Dear Higher Education: Letters from the Social Justice Mountain

The seed for this project, Dear Higher Education: Letters from the Social Justice Mountain was planted in 2023.  It was just a few short years after the public murder of George Floyd, an African American man in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by a White policeman.  The policeman pressed his knee and the weight of his body against Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds on May 25, 2020.   The horror of the publicly recorded murder launched a new era of civil rights awakening.  The awakening included the rapid and widespread hiring of Chief Diversity Officers in universities and corporations across the United States.  It included pledges and compacts from corporations and institutions to provide resources to support African American communities. It included an enhanced awareness and sensitivity to issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion broadly. 

One of the most notable examples of the United States race awakening was The 1619 Project, a New York Times Magazine commemoration in essays, poems, and imagery of the 400 years since the arrival of the first enslaved people. Published in August 14, 2019, it eventually became a book, a TV series, and a school curriculum. By February 2021, The 1619 Project had been adopted by more than 4000 educators from all 50 states.

This movement, however, would be short-lived.  It would be similar to, but much shorter than Reconstruction. Twelve years after the ending of the Civil War, 12 years from 1865-1877, the federal government withdrew its troops from the south in 1877.  It ignited decades of Jim Crow and legally sanctioned segregation, discrimination, and state-sanctioned violence until the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s began to turn the tide. The new racial awakening era, however,  was challenged as early as the spring of 2021, before initiatives had the time to develop and be implemented.

In February 2021, Iowa  drafted a bill to ban the use of the 1619 Project curriculum in classrooms. That was just the start of a turning point that would eventually include anti-critical race theory legislation, divisive concepts, and anti-DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) legislation across the country.   By June 2023, the Supreme Court ended the use of race in university admission, a decision that catalyzed an anti-DEI backlash that would spread across the United State and be codified in executive orders following the presidential transition in 2025. 

Amid this rapidly shifting sociopolitical, legal, and cultural environment impacting social justice and issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the academy, Dear Higher Education came to be.

The editors of Dear Higher Education felt called to address the erasure of knowledge, wisdom, and experiences precipitated by the dissolution of diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and the elimination of websites whose content told the history of equity and inclusion work at their institutions. By adopting a narrative approach that told real stories of diversity, equity, and inclusion work in higher education the project documents historical and systemic challenges that require social justice activism.  Dear Higher Education also elevates various strategies and best practices employed by diversity practitioners in fostering inclusive campus climates; contributes to the current discourse about diversity, social justice, equity, and education; and provides a resource for the larger higher education community of faculty, staff, students, governance boards, and administrators who want to understand diversity, equity, and inclusion issues  in higher education.  

Representing a diversity of racial, gender, sexuality, and disability identities, the contributors share letters to higher education on an extensive breadth of topics, often drawing upon their lived experiences of marginalization, persistence, community-building, and triumph in their roles as educators, scholars, academic professionals and administrators. Motivated by a desire to fight back against attempts to silence, minimize, marginalize, and render invisible the work of social justice in higher education, Dear Higher Education raises up the voices of those whose labor makes campus environments more diverse, equitable, and just.

Evolving from an informal “semi-book” structure, Dear Higher Education is becoming an open access journal, hosted by the University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing with regular calls, and special issues. The current editors of the journal series are faculty members and scholars, including Menah Pratt, Michele Deramo, and M. Gabriela Torres.