without having it cripple us or turn us into the “pain is just weakness leaving the body” intellectual file-closers(1) who still populate far too many of the hallways and offices of academia, then we stand a brief and fleeting chance of revitalizing academic practice and training in a way that is liberating and exciting and which for many of us was the spark that got us hooked on thinking in the first place.
(1) a file-closer in 18th century military terms was an officer or NCO who maintained discipline in the ranks. Most famously, in the army of Fredrick the Great of Prussia, file-closers were supposed to shoot down any soldier who looked like they might panic or refuse to follow an order. I also like this term because closing a file in modern bureaucrat speak is probably one of the more inhumane concepts ever to be adopted by so-called "civilization"
Scott Bear Don't Walk was accepted to be a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. This is his account of what he found there.
Some of my f-list perhaps most of you will have been in situations a bit like this.
Here's my follow-up:
Great essay. Very thought-provoking. It reminds me of a panel that some of my indigenous junior age-mates organized at the national conference a couple of years ago. We've all graduated now and are (the ones who were in the room anyway) at least moderately successful in our chosen fields: one of us has been spectacularly successful in his own quiet way, the rest of us are scattered around more or less prestigious institutions both private and public. We teach, we write, we try to run our personal lives as best we can. We are the ones who made it.
What came home most forcefully as my junior fellows gave their presentations was a) how impressive they all were and b) how terribly the institution we all graduated from, and we their seniors had failed them as students and members of the community.
Certainly, like Scott Bear Don't Walk, they had overcome some pretty arduous obstacles to make it to “the big time”, and unlike Mr. Bear Don't Walk, they now have the terminal credential which did indeed open doors that would otherwise likely have stayed shut. So they (and I) are “successes” where he is “not”.
But they have succeeded in spite of the system rather than because of it. Or more accurately perhaps, they had each been able to find small ledges and finger and toe-holds on the cliff-face that stopped them from slipping and being hurled down the waterfall that is what passes for “training” in academic life and an academic career.
It’s a truism that this waterfall hammers everyone who tries for a life of the mind. It’s also true that people of color have a much harder time of it, even those of us who come from upper-middleclass backgrounds because we are FOR SURE in hostile territory. The same is obviously true (but perhaps in different ways) for working class folks who don’t assimilate, for women, for those who prioritize families and for those who are gay or religious or who are differently abled.
What isn’t made clear is that the process continues beyond grad school in many ways and really exerts the same sort of insidious, self-destroying, dehumanizing effect on those who engage with it, all the way through until at least tenure and perhaps beyond that as well.
Certainly academia is not for everyone, nor should academia as it is currently structured, be imposed upon anyone. But I personally believe that knowledge is for everyone, and that is one of the things that academia can do quite well (and would do even better if it were purged of the virus of competitive, paranoic individualism that is a feature of modern capitalist society).
Of course, academia is not the only place you can do that, and Scott Bear Don’t Walk is to be commended that he realized that he was not going to be able to nurture the kinds of seeds he was skilled at nurturing in the rocky soil of Rhodes Scholarship Land.
For me, the bigger picture is that those of us who are skilled in working that soil need to work to make the soil more welcoming to others. We don’t need to accept that the superfund nature of academic practice is the only way it can be or the only way it ought to be.
If we can stay connected to the genuine pain and confusion of our grad school lives without having it cripple us or turn us into the “pain is just weakness leaving the body” intellectual file-closers(1) who still populate far too many of the hallways and offices of academia, then we stand a brief and fleeting chance of revitalizing academic practice and training in a way that is liberating and exciting and which for many of us was the spark that got us hooked on thinking in the first place.
(1) a file-closer in 18th century military terms was an officer or NCO who maintained discipline in the ranks. Most famously, in the army of Fredrick the Great of Prussia, file-closers were supposed to shoot down any soldier who looked like they might panic or refuse to follow an order. I also like this term because closing a file in modern bureaucrat speak is probably one of the more inhumane concepts ever to be adopted by so-called "civilization"