The Killing Fields
By: Aretina R. Hamilton
Tags: Trauma, Race, Higher Education, Anti Blackness, Geography

We enter the academy hoping to effect change and to carry on the legacy of our discipline, but what happens when these very places kill us?

The University of Alaska recently announced plans to eliminate 39 academic departments and to consolidate majors due to concerns with shrinking enrollment due to Covid-19. On the surface, this may seem like a practical business decision meant to save the organization money and resources, but for those in the know — this is a warning. One of many that have begun to reveal themselves. Liberal arts programs are closing. Colleges are beginning to trim the fat. Even before the quarantine, the process of academic prioritization was a major issue for universities and colleges who were struggling to remain relevant. As a result, some had already made the decision to invest in programs that were money generators and to disinvest from fields like African American Studies, Women and Gender Studies, American Studies, and Geography. The academy was and is killing entire fields of study.

We are in a dire time, but then again we have been for quite a while. With the move towards academic prioritization and COVID, we are beginning to see a decrease in positions, especially in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Despite the reorganization of universities, departments are continuing to admit Ph.D. students and graduate schools are contending with the implications of moving their courses online. All of these factors are concerning, but for BIPOC graduate students, PhDs, and Faculty, dystopian education presents even more double binds.

For Black people, the university was never a rose garden. It was riddled with land mines, labels, racist colleagues, an absence of mentoring, and unspoken and unseen barriers. Over the past decade while attending graduate school, while on the job market and while gainfully employed, I pondered this experience and my own dedication to a place that felt antagonistic. It was a place that had snatched my spirit and made me feel traumatized. I often felt as if I had a learning disability in these hallowed halls, not understanding that the crippling effects of my acculturation into this system had severed pieces of me. As I mentioned in a previous essay, I am/we are hemorrhaging and there is no patch for this pain that we feel. It is endemic.

After I published The Geography of Despair or All These Rubber Bullets, I reflected on my experiences as a graduate student and a faculty member. As luck would have it, a brilliant campaign emerged on Twitter under the #BlackintheIvory led by scholars @DrShardeDavis and @SmileItsJoy who created another virtual space for Black scholars to document their experiences in academia. These tweets mirrored some of my own frustration and angst that I hadn't been able to articulate as a graduate student or junior faculty member. It was, as many Black folks say, “preaching to the choir.” But at the same time that it was a hallelujah shout moment, reading these tweets was painful. They are a reminder that even as I grapple with my own academic mortality, this space does not feel safe. It is not safe.

In these tweets, I saw remnants of my life before the tower fell on me. It warmed my heart to know that despite my internal struggles, there were other survivors. But these spiritual deaths were hard to see. There were no funerals or wakes, or pre-existing conditions. But the pain was familiar. It was like we had all experienced a spiritual form of hazing. And when we finally got our membership cards, we wondered:

I sometimes wondered was I insane? Was it all in my head? This made no sense. I remember working as a secretary at Emory University and reading a sign about PhDs and depression and thinking “What do they have to be depressed about?” How naive was I. Perhaps I was so caught up in my feelings of inadequacy that I chose to ignore the strain that I saw in those students’ eyes. While applying to graduate programs, I remember asking my friend Nan about her experiences pursuing a PhD in Psychology from a public ivy and remember her saying, “I don’t talk about that place. It was trauma.” She laughed as she detailed how she skipped graduation because she couldn’t bear to stay there one more hour. While she was grateful for the degree, the journey was riddled with debris.