Leadership in Higher Education: 6 Conversation-Starting Articles

While gathering resources to enhance my efforts to engage leaders in higher ed in cultivating a lens of inclusion and equity through which to approach their work, I came across these few articles. I’m sharing the links below.

I often engage in conversations about retention; specifically retention of students, faculty, and staff with marginalized identities on college campuses and one of the things I strive to push back against are narratives that assume that institutions and the people who run them can address these challenges without implicating themselves.

Read the first article before proceeding to the others, and try to locate yourself within them all by considering your experiences with and awareness of power, privilege, and oppression in terms of how you are implicated and impacted by what’s being discussed.

Letter to My Bully’s Enabler Upon My Resignation

“Are you, as a leader, fully aware of employee concerns about bullying, or is there a silent epidemic within your organization that you don’t see or choose to ignore? “

Full article: Letter to my Bully’s Enabler Upon My Resignation

Diversity Fatigue is Real

“Underrepresented faculty and staff members share the burden of diversity work in many visible and invisible forms: They often assume heavier workloads in teaching, advising, mentoring, and counseling, and spend more time on outreach, recruitment, training and workshops, and other service work. While their institutions benefit from collective gains in student success, those who do this work find it exhausting to do more than their fair share, indefinitely.

White People: Yes, It is Difficult For You To Talk About Race–That’s Part Of Racism’s Design

“Whatever the reason for your silence, you’ve made a conscious decision to remain silent about race, perhaps even in the face of racist injustice. White privilege allows you to feel like an individual who made a difficult decision. But, in reality, most white people choose silence. And, those individual decisions to remain silent add up to collective white silence, to white complicity in racist oppression, or even white consent to racist violence.

And, that’s exactly how white silence feels. As a person of color, I cannot discern between your fear-stricken silence and the silence of white people who don’t think that racism exists, who think that race only emerges as a topic or factor when people of color bring it up (i.e., “playing the race card), or who simply do not value the lives of people of color. The impact of your silence is literally the same as that of Klansmen, Nazis, most white Republicans, and other garden-variety racists.”

“People of color have to be brave in the face of racism because our survival literally depends upon it. We don’t have a choice in the matter. But, when you let fear silence you, you’re enjoying the luxury of choosing to speak up (or not) about racism afforded to you by white privilege. The consequence of your silence and inaction is not death; in reality, the main consequence is maintaining your white privilege.”

Full Article: White People: Yes It is Difficult For You To Talk About Race–That’s Part Of Racism’s Design

Workplaces Need to Prepare for the Non-Binary Future

“Millennials now make up over one-third of the American workforce, according to the Pew Research Center. And a large fraction of millennials—perhaps as many as 12 percent, by GLAAD’s latest measure—identify as transgender or gender non-conforming.

Combine those two facts and one thing is clear: Employers are going to have to adjust their approach to gender—and fast.”

Full Article: Workplaces Need to Prepare for the Non-Binary Future

When Liberal Orgs Tell QTPOC To “Bring Your Full Self To Work”, It’s A Lie. I Know Because I Fell For It.

“They don’t want us to bring our whole selves to work. They want us to be a token and to act accordingly. This is our other duty as assigned. This is why everything we do and say is under vigilant surveillance, in person and on social media, and it has been since the first moment of employment. They watch us to see if at any moment we make cis people, especially white cis people, uncomfortable. It is inevitable that we will make them uncomfortable with our brilliant existence because they have intentionally excluded us from their spaces and now they are forced to be near us.”

Full Article: When Liberal Orgs Tell QTPOC To “Bring Your Full Self To Work”, It’s A Lie. I Know Because I Fell For It.

Academic Racism: The Repression of Marginalized Voices in Academia

“Ironically, because whites by 2050 will cease to be the majority, any academic institution which continues to ignore the nation’s changing demographics do so at their own peril. Why? Because the U.S. context faced by communities of color will soon be the context of the majority of Americans. Continuing to ignore these voices ensures an absence of cutting-edge academic analysis. Indeed, academia is posed to lose its relevance for the emerging majority of Americans.”

Full Article: Academic Racism: The Repression of Marginalized Voices in Academia

Ubuntu,

From Aspiring Humanitarian, Relando Thompkins-Jones

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