Dear Higher Education: Letters from the Social Justice Mountain

Dear Higher Education, I Love You ... Now Stop Leaving People Behind

Katrina Caldwell

Abstract

This letter is a reckoning and a love letter, offered by a former senior administrator who spent more than three decades inside higher education's institutional walls, watching a quiet contradiction grow louder with each passing year. Higher education institutions proclaim commitments to growth, equity, and human development, yet consistently fail to extend those commitments to the administrators, middle managers, and staff employees who keep these organizations functioning every single day.

Drawing on personal experience as a senior leader across multiple research institutions, the author examines what it once felt like to work in higher education: the sense of mission, the camaraderie, the belief that one's work mattered, and the institution's investment in the people doing it. She then traces the erosion of those conditions, as budget pressures, administrative bloat, and a culture of extraction replaced cultures of development and belonging.

The letter argues that higher education's failure to invest in the growth of staff and administrators is not merely an HR problem. It is a justice problem. When institutions pour resources into student-facing programs and executive leadership development while leaving middle managers and front-line staff without mentorship, professional pathways, or meaningful recognition, they reproduce the same hierarchies of value they claim to oppose.

The letter falls within the category of institutional critique and transformative advocacy, calling higher education to align its internal practices with its stated values. It speaks directly to social justice through the lens of labor equity, institutional belonging, and the invisible workforce that holds higher education together.