News of Jason Arday death comes just as many American students are moving in to college affording us all a moment to reflect on the promise of higher education. Arday had come to prominence as the youngest tenured black professor in Cambridge history. His work dealt with the systemic impact of racism on society, but particularly in education. Most of the thousands of American students who are arriving in dorms as I write will be facing the system he described. Some of them come from schools that prepared them, and others were trained with lies.
I understand the impetus to speak of a world where race is no longer a challenge. At the turn of the millennium, when I was in college, I vividly remember friends, who were the first in their family to matriculate at a university. They sat beside those of us who had generational resources. We all made it to graduation and went out into the world.
While my family has a long history of education, I chose the humanities--something no one in my family had ever done. While I might not have had the Rolodex of some of my peers studying art history, I certainly understood the general parameters of workplace and internships. Looking back so many of my peers set out into the world a couple steps behind me. Many of those friends went onto extraordinary careers, but in that generation we did not easily recognize the systemic difference they faced.
The greatest predictor of success in higher education is the education level of your parents. This is the kind of data many people try to twist into an assessment of race. One could easily say if both of your parents are Asian, you will succeed as well in college. Asia could be the perceived marker of success in American society class and status are unspoken truths. Of course, the story of success is much bigger. Asians who came to the US were often educated and so understood how to foster similar success in their kids. In a society framed by race, also answers are complicated and hidden by a system that attempts to protect the status quo.
The silent white is how I describe American society. People of color are described by their racial classification. If there is no racial classification mention then that person is white. But that silence is the point. To be normative means all systems are calibrated to you. If you are walking in to a situation that feels abnormal because of your background, your success will be mitigated by you trying to calibrate yourself to the system.
In many ways, scholars like Arday highlight how the system expects minority students to calibrate themselves to the norm rather than face the fact that the norm exists. Having spent so many years teaching I can assure you that the norms of higher education are not ideal. These are systems that are based on complicated emotional politics couched in elite thought, often masking a natural inclination of some of the most competitive human beings on the planets desire to bully anyone who threatens their primacy. The movie “Means Girls” is like child’s play compared to the mean tenured professors in higher education. And most people who work in higher education have never had any type of real job, because higher education requires years of graduate school. Not to mention, success is incredibly unlikely. There’s the back biting application process in which you are often trapped in instructor roles that go nowhere. Basically the system of higher education distills the most competitive to be the meanest they can to fill a few roles that exist. It is not a recipe for camaraderie and collegiality.
Add to it, the general liberal culture in which many academics perceive themselves to be good people for the things they discuss in their research while they act like absolute dicks in real life. For them to cheer on a person of color or a Black person, can often be a badge of honor for their career. In other words, they are using the graduate student for their own personal gratification as well as professional acclaim. So mean tenured professors use humans as objects while writing about the ways in which society systemically objective people. A group of people with less connection to reality or self reflection cannot exist on earth, and remember, I regularly write about the Trump administration.
Plus, many professors in the United States, particularly, have their roles because of generational knowledge. A huge chunk of current tenure track professors are the children of professors. Again, just as I said before, this does not imply, inborn intelligence. The success of being able to navigate the 10 year system is a lot easier when your father and mother did it. We all have skills nurtured through family. While some of us, for example, learn how to load the dishwasher from our parents, others have networks and methods passed down to us to help us become professors.
Many of the professors that Arday experienced were training when I did, so I fully understand the ways in which we were taught to believe that race could be fixed by bringing more people into the system. Adding seats at the table only works if everybody has the same understanding of what the meal is. If all of the people at the table had used chopsticks for generations, and the new people were not told about the chopsticks and never trained to use the chopsticks and only given one stick, they will not succeed at the same rate of getting food in their mouth.
It might've been hopes and dreams that made previous generations think bringing more people on would fix the system. A quarter of a century later, we can see how this energized the most mediocre of white men who were simply not good enough to match up to women, people of color or Black people to find a way to maintain the status quo.
Take Nathan Cofnas who started the campaign against Arday. He began taking college classes in high school, which many of us did, but he saw that as a sign of his superiority. He would continue to get degrees at both Cambridge and Oxford. His research is about how biology helps support the idea that white people are superior in his estimation if there were no DEI there would be no black students at Harvard or tenured professors there. His flawed thinking is the same one I've mentioned twice here before. When you can't see the system, you can't find the solution for the problem. Yes, more people who came from educated backgrounds are able to succeed in education. It is not their innate genetic skills, but in fact, the nurturing of their parents.
What's particularly interesting about his cases he could be an example to demonstrate the biased science of eugenics. Cofnas was born to Jewish parents. Hitler regularly used the same language that he does, but to discredit Jewish people as being physically inferior. His physiognomy is very similar to how Hitler's scientist described inferior people.
I bring up Cofnas’ appearance not to shame him for his looks, but to highlight how myopic biased research can be and also how higher education often enables hate. For an academic Cofnas’ research is completely intellectual and for higher education all intellectual avenues are worth exploring. It's the same people who think playing with people of color and Black people is OK because it is an intellectual game. But, both practices are incredibly harmful for society.
Which takes me to the students who are moving in this weekend. Many parents are proudly moving their children into their dorms. They’re probably doing much more lugging than parents did when I was moving into the dorm. Certainly, this generation of college students has much more visual evidence of what a dorm room could be, thanks to algorithmic social media. But despite the differences, at essence these young students have the chance to frame their minds and in turn make the future of our society. That’s a tall order. And I certainly wouldn’t put that on the kids who are just finding themselves in a new world. But for those of who have young students in our lives, I invite you to help them find ways to break from their childhood norms. I invite you to let them feel the power of thinking for themselves.
When I taught freshmen, I was awed that each year a new class steps up to be at the beginning of the new world. Thanks to Trump, fewer students have the resources to afford higher education. Similarly thanks to Trump more and more programs that are meant to teach critical thinking are being cut to turn higher education into a very expensive either trade school or networking opportunity. Trump dreams of the future were the top 5% remain that way for eternity. Higher education still can be a transformational force in society. Thinking on your own, is greatly improved with modeling from people who can show you the pitfalls and the bridges to critical thought. Education should be a way to open a better future. It is incumbent on all of us to help push or higher education systems to be the best they can so our students can celebrate the future in the way they deserve.
