New University- Old Vision?

Moving Away from Systemic Contradictions in the Current University System

Chathuri R. Illapperuma-Wood, Shengtian Wu, Aaron J. Fischer

Introduction

We want to open this chapter by honoring the tremendous initiative of the editors for the space to reflect on what has been, what is, and what we hope for equity, diversity, and justice within a Westernized university--particularly in graduate education. Scholars have produced ample literature research on the evolution of academic institutions, its agendas, and impacts on the future existence of graduate education. For this chapter, we regard the “ideal” or next university as one that positions itself within a system that repatriates, deconstructs, critiques, and decolonizes to advance student knowledge and uplift lives through pedagogy, research, and facilitate the social and economic advancement of marginalized and minoritized populations. 

In this chapter, we will unpack our experiences of being both victimized and benefitted through colonized circumstances and frameworks within academia. Through our reflections and perspectives from a culturally minoritized and privileged standpoint, we will express the systemic imbalances that exist in educational institutions and propose recommendations on how the balance can be restructured to bring equity, justice, and inclusion to minoritized and marginalized graduate trainees and faculty who are unfairly challenged by colonial influences and battle with intellectual slavery, poverty, and monopoly, meaning the colonization of the mind. Our minds are held in captivity as we continue to expand and transplant the Westernized discipline with little to no regard of the ideologies of the platform in which they are to be implanted (Alatas, 1974).

Author introductions

Chathuri Illapperuma-Wood, PhD, NCSP, BCBA

Westernized higher education is in its sense a force of colonization. As la paperson (2017) defined it, this mimics the first university that is centered on growth via accumulation and expansion through neoliberal means. There are innumerable definitions for neoliberalism that span across various disciplines. Predictably, the frequent and recurrent fanciful underpinnings tied to its definitions, although not an all-encompassing list, consists of privatization, commodification, individualism, capitalism, globalization, and economic and social reform. Emerging in the 1970’s, neoliberalism is known to perpetuate injustice, inequity, and non-inclusion. It claims to hold up liberty for all but covertly supports those already positioned to succeed (i.e., those with intergenerational wealth and power), it claims to maintain equity of resources for all but centers them around those who are already privileged and are abundantly resourced (Lavender, 2021, p. 17).

“Belonging to an ethnic majority in Sri Lanka, I was privileged to speak and identify with the dominant language and religion, respectively. For the longest time in my life, I experienced the benefits of belonging to a middle- upper class society. But privilege is a dynamic construct- it will present itself given the setting- and similarly be absent. My experiences being an international student in the United States have been unmatched and it's safe to say it has felt like a rollercoaster. The highs have been all high with moments of pure joy and the lows have been very low. I held a minoritized identity, I no more belonged to the group that were citizens of the dominant language, religion, or class.  I was what the system called a “non-resident alien.” The experiences tied to being underprivileged have included moments that questioned and minimized my presence in society, challenged me to work harder with inequitable resources, overlooked my potential and skills, and trusted the biased system. Those experiences have all impacted me in multiple ways but the most significant is the constant reminder that we can make small and short-lived positive changes every day, but to impact a generation with intention, we need policy- orientated efforts to restructure the system”.

Shengtian Wu, Ph.D., NCSP, BCBA-D

“The biggest challenges of my life have been the preparations for graduate study, learning a new language, and the ongoing acculturation. Luckily, I am a resilient person who is determined to face and overcome every challenge. My mindset helped me accept challenges and adjust to the given environments. It was not until the end of the graduate study that I realized varying degrees of changes to academia are much needed and could nurture a better training environment for students from minoritized backgrounds. In fact, some challenges only occur to those minoritized individuals, and simply normalizing and accepting those challenges is equivalent to complying with the injustice systems. From simple curiosity and genuine care toward minoritized and marginalized students to a far-reaching reform on the policy that supports a better learning environment, academia has some important short and long-term tasks to accomplish”.

Aaron J. Fischer, PhD, BCBA-D

“Education has always been important to me as I grew up.  However, despite my interest in learning, I was ambivalent about my academic passion, and it wasn’t until finding psychology and related human service fields to support individuals on the autism spectrum that I really felt like I could learn and grow in ways that kept me humble, but also curious, and motivated to continue to do the work. With my passion for psychology research, teaching, and practice, I felt like I could work with folks from various intersecting identities, and specifically students with social-emotional and behavioral challenges, to help them live fulfilling lives. I completed my primary education outside of Philadelphia, my undergraduate studies in Miami, and my graduate studies in Baton Rouge--living in those places, with all the rich cultural diversity within those cities, along with the ongoing prejudice and marginalization within those places for communities of color and those with disabilities, helped me to understand experiences different than my own, and taught me extensively how much further we need to progress to create equitable learning spaces for p-12 students through graduate studies. I have experienced so many privileges as a white cisgender man, and as a trainer of graduate students, my commitment is to transforming academic spaces to truly include individuals who are marginalized in our work, to better meet the needs of our diverse communities.”

By embodying these practices within a neoliberal framework, academic institutions leave no place for inclusion and continue to suppress social change for the better; this applies to faculty and students from marginalized and minoritized backgrounds. These ideologies have irreversible impacts on faculty and graduate trainees from underserved populations and proceed to widen the disparities in class, power, and privilege. The demand for culture-focused graduate education is now a staple in most training programs in the U.S. However, the difference lies in extent and intention in which cultural competence is framed beyond curriculums, instruction, and classroom discussions to decolonize the institution. These measures could portray their cultural competence efforts as a response to empathizing with the colonized, but in reality could prevail as an outcome of institutions to maintain white supremacy, antiblackness, and Indigenous censorship (la paperson, 2017). For this chapter, we will utilize the following definitions of white supremacy, anti-blackness, and Indigenous censorship:

White supremacy captures the all-encompassing centrality and assumes superiority of people defined and perceived as white, and the practices based upon that assumption.

White supremacy is not simply the idea that whites are superior to people of color (although it certainly is that), but a deeper premise that supports this idea–the definition of whites as the norm or standard for humans, and people of color as an inherent deviation from that norm. (DiAngelo, 2018, p. 23).

Anti-Blackness is ‘an interlocking paradigm of institutions, attitudes, practices and behaviors that work to dehumanize and oppress Black people in order to benefit non-Black people, and specifically, to benefit and maintain white supremacy’ (Black Liberation Collective, 2017). It also constitutes a wider conception of a hostile or unfriendly relationship between being black and being human; it is beyond racism against black people (Dumas & Ross, 2016).

Indigenous censorship or elimination can be referred to as the removal of Indigenous peoples ‘in multiple forms from settler societies as their existence challenged settler’s access to resources such as land’ (Wolfe, 2006)

We chose these definitions because they effectively capture the complexity tied to these ideologies brought about by colonization and accurately depict the harm to marginalized and minoritized peoples.

Through the lens of cultural competence as a by-product of institutional racism, program, and university-wide efforts to “becoming” culturally competent and diverse have also recently included the recruitment and retention efforts of marginalized and minoritized trainees (Grenier, 2020). While these efforts are purposefully planned and meaningfully executed, they can also serve to suffice a criterion or satisfy a checkbox with little to no deliberate effort to identify and enact system-level changes that are inclusive and provide equitable support to trainees (Ahmed, 2012). While this might allow institutions to accelerate equity and diversity practices by increasing recruitment and retention of marginalized and minoritized populations, the colonial-driven policies rationalize these decisions based on economic logic rather than social justice (DeTurk & Briscoe, 2021). All these connote with la paperson’s (2017, p. 33) description of a first world university.

The impacts of these unaddressed system level changes and hindered support and resources can seamlessly and swiftly trickle down to impact the everyday lives of minoritized and marginalized graduate trainees. In such instances, programs are too quick to question individual competencies than systemic inadequacies. In the following text, we will reveal some of the authors’ personal and firsthand experiences of these injustices and inequalities within the colonized system of the university with suggestions to utilize knowledge and resources to decolonize and transform equity, diversity, and inclusivity. Before diving into these excerpts, we want to acknowledge that each author’s experiences are unique, personal, and firsthand. However, to maintain anonymity among authors, experiences are phrased using collective pronouns including “ours'', “we”, or “us”.

Academic Experiences and Training

Admittedly, our graduate school journey delivered us excellent avenues for professional development and competencies in school psychology. However, a few challenging experiences during the training led to critical reflections on the current inadequacy of support in social justice in academic settings. For example, our repeated prompts to initiate in-class discussions and garner insights tied to systemic differences of school psychology across borders was often responded with very brief to no follow-up responses, interest, or reciprocity from our cohort and classmates. It felt like a one-sided conversation, and we found ourselves gradually censoring such questions while deliberating the importance of those topics to others. The overall learning environment inadvertently suppressed similar questions in subsequent classes and very likely hampered development of critical skills needed for supporting marginalized, minoritized, and international populations.

Moreover, attending the only class that focused on multiculturalism offered later in the training years conveyed that the graduate program could prioritize diversity, inclusion, and social justice issues with similar importance compared to other traditional professional competencies by either offering more courses tied to critical societal issues or offering courses early on in training. The class introduced initial opportunities to explicitly learn, openly discuss, and work on assignments related to diversity, inclusion, and social justice. Given the deeply rooted white supremacy, antiblackness, colonization, racism, and discrimination embedded in the education system, the content and activities covered in the course significantly strengthened our overall competence to provide culturally sensitive and social justice-oriented school psychology services, it appeared meaningful and sufficient to liberate and critically assess. The overall class experience provoked our thoughts, such as (a) “what if more courses of this orientation are offered and distributed across all years of graduate school”, (b) “what if intentional multicultural discussions are embedded into the entire school psychology curriculum”, and (c) “what if practicum group supervisions religiously included discussions on how to disrupt systemic inequities maintained by racial disparities, in our schools?”

Like courses and graduate program curriculum, research activities are also heavily influenced by the interest, agendas, and expertise of our peers and professors. A lack of support and mentorship to cultivate our research skills targeted at exploring equity, diversity, and inclusion engendered a bigger pressure. More ideas revolved around pursuing the ‘R-1 dream’ and less of burning societal issues that challenged minoritized and marginalized families and students in the “outside” world. With the stressors tied to graduate school commitments, there were multiple times we pondered exploring “trendy” research topics in place of pursuing our deep-rooted interests targeting multicultural aspects. However, in conversation with fellow students with similar interests, we quickly learned our individual experiences were not isolated and that other marginalized and minoritized students across other institutions have been experiencing similar barriers. Despite the types of career fields, graduate programs must make a concerted effort to redesign learning environments conducive to learning; often those that actively dismantle and eradicate white supremacy and make room to act on equity, inclusion, and justice for students from marginalized and minoritized backgrounds.

Social Experiences and Connectedness

Social connections are pivotal to our lives and daily experiences. The desire and need to connect with others (e.g., peers, advisors, and mentors) intensifies with the transition to graduate school that introduces various new challenges, situations, and environments (e.g., learning deeper knowledge and skills, interactive nature of psychological services, collaboration-based practices, interacting different opinions with others). Program faculty usually encourage students to utilize peer support to alleviate life stressors and the stressors related to graduate school. Often, graduate programs organize orientation and monthly social events to cultivate and facilitate relationships and connections between students and program faculty. Some programs also adopt a peer-mentoring model to provide support to new students, to help adjustment to their programs and new settings.

Graduate school has a culture of its own; some inhabit the culture of the dominant race- mostly the white culture. For someone who does not associate or identify with this culture, the adjustment into this environment can be stressful and emotionally exhausting. These are inequitable challenges given one’s origin and experience with the system, but the resources available to each are far from equitable. A good example is tuition and student loans. Often those who are not receiving full rides to school end up with large debts and navigate the hardest of challenges studying a field in the social sciences to secure community-oriented jobs that pay low wages, in order to be able to give back to their community and improve livelihoods of marginalized people.

Our challenges were numerous and existed along a spectrum of domains. However, the most prominent one was developing a sense of connection with faculty and students, and often this felt like a one-way street. Our efforts to foster social relationships ranged from demands to be fluent in a foreign language to familiarity with American ways of life such as sports, American humor, TV shows, celebrities, chain restaurants- often these were also successful conversation starters and demonstrated “social fit” with American peers. It was far from liberating.

Assuming other groups of minoritized and marginalized populations do not experience their share of isolation in graduate school is being ignorant of their challenges. For example, depending on the regions, the culture within the U.S. is drastically different. One instance is religion; most of the residents in the southern states (e.g., Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana) invest in Christian faiths and beliefs. Often this offers fewer opportunities for religious minorities (e.g., Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, and Islam) to celebrate, practice, and project their beliefs- which can feel isolating for individuals that seek comfort through their individual religious practices.

The differences that exist between the dominant and our cultural and social beliefs have yielded isolating experiences for all the authors on this chapter. With the dismissal of our beliefs or peers and mentors uninterested in learning about practices outside their comfort, we often withdrew ourselves from culturally dominating discussions. These recurrent experiences have now transformed into opportunities to re-examine the academic environments that we create for our students from minoritized and marginalized backgrounds. 

Interpersonal Experiences and Peers 

Our determination to advocate for racial equity is still a journey. Some of us being foreign born, our initial impressions of cultural relationships in the U.S. were positive and limited to media influences. But those took a turn when we started graduate school; the real-life experiences were unmatched, and no media could reverse our impressions. The more we read and became aware, we learned that instead of simply increasing the number of marginalized and minoritized trainees in a program, facilitating, critiquing, and actively decolonizing are more crucial in achieving inclusion. Unfortunately, individuals are more likely to interact with others from the same racial or ethnic backgrounds (Monarrez & Washington, 2020) and can be attributed to the social, emotional, and spiritual connectedness. So, what happens when there aren’t enough of those individuals represented in a cohort or a program? During inter-racial, ethnic, and religious interactions, we can be victims of inequities and may have to live our everyday experiences of microaggressions. Programs should also be aware that interactions of various identities and backgrounds of marginalized and white students contribute to microaggressions (Clark et al., 2012). Some common microaggressions included being complimented for speaking fluent English, being stereotyped for being good at math given certain ethnic origins and being ostracized for eating “weird” food. Just like birds of a feather, we found our haven in other minoritized groups. Soon our naïve view that overt racial aggressions are merely observable was disrupted through our colleagues’ experiences.

The most devastating experience was hearing our white peers refer to our black friends using culturally unacceptable words or descriptions at no expense or consequence even with formal interrogation through a programmatic standpoint. Reflecting on these encounters, we still share a sense of guilt for being bystanders when our friends were experiencing these micro and macro aggressions. Knowing how to be effective allies is a journey and takes deliberate and repeated practice with systemic support. Graduate programs have an obligation to design opportunities for all students and faculty to engage in intentional conversations to unpack systemic biases and racism and create equitable support and resources. It feels almost impossible to believe that “the system stands with all” or “the system brings justice”. The slogan is only cliche. With an untrustworthy and biased system, there is no guarantee of social justice, safety, or support for those from non-dominant backgrounds and cultures. Ironically, in a setting constructed to breed and groom privilege, we must first work to educate and address the inequities within our immediate environment- which is the system after all.  

Moving Forward: Restructuring and Decolonizing

One cannot avoid contemplating the true intentions behind the pursuit to achieve diversity, equity, and inclusion in academic settings. As described by la paperson (2017) what truly stands between the first, second, and third world university is the ability to thrive and utilize resources offered by the first world university, critique on it as templated by the second world university, and restructure knowledge and resources to transform into a decolonizing university, which is the third. In all of this, understanding neoliberalism as emerged through policy is fundamental to understanding the philosophy and racialization and colonization of education. “To understand neoliberalism is to understand how neoliberal policies reproduce inequity and reinscribe privilege and power in ways that marginalize, exclude, and ultimately reproduce social and material death in the USA” (Inwood, 2015, p. 420). Race and class positions have and will continue to dominate the U.S.- meaning they have and will be central to those social and economic policies- meaning they have and will converge with neoliberalism in paramount ways.

To understand the policies, it is necessary to understand how biased policies came to be. The U.S. economy was built on the exploitation of resources, riches, and rights from racialized and marginalized minorities (Inwood, 2015). However, with the turn on the economic crisis in the 1970’s, white settlers and possessors gathered to position themselves within meritocratic ideologies and discourses to benefit from the racial frameworks, oppression, injustice, and inequities they created but deny (Lassiter, 2006). Mirrored through the recent political dramatization of introducing critical race theory within academic institutions, such events are brutal and overt reminders that these frameworks have transcended our ancestors and will prevail into future generations. 

Institutions of higher education are evolving colonizing machines. For example, academia has a long history of perpetuating white supremacy through overrepresentation of white-centric research, curriculums, and knowledge (Mohamed & Beagan, 2019). One of the multiple characteristics of such universities is its attempt to retain a favorable image via economic rationalism (Holscher & Sewpaul, 2006) and commodification of diversity. Thus, one cannot resist but question the purpose and intentions of university and program wide hype for ‘diversity-focused’ initiatives- when often they intend in the form of “diverse” student numbers for profit rather than student experiences for genuine concern (Urciuoli, 2018).  Attracting “diverse” students serves multiple benefits to academic institutions; firstly, they are revenue- generating. Students are considered consumers who pay for academic services, and diverse students (Urciuoli, 2003; e.g., international students) tend to pay higher costs of tuition- often far more expensive than the low rates estimated for in-state students; often they end up being debtors. Secondly, enrolling diverse students further the institutions’ attractiveness and marketing agenda to garner more revenue. Flawed regimes aim to exploit students' identities and histories to gloat on its selfish positive imagery (Cabrera, 2020). Central to this overall agenda is a firm belief that diversity pertains to race and ethnicity upon which rests, the guileful acceptance or shameful denial that diversity is ingrained in systems (Beagan, 2018). 

Colonized beliefs instill thoughts that rejoice personal development and fulfillment, which associate with positive connotations. But with an uneven playing field, they enhance personal shortcomings, deficits, and increase competition among individuals. It weakens and shrinks the level of compassion among individuals and disregards social change. By embodying these practices within a flawed neoliberal framework, academic institutions leave no place for inclusion and continue to suppress social change for the better. These ideologies have irreversible impacts on graduate trainees from underserved populations and proceed to widen the disparities in class, power, and privilege.

There are masses of work to be done to demystify the myth or phony optimistic message that success in academia is for everyone. They could choose to be institutions that promote social change, but without the investment to make intentional and rigorous efforts to admit and enact positive system level change to specifically benefit those minorities and marginalized students and faculty, academia will only continue to serve and favor those privileged.

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