Dear Higher Education: Letters from the Social Justice Mountain

In the Midst

Alexis Holloway

Mount Holyoke College

Abstract

This letter to higher education reflects on the entanglement of performative engagement, multigenerational caregiving, and institutional indifference through the experience of caring for my mother with metastatic cancer while navigating graduate training and academic life. Writing from “after,” this letter interrogates the figure of the ideal academic subject: disembodied, mobile, unencumbered, and uninterrupted. Against this institutional fantasy, this essay situates the Black daughter-scholar whose intellectual labor unfolded alongside medication schedules, long drives between home and campus, and the slow process of grief.

Ultimately, the letter calls on higher education to confront the temporal, emotional, and material assumptions embedded in its standards of rigor and merit. It asks what becomes possible if relational life is not treated as a distraction, but as a process of intellectual formation. By returning to my mother’s insistence on medical advocacy and her refusal to be diminished by a diagnosis, this letter argues that care work is not ancillary to scholarly life but constitutive of it.