Dear Higher Education: Letters from the Social Justice Mountain

Care as Counter-Institution: Staying, Refusal, and Collective Survival in the Academy

Deborah Oluwasola Owoyemi

Ekiti State University, Ado-Ekiti

Abstract

Transformation in higher education is often imagined as the outcome of institutional reform, policy change, or expanded commitments to equity and inclusion. Yet for many scholars, the conditions that make intellectual work sustainable emerge not from formal structures, but from informal practices of care, refusal, and collective support. Staying in the academy, under such conditions, becomes a political act rather than a sign of compliance. This letter reflects on how mentoring relationships, collective writing practices, and informal networks of accountability function as alternative infrastructures within academic life. These practices provide intellectual rigor, emotional steadiness, and material support in spaces where institutional mentoring and evaluation systems fall short. They do not resolve precarity or erase exhaustion; instead, they make continued scholarly work possible despite it. Care, in this context, operates not as sentiment or individual disposition, but as shared labor that sustains knowledge production where formal systems fail to do so. Grounded in lived experience and informed by Black feminist traditions that understand survival as collective rather than individual, this piece reframes transformation as something already underway, though largely unacknowledged. It argues that hope in higher education should not be located in institutional goodwill, but in the everyday practices through which scholars refuse erasure and create conditions for one another’s survival. At the end, the letter asks what higher education might become if such practices were treated not as peripheral or compensatory, but as central to how academic life is organized, evaluated, and sustained.