Meg Guliford on being a black grad student right now: “I’m disappointed with and disheartened by the institutional expectation that pressing forward with little interruption while trying to process all this heartbreak is healthy.”

“The ability to disconnect from your identity to engage with an oppressor is a privilege. The ability to disconnect from your emotions and values to engage with someone else’s hate is a privilege.”

“Hope has its own distinct kind of pain. Allowing oneself to hope — realistically, clear-sightedly, understanding the odds of change — is tying your heart to your sleeve, vulnerable as a new bruise.”

“It’s easy to think of our work in universities as indulgent when so many lives are at stake, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Universities, when done right, can be crucibles of equality.”

“How far should I stray beyond my own areas of expertise and the research work I have done? What are the boundaries between discussing this research, offering my opinion, and ventriloquizing other people’s experiences?”

“If you accept the premise of the C-CW—that student loan debt will only become a crisis if it increases individual costs beyond the returns to a college degree—you’ve already given up on public higher education.”

“One of my former colleagues is fond of saying, ‘Tenure is the right to be abused in perpetuity.’ My problem was not, however, that I was being abused, but that I was being asked to abuse others.”

“These men continue to believe that I deserve their opinions. I want them to learn to keep their opinions to themselves.” — Essayist and historian Kelly J. Baker reflects on the men who email her.

“‘Think of the science!’ they cry, as if SCIENCE were an all holy deity to which we must offer sacrificial victims so it will continue to bless us with its favors.”

I work at my dream job in a department that is majority male, with colleagues who sexually harass job candidates during teaching talks and students who comment on my clothing in evaluations and senior faculty who rub my arm when they ask me to guest lecture for their classes…

So, Governor, when you say ‘work harder,’ I want to know if you’re really asking me to add another 15-20 hours to my week? If not, where do I make the cuts?

The easy answer is to say, “Well, if academia is so terrible, those put-upon adjuncts should go find other jobs, where they’ll at least earn minimum wage.” I wish they all would. I wish they all could. All of them. En masse.