This morning, my professor handed me back a paper (a literature review) in front of my entire class and exclaimed “this is not your language.” On the top of the page they wrote in blue ink: “Please go back and indicate where you cut and paste.” The period was included. They assumed that the work I turned in was not my own. My professor did not ask me if it was my language, instead they immediately blamed me in front of peers. On the second page the professor circled the word “hence” and wrote in between the typed lines “This is not your word.” The word “not” was underlined. Twice. My professor assumed someone like me would never use language like that. As I stood in the front of the class while a professor challenged my intelligence I could just imagine them reading my paper in their home thinking could someone like her write something like this?
In this interaction, my undergraduate career was both challenged and critiqued. It is worth repeating how my professor assumed I could not use the word “hence,” a simple transitory word that connected two relating statements. The professor assumed I could not produce quality research. The professor read a few pages that reflected my comprehension of complex sociological theories and terms and invalidated it all. Their blue pen was the catalyst that opened an ocean of self-doubt that I worked so hard to destroy. In front of my peers, I was criticized by a person who had the academic position I aimed to acquire. I am hurting because my professor assumed that the only way I could produce content as good as this was to “cut and paste.” I am hurting because for a brief moment I believed them.
“Academia, Love Me Back” by Tiffany Martínez
Reading this article this morning crushed my heart. Being entrenched in academia, you’re never, ever allowed to forget that you’re someone “like that”, when you’re a marginalized student having to work three times as hard to be considered half as accomplished.
To dedicate years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars you might not even have just for the chance of achieving your dreams, only to be told in a thousand tiny ways that someone like you never really belongs, doesn’t deserve, isn’t capable, can’t really, or just plain isn’t real. It’s not just a hostile environment, it’s an incredibly traumatic experience. I know because that was my experience.
There’s a reason I completely changed my academic goals from professor to disability services staff. It was one of the only ways I saw to actually help students and teach them, instead of punishing them for failing to be a specific *type* of person, with a specific set of circumstances.
So many people in both my personal and professional life I have seen wounded, staggering, burning out and falling down because academia was designed to make sure “people like them” don’t make it. From something like required classes being scheduled sequentially (class 1 in fall, class 2 in spring, class 3 in fall, class 4 in spring), which sets up transfer students for hardship and failure, to professors who see disability accommodations, which are required by federal law, as “coddling”, supported by institutions that become suddenly disinterested in retention rates when we talk about “non-traditional” students.
This structural hostility is only bolstered and strengthened by having to wake up every day tensed against the next microaggression, the next accusation of plagiarism (because how could someone like you create anything worthwhile?), the next lecture that canonizes stereotypes about you, or the next argument that yes, you really DO need extended times for test taking, and the professor really DOES have to send your exam to the disability services office.
And the worst part of the whole mess is perfectly captured by the author above: you begin to believe the way you are treated is justified. You doubt yourself; you wonder if something about you really is so wrong, so inept, and so obviously less-than, that everyone but you can see it. You dismiss your own strength and skill sets, you begin to wonder why you ever thought someone “like you” could ever succeed. It’s a dehumanizing experience, and it exhausts you to the very soul. It doesn’t just tear you down, it tears you apart.
I posted this set of tweets yesterday:
[two tweets read: Doing this on social media is a lot like trying to give a lecture while people behind you are sucker punching you at random intervals. BUT. Doing this in academia is literally same sucker-punch scenario while wearing a muzzle and standing *outside* the building.]
This is *still* true for me. I do travel to give talks and make presentations at conferences when it’s possible for me, but why are literary and fandom/media conventions so much more accessible (on almost every level) than academic ones? Each time I reach out, it’s another taste of the same experiences that drove me from a strictly academic career track in the first place.
To make education and information truly accessible, not just for people deemed worthy by the powerful but for ALL people, there needs to be a radically different approach to changing the way we do things, and the way we acknowledge and assign “expertise”. The amazing part of that proposition, to me at least, is that we now have the tools to do so. Open access, digital archives, databases, and discourse with those who are fluent in these methods make it possible for everyone to join their voices with the overall narratives of educators and educated.
We have the tools to do better. So let’s do better, together.
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