Dear Higher Education: Letters from the Social Justice Mountain

Dear Higher Education: On Memory, Staying, and the Refusal to Disappear

Leslie K Morrow

Penn State University

Keywords: Intersectionality, Institutional Memory, Racialized and Gendered Care Labor

Abstract

This letter, entitled "Dear Higher Education: On Memory, Staying, and the Refusal to Disappear," speaks from the positionality of a Black queer woman in the academy who has learned what it means to be the Lonely Only, entitled: 

This letter is situated at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. I examine how higher education simultaneously celebrates symbolic diversity while disciplining the identities and intellectual traditions it claims to value. Drawing from lived experience and research with justice-oriented scholar-educators, I reflect on the racialized and gendered care labor required to make institutions marginally more livable for those most targeted by anti-Blackness and the regulation of gender and sexuality.

To be the Lonely Only is not simply to be underrepresented; it is to be positioned as both hypervisible and institutionally expendable. Our scholarship is welcomed when it diversifies curricula and questioned when it exposes entrenched systems of power. Our presence is mobilized as evidence of institutional progress even as policies fail to secure material conditions of belonging. In moments of political backlash, calls for neutrality and professionalism disproportionately regulate women of color and queer faculty, narrowing the boundaries of acceptable intellectual inquiry.

This letter argues that intersectional voices marked as marginal are analytically central to understanding the contemporary academy. Our voices expose how institutions curate memory, contain critique, and depend upon unrecognized relational labor to sustain claims of equity. To be heard is not merely to be included; it is to disrupt erasure and to document the structural cost of staying.