Post-PhD: 18 Months Later

Post-PhD: 18 Months Later

In this post: I talk about what I've learned about how to exist as an educator and how to extend that beyond the context of academia.
Next week: I cover my plenary talk at the Reward Equator Conference in Berlin. I also include an amazing collection of engaged scholars I've found who are dedicated to supporting Ph.D. researchers.
Last week: For the love of pedagogy, I discuss my role as a professor and a teacher in NYC, and how there is zero incentive for educators to care about their students.

 I left my blog over a year ago, and as time elapsed I became enmeshed in different projects of resistance and affirmation. I came to regard the blog as a site of frustration, fruitlessness, and futility.

 What had once functioned as a release valve, a productive action spun out of reaction, came to feel like an albatross hanging around my neck.

 I felt I had nothing more to say to academics.

 With distaste, I rolled my eyes at discussions of “change” in academia, and thought back to well-meaning invitations to speak at conferences, where I was then dismissed as hysterical, or “unable to see higher education through any other lens than catastrophe.” Perhaps, but I maintain that is the only possible viewpoint to take.

 I logged off Twitter, I developed a personal sense of identity wherein the only avenue left next for me was to double down and become an education activist whose daily work sought to uplift and build New York City’s public school students. It felt like the best possible use of my privilege, education, and righteous indignation over the system of education.

My new sphere became the high school classroom in Harlem, where I learned how to exist as a high school teacher, and how to extend beyond the limited parameters with which that role is currently defined. This will now be a primary focus of this blog, as well as critical interrogations into whiteness, privilege, and education.

 Occasionally, I would be reminded of what had once been my creative outlet. I sporadically checked blog emails, and found one by a professor in my former field. This professor had reached out at the beginning, when my blog was posted in a newsletter to our association, CAA, and started what I simultaneously documented throughout the torturous process of being a whistle blower. This professor had expressed support and outrage. Now, this professor requested I supply the two documents, the one which I claim a misappropriation of my work, and my original work, so that this professor could verify that my claims were true.

 Let’s put aside the reality that both documents, my dissertation and that infamous article are now publicly available, especially to a professor with database access. Let’s put aside the reality that everyone knows my former university and the attendant perpetrators. It’s a simple google search, thanks to polyscirumors.com.

 Let’s put aside the insinuation that my refusal to release them (not a refusal, they are already released. My audience is researchers. Do your own work. I’m not your graduate student).

 Let’s put aside the gendered language that I was traumatized, perhaps not thinking clearly, and how the burden was somehow on me, the victim, to prove my assault. Despite the very public nature with which I spoke out. And the heavy consequences I paid as a result.

 None of that matters anymore, because, to put it bluntly: I don’t give a fuck whether you believe me or not, I don’t give a fuck what academia collectively thinks of me.

 I literally have more important shit to do than remain in a dialog about what did, or did not happen. I have a real responsibility. My students are being arrested while their parents die. And this was before Covid-19 ruptured our social fabric in a violent rearrangement of reality.

 And this brings me back to why I am beginning again with this blog. Let me make it clear:

 Desegregation never happened. The education system is not “broken,” it is working perfectly as it was designed and for whom it was designed. The university is a private corporation, and those within it are cogs in its relentless pursuit of the accumulation of power in the hands of the few, no matter how radical one’s research and work is.

 If you are within it, you will have a very hard time convincing me that you are not a part of the problem by way of complicity. That you are not propping up the capitalist and patriarchal white supremacy which is the demise of us all.

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 Now is not the time for specialized research. I don’t give a fuck about minor art movements proposing vacuous belief in an art of nothing substantial and long forgotten. Likewise, I don’t give a fuck about the speculative contemporary art market, nor in discussing it. I have transcended, I have exceeded art history, and academia. I hope you will too, because what is at stake is simply too dangerous to ignore.

 If you cannot answer the question “What did I do today to undermine, resist, and explode institutions of suppression and exploitation” with an action item, we have nothing to say to each other.

 Let me make it more clear:  Defund the Police. Fund education. Abolish prisons. Fuck the police. Which is to say, fuck white supremacy.  

 In my next post, you can expect more of the above. Take it or leave it. If I offend you: unsubscribe, unfollow, or simply don’t come here.

 But for those of you engaged in actively resisting and chipping away at the capitalist university where education is only given to the very and highly selected few, welcome back. Let’s burn it all down.

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