Steve Volk, November 14, 2016

More than 250 black faculty members, administrators, graduate students and allies gathered in Columbus a day after Election Day to offer their perspectives in a long-planned session titled “Making Black Lives Matter in Higher Education in Challenging Times: A Conversation for, by, and about Black Faculty, Graduate Students, and Staff-Administrators.” In response to the question, “What has it been like to be a black faculty or staff member on a predominately white campus in the era of Black Lives Matter?” one professor responded, “You don’t pray for an easy road; you pray for a strong back.”

I wasn’t at that conference but I was thinking about the strong backs we will need as I drove down to Louisville, KY, on Wednesday for the annual meeting of the POD Network, a group of some 1,000 “faculty developers.” I’ve never much liked the concept of “faculty development,” mirroring my objections about “developed” and “undeveloped” countries, as if some countries — or some faculty — just needed to be “developed.” But that’s what our job is called, those of us who run teaching and learning centers, work in instructional design, and generally collaborate with faculty, graduate students, students and staff around issues of pedagogy and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Truth be told, I hadn’t wanted to go. I just wanted to sit in a dark corner of my house. But I figured I could get something out of it, and, now back at home, I realize that I did. It was healing to be in a room of hundreds and hundreds of people who care about the values of diversity, inclusion, social justice, and, frankly, education.  It was healthy to be at a conference where the president of the POD Network used every opportunity to remind us of the values of the organization:

1. Collegiality
2. Inclusion
3. Diverse perspectives
4. Advocacy and Social justice
5. Distributed Leadership
6. Innovation
7. Evidence-Based Practices
8. Respect/Ethical Practices

It was good to sit  with so many others who care about their students and their colleagues and their country and to ask: what do we do now, where do we go from here? For thousands and thousands across the United States, the answer has already come in the streets. Some of my answers emerged in Louisville.

This posting is coming long after you have taught your first “morning after” class, long after you’ve figured out what you need to do to reassure many of our students that we are there to honor, uphold and protect the values that serve as the foundation of higher education: diversity and inclusion, social justice, respect, evidence, truth and fact. So all I can do now is tell some stories of the last few days, and suggest ways to uphold our values in our classrooms and on our campuses. In storytelling, many have said, is the process of healing.

I served as a poll observer on election day at the Mt Zion Mission Baptist Church in Lorain, OH. About 75% of the voters who came in were Spanish-speaking, largely of Puerto Rican and Mexican ancestry; a large number were black. A few were illiterate, a chilling observation for the United States in the 21^st century. More than anything, I was taken by the seriousness with which they approached the responsibility of voting. One image in particular will long stay with me. An older African American woman came to vote with her husband. She walked slowly and with considerable pain, it was clear, and we helped her over to the voting station. She remained for about an hour standing at the voting booth; her husband had long since taken a seat to wait for her. She read every word of every issue (I could see her mouthing the words) before she checked a box, and then used the “back” button to read them again before finally casting her ballot. I, of course, have no idea who or what she voted for, but voting was her right and damn if she wouldn’t take it seriously.

At the POD conference, I sat in on a number of sessions on diversity and inclusion in higher education. Most in attendance were still processing what had just come down and the implications for those of us in education, both higher education and K-12. Underlying all the conversations were deep concerns for students of color, immigrants, foreigners, and undocumented who were scared and already witness to a racist “whitelash.” One black faculty member from Northeastern remarked that faculty of color are even more frightened by the educated, white faculty who make them feel unwelcome on their own campuses. And an African American faculty developer from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville talked about the fact that all day on Wednesday white faculty were in her office crying and she’s thinking, “I can’t be positive for both you and me. What about the faculty of color who by virtue of the fact that they are pushed into this position of being there to support not just faculty and students of color but everyone?” (On this, you might want to take a look at Christine Malsbary’s “The Passionate Ethnographer” blog, “Dear White People: Things you can do instead of cry or try to hug us. Sincerely, People of Color.”)

“How do we welcome the future?”

We at the conference were fortunate to be graced with a fierce and funny keynote by the poet Nikki Giovanni who began by wryly observing that “One of the advantages of being black is that so much shit has happened to us that this is just one more. We just make up a song and go on.” And she reminded us of what it is we teachers do by reading some stanzas from her poem, “Always There Are the Children,”

 

and always there are the children

there will be children in the heat of day
there will be children in the cold of winter

children like a quilted blanket
are welcomed in our old age

children like a block of ice to a desert sheik
are signs of status in our youth

we feed the children with our culture
that they might understand our travail

we nourish the children on our gods
that they may understand respect

we urge the children on the tracks
that our race will not fall short

but our children are not ours
nor we theirs they are future we are past

how do we welcome the future
not with the colonialism of the past
for that is our problem
not with the racism of the past
for that is their problem
not with the fears of our own status
for history is lived not dictated

we welcome the young of all groups
as our own with the solid nourishment
of food and warmth

we prepare the way with the solid
nourishment of self-actualization

we implore all the young to prepare for the young
because always there will be children.

It was Giovanni who talked most about storytelling and healing: we sit together, we listen to each other, we have to talk to each other, share with each other. “There are stories,” she told us. “Don’t be afraid to tell them.” And she concluded in her inimitable fashion: “Either learn something or shut the fuck up. We’re going to be alright.” I figured that I never need to listen to another conference keynote: I had already heard the best.

As a break from the conference – and who doesn’t need a break from a conference? – I walked the few blocks to the Muhammad Ali Center. It seemed the right thing to do and I wasn’t disappointed. The center is organized around Ali’s six core principles:

• Confidence: Belief in oneself, one’s ability, and one’s future
• Conviction: A firm belief that gives one the courage to stand behind that belief, despite pressure to do otherwise
• Dedication: The act of devoting all of one’s energy, effort, and abilities to a certain task.
• Giving: To present voluntarily without expecting something in return.
• Respect: Esteem for, or a sense of the worth or excellence of, oneself and others.
• Spirituality: A sense of awe, reverence, and inner peace inspired by a connection to all of creation and/or that which is greater than oneself.

As I was making my way through the museum, I latched onto a group of some 15 students and their teacher; all were black. The kids were about 8-12 years old. The teacher was an inspiration, a magician, a ball of fire, telling her students that they had to believe in themselves and “never, never let anyone tell you that you can’t be great.” She read them the wall text at the start of the exhibition: “Know who you are and believe. Trust yourself: let yourself take the steps that get you where you want to go. Sometimes this requires a leap of faith…The self-confidence that Muhammad Ali showed the world irritated some people. But it inspired – and empowered – many, many others.”  “OK,” she said, “I want you to take a picture of that. Did you take a picture of that? I want you to look at it and not forget it.” These are the teachers who will heal the world.

Back to the conference where POD’s president, Kevin Barry, was remembering the words of Christian Moevs, a professor of Romance Languages and Literature at Notre Dame, on receiving the “Sheedy Award” in 2006, an honor given to an outstanding faculty member. “In a human being,” Moevs began, “generosity and love are one with consciousness, with awareness. I began to learn how much students will give, how much they will give of themselves, how they will respond, come towards you, if you step towards them. Any success of any teacher,” he continued, “depends on that light, love, generosity in our students. I learned then that the key to all teaching is: You must love your students with a deep, self-giving love. There is a famous phrase in Dante, about how no one loved can escape from loving in return. That is not actually true with sensual love. It is true with selfless, self-giving love. That love is the bond, the link of communication, through which real teaching and learning happen.”

His words recalled to me what bell hooks said in Teaching to Transgress: “To begin, the professor must genuinely value everyone’s presence. There must be an ongoing recognition that everyone influences the classroom dynamic, that everyone contributes.”

And how do we do that? We begin with ourselves. James Baldwin argued in 1948 in “Lockridge: ‘The American Myth’” that a “rigid refusal to look at ourselves may well destroy us particularly now since if we cannot understand ourselves we will not be able to understand anything.”  We carry out our work in our classrooms, and it is in those spaces above all that we pledge to look into ourselves to ask if we doing all we can to insure that all of our students can thrive and are supported. It is in our classrooms that we can make the greatest difference, where we must insist that everyone’s presence is valued and that all our students can achieve their goals. It is in our classrooms that we “prepare the way with the solid nourishment of self-actualization.”

The great Leonard Cohen, who passed this last week, has been quoted much in the last few days, particularly his observation that “there is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.” I can do no better than close with his song, “Democracy.” Written in 1992, it seems to have uncannily predicted this moment:

 

It’s coming through a hole in the air
From those nights in Tiananmen Square
It’s coming from the feel
That this ain’t exactly real
Or it’s real, but it ain’t exactly there
From the wars against disorder
From the sirens night and day
From the fires of the homeless
From the ashes of the gay
Democracy is coming to the USA
It’s coming through a crack in the wall
On a visionary flood of alcohol
From the staggering account
Of the Sermon on the Mount
Which I don’t pretend to understand at all
It’s coming from the silence
On the dock of the bay,
From the brave, the bold, the battered
Heart of Chevrolet
Democracy is coming to the USA

It’s coming from the sorrow in the street
The holy places where the races meet
From the homicidal bitchin’
That goes down in every kitchen
To determine who will serve and who will eat
From the wells of disappointment
Where the women kneel to pray
For the grace of God in the desert here
And the desert far away:
Democracy is coming to the USA

Sail on, sail on
Oh mighty ship of State
To the shores of need
Past the reefs of greed
Through the Squalls of hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on

It’s coming to America first
The cradle of the best and of the worst
It’s here they got the range
And the machinery for change
And it’s here they got the spiritual thirst
It’s here the family’s broken
And it’s here the lonely say
That the heart has got to open
In a fundamental way
Democracy is coming to the USA

It’s coming from the women and the men
Oh baby, we’ll be making love again
We’ll be going down so deep
The river’s going to weep,
And the mountain’s going to shout Amen
It’s coming like the tidal flood
Beneath the lunar sway
Imperial, mysterious
In amorous array
Democracy is coming to the USA

Sail on, sail on
O mighty ship of State
To the shores of need
Past the reefs of greed
Through the squalls of hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on

I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can’t stand the scene
And I’m neither left or right
I’m just staying home tonight
Getting lost in that hopeless little screen
But I’m stubborn as those garbage bags
As time cannot decay
I’m junk but I’m still holding up this little wild bouquet
Democracy is coming to the USA
To the USA

[Democracy lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC]