A Circle Has No Beginning

I approached the Shaun Harper and Charles Davis most recent article, “Eight Actions to Reduce Racism in College Classrooms”, with much excitement. Mostly, I was geeked to have a neat and packaged list that could be easily passed along to my colleagues and classmates in higher ed. –Shout out to Dr. Harper for providing the free download on his social media platforms (https://upenn.app.box.com/s/6xbq3htlj0svp6pi7xsjdnh6nwjxdbw6) Additionally, I was eager to see if years of data and site visits corroborated the guesses that I’d been working from. Ultimately, reading this article reminded me of the tremendous amount of work that there still is to do in higher education, specifically along the lines of race and social justice.

One of my favorite set of lines from the J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows books comes when Luna Lovegood answers the age old question, “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” Luna responds, “A circle has no beginning.”

How infuriating and painfully accurate…

Higher education scholars and practitioners are always attempting find the beginning. When discussing our institutions’ consistent issues with race and social justice (call a spade a spade… none of this is new), we have throw shade a struggling k-12 systems, lack of parental support or guidance, student resistance, underdevelopment by student affairs professional, our administrators, and finally we have come to discuss the impact of faculty. The reality is that all of these points make up a seemingly un-interupt-able circle of social injustice within higher education.

We can’t afford focus on one problem. We have to work through them all. BUT we can’t all do the same work.

I am thankful for the work of Dr. Harper and Dr. Davis on this specific area of social justice in higher education and I am motivated to find my place in this work. Hopefully others will do the same.