Dear Higher Education: Letters from the Social Justice Mountain

Arrived at the Mountain, Only Saw Waste

Gemmicka Piper — 2026-06-18

A wasteland is a vast land barren of resources or people—a space where nothing but desolation awaits. Riffing on this, an academic wasteland suggests that regardless of how much time or effort I extended, there are forces that can render the potential and promise of academia a moot point. My letter fits within the category of “Why We Come to the Mountain” by reflecting on what I believed higher education would mean for my life. In my foray into academia, I have always been clear that I was never in love with the idea of education and being educated, but rather chasing what education was supposed to mean. I thought it would open the door to financial freedom from the poverty I was born and raised within. Higher education was framed as a gateway—once you entered, it would provide freedom of movement. I believed that if I tried hard enough, I could experience comfort and stability. After over a decade in academia later, I have achieved little of the full life I thought higher education would afford me. Through this letter, I name how the Mountain becomes a wasteland through structural scarcity, hidden curricula, and the uneven costs women of color are expected to absorb—and I invite higher education to reckon with what it promises, what it withholds, and what repair would require.

Dear Higher Education: A Black Woman’s Call for Recognition, Equity, and Early Tenure at a Predominantly White Institution

Jennifer Malone — 2026-06-18

“A Black Woman’s Call for Recognition, Equity, and Early Tenure at a Predominantly White Institution” is a reflective narrative written from the perspective of a Black woman faculty member at a predominantly white institution seeking early tenure, illuminating the complex intersection of race, gender, and academic labor within the tenure process. The piece examines how teaching, research, and service are experienced and evaluated through inequitable lenses, highlighting the rigor of preparing future educators, the urgency of equity-centered scholarship, and the often-invisible mentoring and representational work disproportionately carried by Black women faculty. Framed as both personal testimony and institutional critique, the letter challenges traditional definitions of merit and excellence, arguing for a more expansive understanding that values relational labor, community impact, and sustained commitment to student success. Ultimately, it asserts that pursuing early tenure is not merely a professional milestone but an act of courage and affirmation of belonging in spaces where recognition has not always been equitably granted.

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

Katrina Caldwell — 2026-06-18

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.

Dear Higher Education, The Mountain Was Never Neutral: On Black Womanhood and the Invisible Labor of Belonging

Katrina Calhoun — 2026-06-18

This letter examines the structural forces that isolate Black women in higher education, particularly in senior leadership and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) roles. It also contributes to the theme of why we come to the mountain to share our experiences, especially during these trying times. Situating recent leadership exits within a broader socio-political backlash against equity initiatives, it argues that the marginalization and attrition of Black women reflect systemic barriers rather than individual inadequacy. Drawing on scholarship related to tokenism, racial battle fatigue, and controlling images such as the mammy, this letter analyzes how institutions extract disproportionate emotional, relational, and diversity labor from Black women while simultaneously questioning their legitimacy and expertise. It extends existing literature on Black women in leadership by examining contemporary sociopolitical factors in the academy, where Black women provide extensive formal and informal care to both white colleagues and students of color navigating racialized campus climates. This dual and often unrecognized labor intensifies isolation, accelerates burnout, and constrains advancement. The letter concludes by calling for structural reform, including equitable evaluation practices, formalized mentorship and sponsorship, leadership accountability, and culturally responsive wellness resources, urging institutions to align their operational practices with their stated commitments to justice, equity, and inclusion.

Do I Belong: Being the Lonely Only in Higher Education

Teianna Cooper — 2026-06-18

This letter reflects on the layered relationship Black women have with higher education, a relationship shaped by historical exclusion, cultural displacement, and enduring resilience. Written in epistolary form, the letter traces a lifelong question of belonging as it emerges across academic institutions and within one’s own community, where intellectual pursuit is often met with both suspicion and distance. Drawing on lived experience, cultural memory, and poetic testimony, the author examines how higher education simultaneously invites Black women in while withholding full recognition, often relying on their labor, brilliance, and perseverance without addressing the costs of remaining. Rather than framing these tensions as individual struggle or imposter syndrome, the letter situates them within structural conditions that demand excellence while denying affirmation. Ultimately, the letter refuses the need to ask permission to belong and instead turns the question back to the institution itself, challenging higher education to reckon honestly with who it has excluded and what it continues to require of those who remain.

Grieving Discontinued Classes

Sonja Thomas — 2026-06-18

This letter expresses the grief associated with discontinuing a class on Black feminist thought and tap dance. Working from theories presented by Sara Ahmed, Rachel Lee, Amber Jamilla Musser, and Robyn Wiegman, I outline how institutions of higher education have “included” diversity as a way to actually exclude diversity. The actual desires of the institution make a reality such that allyship for non-black women of color like myself becomes an impossibility. Despite the need for allyship and despite the transformative nature of tap dance and Black feminist thought, this course has faced barrier after barrier causing me anxiety, frustration, and sadness. I trace those barriers and negative emotions. Rather than let them seep into a class that gives me joy, I discuss how I decided to discontinue the course and take it elsewhere. Black feminist thought and feminist anti-racist literature sustains us all. Thus, while discontinuing a class is filled with grief, it will not be the end.

Higher Education Broke My Heart — and Why I Still Stay

Precious Porras — 2026-06-18

In Higher Education Broke My Heart — and Why I Still Stay, Precious Porras writes a reflective letter examining the emotional and structural realities of serving as a Chief Diversity Officer within contemporary higher education. Situated within the broader category of social justice leadership and institutional accountability, this letter interrogates how white supremacy culture persists not primarily through overt hostility, but through procedural delay, governance norms, budgetary choices, and institutional risk aversion.

Drawing on lived experience as a Black biracial woman in executive leadership at a Catholic Hispanic-Serving Institution, Porras argues that the heartbreak many equity leaders experience is not rooted in personal disappointment but in structural contradiction: institutions fluent in the language of justice often resist the redistribution of power required to actualize it. The letter names the CDO role as both transformational and precarious — positioned to advance equity while simultaneously absorbing institutional anxiety.

Rather than ending in resignation, the letter reframes heartbreak as clarifying. It calls for structural embedding of equity into evaluation systems, governance models, and financial priorities. By centering institutional design over institutional rhetoric, this piece contributes to critical conversations about leadership, accountability, and the future of justice-oriented higher education.

On Silencing, Disappearance, the Refusal to be Defeated

M. Cristina Alcalde — 2026-06-18

At a moment when diversity, equity, and inclusion offices have been eliminated across higher education in response to federal and state legislation, this letter reflects the category of Why We Come to the Mountain to name what institutional announcements tend to avoid: the silencing and disappearance of women of color from higher education leadership. Written from the author's positionality as a scholar-practitioner, feminist anthropologist, and former vice president whose role and division were eliminated, the letter identifies three interconnected dimensions of institutional erasure by exploring the impersonality of compliance-focused communications, the physical dismantling of office spaces built through years of collective effort, and the resulting disappearance of leaders. The letter argues that current events do not represent a departure from higher education's historical patterns of exclusion but rather a more visible iteration of them. Higher education’s erasure of names, accomplishments, and grief from official communications reflects institutional cultures that benefit from the labor of women of color while refusing accountability for its costs. The letter closes by insisting that the refusal to be disappeared is itself a form of feminist leadership. This letter speaks directly to women of color navigating higher education’s contradiction of simultaneous dependence on our skills, expertise, and leadership on the one hand and exploitation and exclusion on the other hand.

Roots and Ridges: Caregiving as Brown Asian Women Faculty

Ashmi Desai — 2026-06-18

This Dear Higher Education letter speaks to our experiences as Brown Asian women faculty in higher education, who are navigating academia while serving in caregiving roles. As women faculty caregivers, our experiences can be isolating and, at times, riddled with a constant sense of imposter phenomenon. We write as South and East Asian immigrants, educators and practitioners of dialogue, and as the women (mothers, daughters, sisters, and aunties) who sustain the necessary labor of multigenerational care. This letter is rooted in the intersection of our professional and personal worlds, and the continued hope and courage for transformative change in the academy through peer mentorship, the sacred trust of confidantes, and the strength of community.

Speaking for Ourselves: High-Achieving Black Women Navigating Academic Milestones

Chelsea Smith — 2026-06-18

This letter centers on the experiences of Drs. Jayla Moody Marshall and Chelsea T. Smith, two Black women who have been identified as ‘high achievers’ since early in their educational journey. The open response framed using Black Feminist Thought (Collins 1986, 1990) illuminates a space for the authors to reflect on their experiences traversing academic milestones while bearing the weight of both internal and external validation. Further, they document how pervasive white-centric academic norms have served as barriers to how their success has been measured. They call on and call out academia on the ways in which it has perpetuated hegemonic metrics of success rooted in whiteness, patriarchy, and other oppressive practices that often leave Black women unheard or misheard. Tracing their navigation of academic milestones as students and academicians, the authors reflect on the transformative process in which they begin to resist the uneven metrics that were shaped by gendered racism, misogynoir, and white fragility, and begin to let their voices speak for themselves. They end this letter with three simple requests for Higher Education: 1) Center their humanity. 2) Recognize their knowledge and contributions as valid, and 3) Stop posturing white-centric standards of practice as the prototype and sole metric of success.

The Current Attack on Black Superwomen in Higher Education Administration

E. Hairston — 2026-06-18

This is a letter to higher education and its administration detailing the struggles, dismissiveness, and erasure of black women administrators amid this current politically charged climate in higher education. The perspective is that of a black woman in a management position in higher education having worked her way, over seventeen years in the academy, from a department assistant to a senior director-level position in a university president’s office. The letter outlines the specific conflicts, pains, and stress of being part of the “working class” of an institution, while also being a black woman ushered aside in this moment when policies and ideologies about diversity, inclusion, equity, and social justice are again severely under attack. Special attention is given to the overall plight of black women in administration who are expected to act as “superwoman” routinely going above and beyond, while also being the first group targeted during the age of anti-DEI and the exile of minority executive leaders. This letter also outlines the historical plight and perseverance of black women in education and administration, and the author’s specific experiences and witness to being intentionally discarded for lesser talented white peers. This letter boldly calls out the burden of being a black woman in the academy, consistently overworked and underappreciated but completely depended upon, until this climate deemed them unnecessary, inconsequential, and replaceable.

The Distance Between Tenderness and Threat: A Letter on Care, Constraint, and the Lonely Only in Higher Education

Jennifer Yanez-Alaniz — 2026-06-18

Abstract

This letter addresses higher education from the embodied standpoint of a Chicana Lipan Apache scholar navigating multigenerational caregiving, chronic illness, and intensifying policy constraints within the academy. Drawing on my original framework, Conocimiento Transcendente Autohistoria Teoría (CTAT), I integrate personal narrative, translingual poetry, and institutional analysis to examine how women of color faculty and teacher educators sustain relational labor amid conditions that increasingly narrow curricular and programmatic possibilities. The letter situates recent developments at the University of Texas at San Antonio within the broader policy climate shaped by Texas Senate Bill 17 and evolving UT System guidance, tracing how these shifts reverberate in classrooms serving vulnerable students.

Through scenes of caregiving, early teaching experience, and Lipan ancestral invocation, I argue that the “Lonely Only” condition is not merely affective but structurally produced by administrative recalibration, policy pressures, and the ongoing marginalization of relational, culturally grounded pedagogies. At stake is the fragile ecosystem of care, truth-telling, and linguistic and cultural sustainability that many women of color educators have labored to build. The letter ultimately advances a vision of enduring hope, insisting that survival within the academy has long served as preparation for continued intellectual and community-building work. I call on higher education to reckon with the lived costs of current policy directions while recognizing the sustaining knowledge practices already carried forward in our classrooms.

The Sherpa to the Mountain

Trudy P. Nadine — 2026-06-18

In “The Sherpa to the Mountain,” Dr. Trudy P. Nadine offers a rage-filled letter, stylized as a poem, addressed to Higher Ed Mountain—a towering metaphor for the academy itself. Fully aware of her role, the consequences, and the risks, Dr. Nadine describes the precarious position of Black women who serve as sherpas: guides who carry institutional weight, stabilize treacherous paths, and ensure others reach the summit, often at great personal cost. She situates herself within a lineage of women—her grandmothers and mother—who have navigated the Mountain’s unforgiving terrain. Despite being committed to and enamored with the Mountain, she has resolved to send her own daughter up as well; but is the act one of love, legacy, survival—or betrayal?

This letter-poem explores the sherpa metaphor as a framework for understanding the intellectual, emotional, and structural labor Black women perform in higher education. It examines the tension between loyalty to the institution and recognition of its exhausting demands. While Dr. Nadine acknowledges what occurs—and has occurred—along the path to the summit—the exhaustion, invisibility, and risk to life—she remains tethered to the Mountain, unable to imagine herself elsewhere. In doing so, the poem exposes both devotion and captivity, illuminating the complicated terrain women of color traverse as they sustain institutions that do not always sustain them in return.

You Locked Them Out and Call it Policy: Are They Accepted or Not?

Keisha Hook — 2026-06-18

This letter examines the policy of restricting student access to learning management systems, like Canvas, due to unpaid tuition balances and examines its disproportionate impact on students of color, first-generation students, and those experiencing financial hardships at predominantly white institutions (PWIs). The letter explores how financial holds function not merely as administrative procedures, but as mechanisms of structural exclusion that interrupt students’ academic participation, sense of belonging, and continuity in community. When students are locked out of course platforms, they are effectively removed from the educational process. The letter also highlights the invisible and emotional labor required of Black women faculty, who are often positioned as cultural translators, advocates, and emotional anchors for students navigating institutional barriers, while simultaneously lacking the authority to alter the policies that produce harm. It calls on higher education institutions to critically examine how financial policies shape access, belonging, and equity, and to reimagine systems that support, rather than suspend, student participation.

Being The Lonely Only: The Strange Fruit of the "Model Minority" in Rural Academia

Nuchelle Chance — 2026-06-18

This letter, positioned as why we need to be heard, explores the precarious position of Black women faculty, where conditional visibility as a "model minority" token quickly shifts to discard and caricature when cultural authenticity challenges the white gaze. Drawing on lived experience as an applied social psychologist studying Black women's crucible experiences in leadership, the narrative deconstructs the hyper(in)visibility paradox; tokenized for diversity optics in brochures or belonging expertise, yet invisible when seeking structural protection, and reduced to the "angry Black woman" trope via weaponized student evaluations or critiques of attire and pedagogy. The "low-hanging fruit" of advancement reveals itself as a trap amid DEI rollbacks, salary inequities wrapped in politeness, and classroom surveillance from groups like Turning Point USA. In response to institutional betrayal and performative inclusion, the author enacts a "quiet rebellion", stepping away from traditional classrooms due to safety concerns while remaining committed to mentoring young adults through evolving pathways like community workshops or independent platforms. Leaning into righteous rage, finding refuge in affinity spaces such as Sista/h Circles, and building parallel communities, the letter envisions transformation, not through institutional metrics, but via self-sustained spaces that model equity, reduce isolation, and ripple outward to pressure systemic change while continuing scholarship beyond academy walls.

Black Woman Isolation in the Academy Remaining Despite Being Lonely

Keisha Clark — 2026-06-18

This paper offers a critical examination of being the “lonely and only” within academic institutions. This term refers to those who occupy the position of being the sole among a few, and to any representatives of their marginalized racial, gendered, or social identities within the academic setting. Despite the profound challenges of isolation and systemic barriers, a sense of responsibility and resolve to persist in the academy emerges. There is solace in peace in serving as a place of safety and hope for others. There is a peace in recognizing that as long as they continue to remain in the academy, there are others who may not experience being the “lonely and only” because their presence is there. This continued participation disrupts prevailing narratives of exclusion and enhances the academy by aiding the cultivation of a more inclusive environment.

Born Twice: A Letter from the Crossroads

Kennia Delafe — 2026-06-18

My name is Kennia Delafe, a first-generation Cuban immigrant, mother, educator, and Ph.D. candidate in Higher Education Administration. As Assistant Director for Syracuse University's Project Advance, my social positionality is shaped by my journey from Cuba to the U.S. in search of freedom and opportunity. Navigating authoritarian and American education systems, I've witnessed how knowledge, identity, and belonging are regulated, leading me to center marginalized immigrant voices in my work. Born Twice: A Letter from the Crossroads embodies my commitment to amplifying narratives of resistance and rebirth through immigration, education, and identity transformation. The letter exposes epistemic injustices and assimilationist norms in higher education, urging institutions to move beyond symbolic gestures toward radical listening and systemic change. It calls for diversity, equity, and inclusion to be realized through mutual transformation, not just metrics.

My story reflects the dual experience of being born under a regime that erased cultural and spiritual knowledge in Cuba and again in the U.S., where freedom came with hidden demands for assimilation. It shares the emotional and intellectual labor of navigating systems that tokenize or mistranslate our experiences, mirroring the journey of many immigrants and first-generation scholars. I invite higher education to listen and meet us at the crossroads, not with integration frameworks, but with openness to transformation. Institutions must recognize epistemic violence and create spaces where students and educators speak authentically, embracing bibrilliance, a term I use to describe the cultural, intellectual, and emotional power of hybrid identity, identities that bridge multiple ways of knowing. This is not just a call to equity, but a call to courage.

Dear Higher Education: A Love-Demon

Tania Romero — 2026-06-18

This free-style letter is meant to address the silence that many BIPOC undergraduates carry with them when they enter learning spaces that limit the ways to reach success. The letter personalizes the additional struggles that first-generation immigrant students also have to overcome just to acquire a good education. This letter advocates an acknowledgement of new systems of power that are anti-racist, multicultural, and empower differences rather than conform them to a standard and asks the question, how do we create more inclusive spaces where dialogue and change can occur?

Dear Higher Education: Belonging as a Black African Immigrant Woman in Spaces Not Built for Me

Martha Kakooza — 2026-06-18

This letter emerges from my "conscripted fieldwork" as a Black African immigrant woman navigating predominantly white spaces of U.S. higher education for over a decade. Drawing on dialogical narrative inquiry, I interrogate the complex and contradictory nature of belonging for Black African immigrant students in institutions structurally designed to exclude us. I trace my epistemological rupture upon migrating from Uganda to a historically white institution, where I acquired a heightened racial consciousness. In Uganda, ethnicity and class were salient identity markers; Blackness was intrinsic. In the United States, I was racialized differently, reordering how I understood myself and compelling me to theorize belonging from this new migratory location.

Even within progressive spaces like Women's and Gender Studies, I encountered the reification of white cultural norms and the systematic marginalization of Black and African women's epistemologies. Yet I write with what I call "critical curiosity,” which is a refusal to accept higher education's current architecture as inevitable. I hold space for stories of belonging that emerge in and against exclusionary institutions, where students compose new narratives of community and possibility. This letter is both a critique and an invitation: a demand for accountability and a vision of Higher Education otherwise, fundamentally restructured by the wisdom and scholarship of women of color.

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

Leslie K Morrow — 2026-06-18

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.

Dear Higher Education: Winning Within the Margins Without Losing Ourselves

Tamanika Ferguson — 2026-06-18

This epistolary letter speaks from the vantage point of many women of color in the academy: the “Lonely Only” expected to be exceptional, grateful, and endlessly resilient while navigating rules that are shifting, unwritten, or unevenly applied. I describe what it feels like to move through hiring cycles, publishing pipelines, and departmental life where “fit” operates as polite code for cultural matching, where silence is treated as neutral rather than consequential, and where brilliance unmeasured by dominant metrics is treated as “less, under, micro.”

Grounded in lived experience, the letter names overlapping burdens that rarely appear in formal evaluation: multigenerational caregiving carried alongside “productivity,” migrations of geography and identity read as instability, salary differentials wrapped in politeness and policy, and the disciplining that occurs when women of color name harm and are told to be “professional.”

Rather than offering a story of individual triumph, I argue that survival and excellence require infrastructure. I share repeatable practices I have built to stay grounded: clarity tools that make interdisciplinary work legible without shrinking it, ethics as workflow (consent, context, usefulness), and boundary scripts that protect time and spirit. I close by calling for institutional changes that would make transformation possible, including transparent criteria and timelines, equitable compensation, caregiving supports, and review standards that can recognize interdisciplinary and public scholarship.

From Lonely Only to Authentically Me in the Academy and Beyond

Cristina Santamaría Graff — 2026-06-18

This letter examines the movement from “Lonely Only” to “Authentically Me” within the lived experience of a bicultural Mexican American mother-scholar and faculty member who describes navigating educational spaces from childhood through higher education. Drawing from formative moments of racialized exclusion, linguistic policing, and cultural dissonance in White-dominant Catholic schools and other educational spaces, the author traces how identity fragmentation emerged through pressures of assimilation and compliance. Writing across first- and third-person narration, she conceptualizes Lonely Only as both an internalized response to isolation and an archetype shaped by procedural, hierarchical, and covert systems that marginalize women of Color.

Through experiences teaching in an Indigenous Yucatec Mayan community and reflecting on her liminal racial positioning as a bicultural Mexicana—phenotypically White (Irish/Italian heritages) and Mexican—the author argues that belonging is contextual and multidimensional. Her personal journey reveals how broader geo-political and societal constructs – rooted in Westernized dominance and Christian ideologies – shape who is perceived as legitimate within educational spaces.

The letter reframes Lonely Only not through a deficit lens, but as adaptive within environments that fragment and silence. By consciously naming and integrating this archetype, the author articulates Authentically Me as an individual self-grounded in accountability and discernment while being critically aware of inequitable systems. In a current political moment marked by the erosion of protections affecting women of Color, this letter calls higher education to recognize the structural conditions that produce isolation and to support women of Color in reclaiming their full, authentic selves within the academy.

Finding My North Star While the Ground Shifts: Letters from a Canary Still Singing

Ursula Thomas — 2026-06-18

This letter is written from the vantage point of a Black woman in the academy navigating the isolating terrain of being “the lonely only,” where brilliance is simultaneously demanded and discounted. Guided by the central question—What is my North Star in the midst of constant disruption?—this reflection traces migrations of geography, identity, faith, and belonging that mark life on the social justice mountain.

Through a series of critical incidents, I position myself as both scholar and canary in the mine. I recount the reframing of sociocultural curriculum in the face of institutional resistance, where pedagogical commitments to equity are met with surveillance and opposition. I reflect on the day I increased my liability insurance—a quiet but telling moment revealing the personal costs of speaking truth within hostile systems. I bear witness to the real-time devastation of equity through the dismantling of CCAMPIS, naming how policy decisions fracture both student futures and professional purpose. Each incident reveals how women of color are often asked to absorb institutional risk while being rendered expendable.

Yet this letter is not solely about loss. It is also about becoming. I explore who I am after these moments—how faith has evolved from doctrine to ancestral guidance, how survival has transformed into clarity, and how my North Star has shifted from external validation to ancestral accountability. This letter offers testimony, mourning, and affirmation, insisting that even in isolation, women of color continue to illuminate pathways forward—not because the academy makes space, but because we carry our own light.

From Lonely Only to Legacy: A Love Letter to Future Black Women Faculty

Anglesia Brown — 2026-06-18

This letter resides within the category Why We Believe Transformation Is Possible by reframing the narrative of the “Lonely Only” into one of lineage, joy, and institutional change. Written as an intentionally curated love letter to future Black women faculty, this piece echoes the voices of Black women who have triumphantly taken tenure and who now offer hard-earned wisdom rooted in liberation rather than survival alone. Although informed by multiple lived experiences, the letter speaks in a unified voice to demonstrate the interwoven and collective nature of Black women’s journeys in the academy. Grounded in Black Feminist Thought and Endarkened Feminist Epistemology, this letter centers collectivism, belonging, and intellectual sovereignty as pathways toward transformation. It acknowledges the structural realities of institutional marginalization while insisting that Black women faculty are not anomalies within higher education but architects of its reimagining. Moving from isolation to inheritance, the letter positions legacy as both personal and communal, an intentional passing of knowledge, boundaries, joy, and strategy. Ultimately, this contribution affirms that transformation in higher education is already underway through the sustained brilliance and generative labor of Black women faculty.

I'm the One and Only for Now, But I Will Not Be the Last

Catherine Ma — 2026-06-18

My letter centers on the rage of being the only Chinese full psychology professor in my college and finding my voice to overcome my imposter syndrome. In doing so, I channeled my angry Chinese woman vibes to change things that I thought were unchangeable. I want others in similar situations to understand how making visible the rage and supporting the voices of those surviving in academia can be useful tools to thrive in the same hostile environments that have killed or pushed out many professors of color. Although I am currently the lonely only, I share my experiences in raising my voice to force open the boundaries that have oppressed many marginalized and minoritized professors. Sadly, the current administration has increasingly made academia a hostile work environment, with an increasing number of top-tier universities making drastic cuts to diversity initiatives. This has placed enormous stress on female professors of color. I want this letter to offer hope to others that I will not be the last lonely only because I am actively working to mentor those who come after me to make our department and college less intimidating and detrimental to our mental health. This opportunity to raise the voices of the lonely onlies seeks to combine our individual power into a united front to combat the injustices that continue to plague the ivory tower. I share my experiences to remind others that change is coming, and although change can be thwarted, it can never be stopped.

In the Midst

Alexis Holloway — 2026-06-18

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.

’Lonely Only’ Voices: Modeling Perseverance, Power Despite Pain, and Possibility

Cynthia Porter — 2026-06-18

This submission to Dear Higher Education, titled “’Lonely Only’ Voices: Modeling Perseverance, Power Despite Pain, and Possibility,” presents a perspective from a member of the “lonely only” as one that offers opportunity and insight for the benefit of society, at large. Despite barriers and attacks, the “lonely only” often models grace, perseverance, determination, and success. Such voices provide unique and invaluable insights into what could be in the future, while also enduring the painful process of accepting (while refusing to perpetuate) examples of inequity and misrepresentation that have informed and supported a discriminatory social structure. Penned by a woman of color in the academy, the author considers the positionality of the “lonely only” – often marginalized, racialized, and discriminated against – to be one that is also fundamentally inspirational, exemplifying the power in self-assuredness, the strength in speaking across difference, and thus a rejection of a narrative that encourages the status quo to believe that other ways of being, identifying, and communing are possible.

My Call to Be Heard: A Letter from the Lonely Only

Dawn Brown — 2026-06-18

This letter centers the theme “Being the Outsider Who Stays and Is Heard” through my lived experience as a Black woman educator, physical therapist, researcher, and leader in a profession where Black representation remains exceedingly rare. Framed through the lens of the “Lonely Only,” my narrative traces the emotional and professional cost of working in spaces not designed for Black women’s (or any woman of color) full presence – spaces where visibility can be hyper-surveilled while belonging remains conditional. Moving beyond the familiar rhetoric of resilience, this letter asserts that resilience alone is insufficient when higher education continues to reproduce isolation. Instead, it offers belonging as a deliberate practice that is claimed, constructed, and defended through community-building and the refusal to shrink to fit. The letter argues that the voices of women of color in academia must be heard because they matter to students who share similar intersecting identities and seek proof that they, too, can thrive. It highlights how representation is not symbolic but transformative to expand possibility, interrupt inherited narratives of exclusion, and create pathways for those entering the academy “yet again” as outsiders. Drawing on intersectionality, this letter names how race and gender converge to shape experiences of marginalization and power, and it calls on higher education to shift from performative diversity to structural and systemic change. Ultimately, this letter insists that when Black women and women of color are no longer the “Lonely Only,” the higher education becomes better equipped to fulfill its true educational mission.

Navigating the Crip Sprint: Invisible Labor, Temporal Stockpiling, and the Myth of the "Abled" Academic Body

Tiffany Jones — 2026-06-18

This letter addresses the profound intersectional invisibility of Black women in the academy who navigate the dual pressures of tenure-track expectations and high-stakes multigenerational caregiving. Drawing on the author’s lived experience as a "Lonely Only"—an only child, only grandchild, and sole caregiver to an aging mother—this narrative challenges the standard academic metric of "productivity." It introduces the concept of "Temporal Stockpiling," a survival strategy utilized by scholars with chronic illness (Fibromyalgia and Long COVID) to "pre-pay" for inevitable physical crashes.

By applying Jane Hill’s framework of "white public space" and Robert McRuer’s “Crip Theory,” the letter explores how academic "mentorship" can often morph into hyper-surveillance and "Presumed Incompetence" (Gutiérrez y Muhs et al. 2012) when applied to minoritized and disabled bodies. Furthermore, it critiques the pervasive "parenting" metaphor in higher education, arguing that it fails to capture the technical and emotional complexity of "re-parenting" an aging parent. Finally, the author argues for an expansion of intersectional theory (Crenshaw 1989) to include caregiving labor and "dis-able-ity," moving away from the "Big Three" toward a framework that recognizes the "Crip Sprint" as a legitimate scholarly pace. By narrating the journey from a high-surveillance, predominantly white institution to the supportive yet high-burnout environment of an HBCU, the author invites Higher Education to adapt its standards for a more inclusive, compassionate, and sustainable future.

“Not You, of Course”: A Letter from a Lonely Only

Leela MadhavaRau — 2026-06-18

“Not You, of Course” takes its title from the phrase a biracial child heard growing up in small-town Ontario — the exception granted by her father’s colleagues even as they disparaged immigrants and minorities. The letter argues that higher education has been repeating this phrase for over thirty years: hiring women of color to do equity work while withholding the institutional support and power needed to accomplish it.

Written as a direct address to higher education itself, the letter traces the author’s migrations across four institutions and two countries — from a Race Relations Officer position at a Canadian university sheltering faculty conducting eugenics research, through American institutions where “food and fiesta” substituted for structural change, to the founding of an independent consulting practice when institutional conflicts of interest made transformational work from within impossible. At each institution, the author was the Lonely Only: the woman of color hired to carry what the institution would not do.

The letter weaves a second narrative — the author’s experience of living with rheumatoid arthritis and other invisible disabilities, drawing a parallel between the invisibility of chronic pain and of equity labor. The institutional dismissal of equity work (“it’s just diversity”) mirrors the dismissal of invisible disability (“it’s just a headache”). Both render the person and her work unseen.

Despite three decades of institutional resistance, the letter closes with a vision of what higher education could be — honest, clear-eyed, and committed to working within limitations while refusing to accept them as permanent.

Reflections From a Mothering Scholar

Bao Vaaj Nchaiv Txab — 2026-06-18

This letter is a reflection to administrators, educators, students, classified staff, and anyone who cares about the future of our children. Read this with care and intention. This is me calling out for support. This is me asking for folks to speak out against the power dynamics within our own institutions. As a mothering scholar - educator, it is important to recognize and begin to dismantle violent practices within our own hiring committees and our departments. Our students deserve better, especially our mothering - parenting students, who work full-time and take classes. We recognize that our higher education systems are not designed to support such students; however, we can center their experiences. I am one of many who is willing to share my lived experiences of navigating this violent system created without me in mind. Let’s hear them. Let’s see them. Let’s do better by them.

We continue to teach equity and diversity but our practices have failed. Failed us and our students, therefore failing our future generations. This is a call for folks who hold power at the decision making table to reflect on your own practices and your departments’ practices. All we do requires more than intention.

Reflections on Hypervisibility and Isolation in Academia

Anique Forester — 2026-06-18

This narrative examines the evolving challenges faced by underrepresented physicians in academic medicine as they move from clinical roles into leadership and supervisory positions. While clinical teaching and mentorship are widely accepted faculty responsibilities, administrative authority and systems leadership often expose marginalized physicians—particularly women of color—to heightened scrutiny and subjective critique. This essay describes a shift from evaluations based on clinical competence to assessments centered on personality, tone, and perceived demeanor, revealing how bias operates through informal feedback and coded language. The essay situates these experiences within broader institutional patterns, including resistance to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts following their brief surge of support around 2020. The main argument is that organizational hierarchies often preserve themselves through silence, exclusion, and the marginalization of dissenting voices, particularly those who challenge entrenched norms. The concept of hypervisibility is explored as a paradox in which marginalized leaders are simultaneously spotlighted as symbolic representatives and isolated as outsiders, a dynamic likened to the “tall poppy syndrome,” where achievement invites heightened criticism. The narrative contends that such systems risk stagnation by privileging sameness and discouraging innovation. It calls for structural transformation grounded in genuine commitments to equity, shared responsibility for institutional change, and recognition that diverse leadership perspectives are essential for the future of academic medicine.

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

Anonymous — 2026-06-18

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.

Staying Without Becoming: Notes from a Woman of Color Inside the Academy

Shanique Broom — 2026-06-18

This letter reflects on the structural loneliness experienced by women of color in higher education, arguing that isolation is not an emotional condition but a predictable outcome of institutional design. Drawing from lived experience inside academic and public-sector institutions, the author reframes the “Lonely Only” not as a matter of belonging or resilience, but as a governance signal produced by responsibility without authority, visibility without protection, and accountability misaligned with power. The letter traces how women of color are often positioned as evidence of institutional commitment while simultaneously relied upon to absorb unresolved structural contradictions—particularly in equity-adjacent roles. Rather than narrating harm through personal vulnerability or individual coping, the letter documents how professionalism, politeness, and policy operate to normalize inequity, discipline dissent, and reframe institutional failure as individual deficiency. Central to this reflection is a formative understanding learned early in the author’s academic journey: that meaningful change requires entering institutions as they are, while remaining vigilant against being reshaped into the very logics one seeks to challenge. The letter does not offer solutions framed as cultural change or personal endurance. Instead, it leaves a record of what staying has required, what has been normalized, and what remains structurally unaddressed. By centering governance rather than values, this contribution asserts that listening to women of color is insufficient without institutional redesign and accountability.

The Academy Does Not Have the Capacity to Love You: An Unrequited Love with Higher Education

Tangela Montgomery — 2026-06-18

The Academy Does Not Have the Capacity to Love You is an epistolary reflection written from the perspective of a Black queer woman who climbed every rung of the academic ladder only to discover that the institution she devoted herself to could not love her in return. Using the metaphor of an unrequited love story, the letter traces her path from primary school in her hometown to obtaining a doctorate and becoming one of the few Black women professors in the United States. Along the way, she confronts the racial isolation, gatekeeping, and emotional labor that shape the experience of being the Lonely Only in predominantly white academic spaces. The letter examines how limerence, an imagined and idealized attachment, mirrors the way marginalized scholars are encouraged to romanticize the academy despite its inability to offer genuine care. Through moments of dismissal, tokenism, and the weaponization of critique, the author reveals how the pursuit of belonging often demands a performance of resilience that comes at a personal cost. The letter does not end in despair. Instead, it turns toward transformation. By recognizing the limits of the academy’s capacity to love, the author discovers a deeper capacity to love herself and to support those who climb after her. This letter argues that the voices of women of color, especially those who navigate the academy as singular and intersectional presences, must be heard for what they reveal about institutional harm and for the futures they make possible.

When Enthusiasm Outpaces Infrastructure

Felicia Mitchell — 2026-06-18

In When Enthusiasm Outpaces Infrastructure, Felicia M. Mitchell, Associate Professor, reflects on her journey through doctoral education and the tenure track as the “Lonely Only”—the only tenure-track Indigenous faculty member in her department. Situated at the intersection of being first-generation, low-income, mixed-race Indigenous, Black, and white, she traces how institutional enthusiasm for representation can coexist with structures that were never designed to sustain those invited in.

This letter speaks to the theme “Why we need to be heard” by centering the lived realities of intersectional identity in the academy. Dr. Mitchell recounts how requests framed as opportunity often accumulated into disproportionate service, how saying no carried reputational risk, and how tenure systems that presume neutral time can obscure uneven labor. Outwardly successful, she nonetheless crossed the tenure finish line mentally and physically depleted, illustrating how resilience is too often mistaken for adequate support.

At the same time, she acknowledges institutional responsiveness and the possibility of change, while underscoring that progress should not require visible strain to be taken seriously. Ultimately, this letter argues that inclusion without structural protection isolates the included. If higher education is serious about equity, enthusiasm must be matched with infrastructure so that the Lonely Only is not left to carry the weight of representation alone.

Wokeish: On Being the One Who Speaks When Silence Is Safer

Violet Jiménez Sims — 2026-06-18

This letter contributes to the Why we need to be heard category by naming and interrogating a phenomenon I describe as “wokeish”—a performative engagement with equity and social justice that prioritizes appearance over action. Drawing from my lived experiences as a Dominican woman with over 20 years in higher education and public education spaces, serving as both faculty and leader, I examine how institutions and individuals adopt the language of justice while avoiding the disruption required to achieve it.

Through narrative reflection, I explore what it means to occupy the role of the “Lonely Only” not solely as a matter of representation, but as a function of action—being the one who speaks when it is inconvenient, uncomfortable, or politically risky. I recount moments in which truth-telling was met with subtle forms of institutional discipline, framed as guidance but functioning as boundary-setting, and consider how such dynamics reinforce cultures of silence under the guise of professionalism and neutrality.

This letter also interrogates the paradox in which minimal gestures toward equity are labeled as “too much,” creating conditions where “wokeish” behavior is both criticized and rewarded. Ultimately, I argue that transformation requires a shift from performative alignment to principled disruption.

Care as Counter-Institution: Staying, Refusal, and Collective Survival in the Academy

Deborah Oluwasola Owoyemi — 2026-06-18

Transformation in higher education is often imagined as the outcome of institutional reform, policy change, or expanded commitments to equity and inclusion. Yet for many scholars, the conditions that make intellectual work sustainable emerge not from formal structures, but from informal practices of care, refusal, and collective support. Staying in the academy, under such conditions, becomes a political act rather than a sign of compliance. This letter reflects on how mentoring relationships, collective writing practices, and informal networks of accountability function as alternative infrastructures within academic life. These practices provide intellectual rigor, emotional steadiness, and material support in spaces where institutional mentoring and evaluation systems fall short. They do not resolve precarity or erase exhaustion; instead, they make continued scholarly work possible despite it. Care, in this context, operates not as sentiment or individual disposition, but as shared labor that sustains knowledge production where formal systems fail to do so. Grounded in lived experience and informed by Black feminist traditions that understand survival as collective rather than individual, this piece reframes transformation as something already underway, though largely unacknowledged. It argues that hope in higher education should not be located in institutional goodwill, but in the everyday practices through which scholars refuse erasure and create conditions for one another’s survival. At the end, the letter asks what higher education might become if such practices were treated not as peripheral or compensatory, but as central to how academic life is organized, evaluated, and sustained.

Dear Higher Education: I Am Still Learning to Belong Here

Veneice Guillory-Lacy — 2026-06-18

This letter to Higher Education emerges from my lived experience as a Black and Indigenous (Nimiipuu/Nez Perce) assistant professor at a Minority-Serving Institution (MSI). Situated at the intersection of K–12 leadership and the professoriate, I write from the in-between space of someone who did not set out to become an academic but who now finds herself navigating tenure-track expectations shaped by colonial mindsets, individualism, and productivity metrics that often contradict relational and justice-centered ways of knowing. Drawing upon my journey from high school English teacher to principal, to the professoriate, this letter reflects on the tensions between institutional belonging and cultural integrity.

I narrate the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual labor required to survive and transform academic spaces that were not designed for scholars like me. This contribution calls higher education into dialogue about how it measures merit, defines rigor, and sustains or silences social justice work. Rather than presenting an academic argument, I offer testimony: a reflection on community, isolation, race, gender, Indigeneity, and the longing for collective academic futures rooted in community rather than competition.

This letter invites institutions to reimagine tenure, mentorship, and knowledge production in ways that honor community, lived experiences, and transformative possibility.

Our Collective Power: Creating Women of Color in Academia (WOCA) for Us, by Us

Whitney Pirtle — 2026-06-18

This letter is written by the founding members of Women of Color in Academia (WOCA), within a school of public health, who believe transformation is possible. We write this to you to offer strategies of how we use refusal to cultivate WOCA—a space for us, by us. Each of the authors share specific strategies we have implemented in our research, community connections, pedagogy, mentoring, and institution bridging to ensure the lonely only does not keep us entrapped.

Through five narratives, the letter highlights distinct yet interconnected approaches to reshaping academia. One advances abolitionist public health through deep study and political education, creating funded communal spaces where students engage abolition as public health practice. Another centers Asian immigrant women in community-based participatory research, challenging data invisibility while modeling mentorship grounded in whole-person care. The third reimagines pedagogy through culturally rooted community partnerships, promotor-led frameworks, and classroom practices that honor identity, joy, and belonging. The fourth demonstrates the power of bridging across disciplines, practice and research, and backgrounds to support system-impacted youth. The last highlights inter- and intra-institutional building through formalization as a form of refusal.

Together, these strategies actively resist the lonely only. As WOCA, we refuse isolation and tokenization. Instead, we cultivate collective empowerment, ethical scholarship, and institutional disruption. WOCA stands to represent our whole selves - not simply as a support network, but as an intentional space asserting that women of color belong in the academy, and that we have the power to transform it.

Restoring Our Brilliance, Sustaining Our Power: Healing Wisdom for Leading in Challenging Times

Tisha Brooks — 2026-06-18

This submission, written by Tisha M. Brooks and titled “Restoring Our Brilliance, Sustaining Our Power: Healing Wisdom for Leading in Challenging Times," offers a response to the “Why We Believe Transformation is Possible” prompt for this special issue. In the letter, Brooks offers a narrative showcasing challenges she faces as a Black woman faculty member, higher ed leader, and caregiver who is committed to the transformation of the higher education landscape through embodied leadership practices grounded in justice, equity, and sustainability. Through sharing her own sustainable (embodied) leadership practices, she models an alternative way of being and leading grounded in the wisdom of Black women ancestors, writers, activists and wellness practitioners who call us to honor our full humanity and dignity in the face of impossible circumstances. This vision of transformational leadership centers our wholeness as critical for sustaining the work of liberation.

Skinfolk Ain’t Always Kinfolk: How to Create Community in Institutions Where Community Should Be a Given

Rondrea Danielle Mathis — 2026-06-18

In “Skinfolk Ain’t Always Kinfolk: How to Create Community in Institutions Where Community Should Be a Given,” Rondrea Danielle Mathis recalls her experience as—what producer Shonda Rhimes calls—an F.O.D., which stands for First. Only. Different. Rhimes explains how her career as a groundbreaking showrunner on the ABC network led to her feeling personally isolated, while concurrently fielding professional attention and accolades. In the same way, Mathis recalls her own journey at two distinctly different historically Black colleges: one where she expected the community to be a given and another where she made conscious choices to cultivate the community she sought. All told, Mathis offers a framework for institutional administrators to replicate these best practices at other institutions, helping to support junior scholars in familiarizing themselves with the campus and affording them opportunities to transform academia from the inside out.

Tall Fences and Sacred Ground: Recalibrating Worth in the Academy

Martha Clavelle — 2026-06-18

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.

The Outsider Who Stays: Mentorship and Sponsorship for Women of Color in Academia — A Lived Experience

Monique Holsey - Hyman — 2026-06-18

I write from my lived experience as a woman of color in higher education, who often feels like the outsider who chooses to stay. I write as someone who lives into the possibility that higher education hosts transformation. I draw upon my story to speak about times where I have been seen but not sponsored and where I have felt the emotional weight of isolation. In doing so, I remind others who are of this mindset that mentoring, honest sponsorship, and a strengths-based orientation can change things, provide a doorway, create space, and position us for leadership and belonging. Remaining in the academic world is not only about persistence but also about my purpose, particularly for students, for girls who would lead, and for other women of color. I let my purpose shape my decision-making even when things go awry, and discouragement looms large. I remind myself that higher education is transformable because we women of color are leading within and towards it, filled with courage, commitment, integrity, and vision, even if we must occupy uninvited spaces “While They Be." When this happens, women of color not only flourish individually but also help shape higher education as a whole for generations of students who follow

The Reimagining of a DEI Scholar’s Dream

Eletra Gilchrist-Petty — 2026-06-18

As a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) scholar, this letter to higher education addresses a reimagining of my professional trajectory amid rapid dismantling and rebranding of DEI initiatives in U.S. higher education. Drawing on intersectional lived experiences as the first and only Black woman full professor and longest-serving Black woman department chair at a research-intensive predominantly White institution in the South, I address my experiences as the “lonely only." I devote particular attention to the broader structural and political shifts that have rendered my aspirational DEI leadership position increasingly untenable. I argue that transformation remains possible, especially for those with intersectional identities, through recalibrated approaches to our pedagogy, scholarship, community engagement, and administrative advocacy.