Dear Higher Education: Letters from the Social Justice Mountain

Staying Without Becoming: Notes from a Woman of Color Inside the Academy

Shanique Broom

Abstract

This letter reflects on the structural loneliness experienced by women of color in higher education, arguing that isolation is not an emotional condition but a predictable outcome of institutional design. Drawing from lived experience inside academic and public-sector institutions, the author reframes the “Lonely Only” not as a matter of belonging or resilience, but as a governance signal produced by responsibility without authority, visibility without protection, and accountability misaligned with power. The letter traces how women of color are often positioned as evidence of institutional commitment while simultaneously relied upon to absorb unresolved structural contradictions—particularly in equity-adjacent roles. Rather than narrating harm through personal vulnerability or individual coping, the letter documents how professionalism, politeness, and policy operate to normalize inequity, discipline dissent, and reframe institutional failure as individual deficiency. Central to this reflection is a formative understanding learned early in the author’s academic journey: that meaningful change requires entering institutions as they are, while remaining vigilant against being reshaped into the very logics one seeks to challenge. The letter does not offer solutions framed as cultural change or personal endurance. Instead, it leaves a record of what staying has required, what has been normalized, and what remains structurally unaddressed. By centering governance rather than values, this contribution asserts that listening to women of color is insufficient without institutional redesign and accountability.