Dear Higher Education: Letters from the Social Justice Mountain

Silent No More: Toward a New Modus Operandi in the Academy

Anonymous

Abstract

This letter, submitted to the Why We Need to Be Heard category, represents the author’s experience navigating the tenure track as the only Black faculty member in the department in a discipline where Black faculty make up just 4% of the professoriate. For too long in higher education, colleagues and students have been allowed to be invisible ghosts in the minds of marginalized, pre-tenure, and adjunct faculty. These incidents are particularly damaging when experienced as the Lonely Only. Lorde called the transformation of silence into language and action an act of self-revelation. Self-revelation calls one to reflect on their thoughts, feelings, attitudes, acts of omission and commission. This, of course, is scary. It is also necessary. Inspired by poet-professor-librarian-activist Audre Lorde, I share an original poem calling on Higher Education to reimagine its current MO of responding to our lived realities with silence.