Dear Higher Education: Letters from the Social Justice Mountain

Tall Fences and Sacred Ground: Recalibrating Worth in the Academy

Martha Clavelle

San Diego State University

Keywords: Black women in leadership, misrecognition, Institutional self-preservation, community as resistance

Abstract

This letter reflects the Journey of a Black woman Dean navigating institutional self-preservation and the complicities that sustain misrecognition, particularly as they shape the perceptions of Black women’s leadership and authority within higher education. Entering the academy with a deep commitment to equity and justice, the author initially believed her purpose aligned with the institution’s mission. Over time however, she encountered the incongruence between aspirational language and structural design. Positioned in middle management she endured being positioned in proximity to power without the benefit of legitimacy or protection.

Through the cultivation of a student-centered community space known as the “Village”, she experienced both the impact of relational leadership, and the erasure that can follow when institutional narratives extract and detach labor from its source. What initially registered as personal failure was later understood, through study and community with Black women scholars as patterned misrecognition. Naming that pattern shifted shame into clarity.

Situated within the category: “Why we believe transformation is possible,” this letter asserts that hope lies less in institutional concession and more in the collective discernment of women of color. Transformation emerges through boundary-setting, internal recalibration, and community formation that interrupts isolation and affirms self-worth. Rather than centering reform alone, the author locates possibility in women’s shared refusal to hustle for validation and in their commitment to remain whole within, alongside, or beyond the academy.