Dear Higher Education: Letters from the Social Justice Mountain

Dear Higher Education: Winning Within the Margins Without Losing Ourselves

Tamanika Ferguson

Wellesley College, Women's and Gender Studies

Abstract

This epistolary letter speaks from the vantage point of many women of color in the academy: the “Lonely Only” expected to be exceptional, grateful, and endlessly resilient while navigating rules that are shifting, unwritten, or unevenly applied. I describe what it feels like to move through hiring cycles, publishing pipelines, and departmental life where “fit” operates as polite code for cultural matching, where silence is treated as neutral rather than consequential, and where brilliance unmeasured by dominant metrics is treated as “less, under, micro.”

Grounded in lived experience, the letter names overlapping burdens that rarely appear in formal evaluation: multigenerational caregiving carried alongside “productivity,” migrations of geography and identity read as instability, salary differentials wrapped in politeness and policy, and the disciplining that occurs when women of color name harm and are told to be “professional.”

Rather than offering a story of individual triumph, I argue that survival and excellence require infrastructure. I share repeatable practices I have built to stay grounded: clarity tools that make interdisciplinary work legible without shrinking it, ethics as workflow (consent, context, usefulness), and boundary scripts that protect time and spirit. I close by calling for institutional changes that would make transformation possible, including transparent criteria and timelines, equitable compensation, caregiving supports, and review standards that can recognize interdisciplinary and public scholarship.