Conditions on The Ground Now

As a tenure-track and now-tenured professor with a doctorate in political science, I have purchased students’ plane tickets, provided childcare, and fed and housed them at conferences. I have organized shared-housing arrangements to support students during critical periods of transition. I have secured mini-grants, typically from $1,500 to $3,000, to pay students as research assistants with the explicit goal of funding their attendance at conferences. I have taught extra courses to pay for hotel rooms, rollout beds, couches, and floor spaces so that students could attend conferences. I also have had to teach students how to be advocates for themselves and how to apply for funding from the Diverse Educational Community and Doctoral Experience (DECADE) program, graduate division; student government; professional associations and conference conveners; and offices of undergraduate and graduate research.

I fund my graduate students in these ways because my peer mentors and my mentors met me at the Greyhound bus in Santa Barbara, California, as an admitted graduate student; introduced me to their kindest and most supportive colleagues; and paid for meals and hotel stays. My mentors gifted me with paid research projects and my first job-interview suits, literally outfitting me to conduct research and present at scholarly conferences on two continents. Through these acts of sharing and welcoming me into intellectual life, I have become an interdisciplinary feminist political scientist working across multiple countries on the African Continent and in the African Diaspora.

Normative political theorist and feminist philosopher Audre Lorde described “poetry” as the form of theory building that “coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom.” For Lorde, the type of freedom that I experience now and that was imagined for me by my mentors in the past required superior research training as well as a superior ethical environment that prioritized economic justice and redistribution. Lorde’s ideas about writing insisted that poetry—that oft-demeaned form of creative expression—be understood as the most critical vector for “dreaming,” “demanding,” and creating “power within our living.”

Those mentors and the scholars, librarians, women’s center founders and staffers, advocates, and activists who are part of their intellectual community intentionally subverted what Jeanne Scheper (Reference Scheper2017, 33) called the “redlining of education” and the “mortgaging of minds.” These acts of sharing expressed to me their belief in my promise—but not my promise as an exceptional “Magical Negro” or “Token.” Rather, these acts of sharing by my mentors and their community demonstrated to me their belief in my promise as indicative of the promise of all of us—left behind, left out, not cited, and recruited with the expectation of failure. My mentors’ sharing served as a relentless reminder that my life as an intellectual, as a writer, as a reader, and as a thinker was precious to them and to their survival.

Attending conferences are critical experiences that enable students to see themselves in the world of higher education and to begin to meet people who will be their peers in the field. At conferences, students make friends, build an associational life, and learn how to read informal spaces as learning spaces.^{Footnote 1} Learning to navigate the professional world of higher education requires enormous amounts of practice. It also requires students to figure out which people will accompany them as they learn how to discern the hidden curriculum of interpersonal interactions and formal requirements. For four centuries, the doyens of enlightenment have used their velvet-upholstered perches in research universities to legitimize the violence of enslavement, colonialism, imperialism, and heteropatriarchy. Whether these perches were literally built by enslaved persons or viewed as the necessary product of enslaved persons’ actual flesh, we are still on the journey from what Lorde called the “intimacy of scrutiny”…[for]…control over us” to wherever we have arrived at in this present era of higher education.^{Footnote 2}

Changing the Conditions—Poetic Demands

I was already post-tenure when I wrote a grant titled, “Evicting Our Best: The Political Work of Doing Political Science as a Scholar of Color at UC Irvine,” which enabled me to secure modest funding from my campus diversity office to pay for eight underrepresented students to attend their first national academic conference: the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. For the first time, I was able to bring students to a conference without them going into debt and without maxing out my credit cards.

Where are those students now—just three years later? One defended a dissertation on March 8, 2019; another graduated from George Washington University’s graduate program spring 2019; another graduated from Rutgers University’s graduate program; another graduated from Claremont Seminary of Theology’s doctoral program; one is in the first year of a multi-year Fulbright Fellowship in Latin America; another is in the first year of a tenure-track job; several are working at high-paying jobs in higher education at Research One universities and applying to graduate school; others are doing archival research and working on first dissertation chapters. Representing diversity in age, race, country of origin, religion, and sexual orientation and gender identity, these students read one another’s papers and Power Points, provided key pointers for presentation style, and provided childcare during absences from home—for each other.

Reflecting on the practices associated with helping my students see how deserving they are to attend graduate school is tempered by reflection on many of our colleagues nationally who use their classrooms to discourage first-generation and underrepresented minority students from going forward. My understanding is tempered by my white colleagues, who diminish my leadership in this area with pretend care and concern about how I “have nothing to contribute” while they are busy trying to position themselves as modern-day Friends of the Negro and Friends of the Native. I am convinced that graduate education is the single-most important factor in enabling our future colleagues to see their worth, their value, and their own capacity for working with others to contribute in deeply meaningful ways to society and the world. The neoliberalization of higher education has yielded an impoverished undergraduate experience, where at large historically white R1 institutions far too often students graduate having had only a few transformative classroom experiences in which their lives as thinkers, researchers, and writers were affirmed, challenged, upended, or remapped.

I was told recently by the director of diversity at my campus to “be more planful.” I heard it as a codeword for being more strategic and for shifting from leading from behind to leading in front. I am still deciding what I think about that advice. However, in the meantime, I will keep encouraging my future colleagues to take themselves seriously as thinkers and creating opportunities for them to do that. I will continue to warn them about people who want to help them for the wrong reasons and to teach them how to check me when I forget to accompany them. To the extent that I can clear space for them to access all of the languages and genres and research methodologies available to them—and those yet unthought—to “charter th[eir own] revolutionary demand[s],” I will continue my work of writing poetry and testifying. I am part of an insurgent political movement in higher education. I am here to testify, to write, and to return what has been stolen from generations yet to come.