Dear Higher Education: Letters from the Social Justice Mountain

The Sherpa to the Mountain

Trudy P. Nadine (Pseudonym)

Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and Southern Illinois University Carbondale

Keywords: sherpa, legacy, black women

Abstract

In “The Sherpa to the Mountain,” Dr. Trudy P. Nadine offers a rage-filled letter, stylized as a poem, addressed to Higher Ed Mountain—a towering metaphor for the academy itself. Fully aware of her role, the consequences, and the risks, Dr. Nadine describes the precarious position of Black women who serve as sherpas: guides who carry institutional weight, stabilize treacherous paths, and ensure others reach the summit, often at great personal cost. She situates herself within a lineage of women—her grandmothers and mother—who have navigated the Mountain’s unforgiving terrain. Despite being committed to and enamored with the Mountain, she has resolved to send her own daughter up as well; but is the act one of love, legacy, survival—or betrayal?

This letter-poem explores the sherpa metaphor as a framework for understanding the intellectual, emotional, and structural labor Black women perform in higher education. It examines the tension between loyalty to the institution and recognition of its exhausting demands. While Dr. Nadine acknowledges what occurs—and has occurred—along the path to the summit—the exhaustion, invisibility, and risk to life—she remains tethered to the Mountain, unable to imagine herself elsewhere. In doing so, the poem exposes both devotion and captivity, illuminating the complicated terrain women of color traverse as they sustain institutions that do not always sustain them in return.