Dear Higher Education: Letters from the Social Justice Mountain

“Not You, of Course”: A Letter from a Lonely Only

Leela MadhavaRau

Independent Consultant Scholar

Abstract

“Not You, of Course” takes its title from the phrase a biracial child heard growing up in small-town Ontario — the exception granted by her father’s colleagues even as they disparaged immigrants and minorities. The letter argues that higher education has been repeating this phrase for over thirty years: hiring women of color to do equity work while withholding the institutional support and power needed to accomplish it.

Written as a direct address to higher education itself, the letter traces the author’s migrations across four institutions and two countries — from a Race Relations Officer position at a Canadian university sheltering faculty conducting eugenics research, through American institutions where “food and fiesta” substituted for structural change, to the founding of an independent consulting practice when institutional conflicts of interest made transformational work from within impossible. At each institution, the author was the Lonely Only: the woman of color hired to carry what the institution would not do.

The letter weaves a second narrative — the author’s experience of living with rheumatoid arthritis and other invisible disabilities, drawing a parallel between the invisibility of chronic pain and of equity labor. The institutional dismissal of equity work (“it’s just diversity”) mirrors the dismissal of invisible disability (“it’s just a headache”). Both render the person and her work unseen.

Despite three decades of institutional resistance, the letter closes with a vision of what higher education could be — honest, clear-eyed, and committed to working within limitations while refusing to accept them as permanent.