Excerpted from Pedagogical Roundtable “Teaching Antiracism” with Joseph Flipper (Bellarmine University) and Christopher Pramuk (Regis University).

People often imagine the university as an institution uniquely positioned for antiracism. The image of the university as an exceptional place remains. Universities hire exceptional faculty and staff, admit the best students, and are the loci of generation of knowledge. Academics in the humanities are especially tempted to describe a humanistic formation that is personally liberative and, therefore, uniquely positioned to champion the struggle against oppressive forces that stymie this liberation, including racism. In this view, education is personally liberative and serves as the gateway to (and gatekeeper of) economic mobility, standing apart from other institutions of government, policing, prisons, finance, and militarization. In this imaginary presentation and middle-class aspiration, the intellectual, cultural, and financial emancipation of Black and brown people flows through this institution.

But the university’s history speaks otherwise. Its provenance is in settler colonialism and slavery. Land-grant universities were founded with the sale of eleven million acres stolen from “over 250 [Indigenous] tribes, bands, and communities through over 160 violence-backed land cessions.”[i] The 1862 Morrill Act, still in operation today, requires the states to hold the proceeds in “perpetual fund, the capital of which shall remain forever undiminished … and the interest of which shall be inviolably appropriated … to the endowment, support, and maintenance [of universities].”[ii] Throughout the South, many universities were literally founded on lands that were formerly worked by slaves. In this context, the 1838 Jesuit Maryland Province sale of 272 slaves that financially stabilized Georgetown University and launched its ascendant trajectory was not an anomalous event. It is consistent with the projects of dispossession and enslavement that established and endowed universities in the United States.

The contemporary university remains deeply invested in a racial regime by developing and certifying its human, institutional, and epistemological resources. The university is characterized not by its immunity to external racism, but by its permeability to outside institutions and by its central role in solidifying racial and class stratification. Sandy Grande, Quechua author and Indigenous studies scholar, explains, the “initial dispossession and enslavement of Indigenous and Black peoples has given rise to a settler nation and attendant institutions that are predisposed to replicate relations of domination. As such, scholars of abolition and decolonization question the efficacy of liberal reform measures focused on diversity, inclusion and equity. Given that the university is at least 1,000 years old and still remains fundamentally defined by its constitutive dispossessions, enclosures and exclusions is its own testament to the failures of reform.”[iii]

Data shows an exploitative economic architecture of colleges and universities that affect BIPOC students and faculty acutely, though they affect whites to a lesser degree. Kelley puts it succinctly: “the neoliberal structuring of educational institutions” is consistent with the history of “dispossession, accumulation, and exclusion.”[iv] In the classroom, we can see the practical results: students who cannot keep up with their academics because they are working two or three jobs are taught by professors who are doing the same.

The university was established within the logics of slavery and dispossession, profiting from the slave trade and land appropriation. Colleges and universities were established and administrated by men who were slavers to form young men into masters. The sciences and theologies of white supremacy were systematized through the university, which also advanced racial ideals of civilization. They became the institutions through which Indigenous and Black people were transformed from supposed savagery and ignorance into citizens. Given the historical entanglements of the university with white supremacy and settler colonialism, vast contemporary inequalities of resources, and the extractive structure of financing postsecondary education, and the gatekeeping role of the university, the obstacles to antiracist education within the university are systemic. In this moment, to be included in the university is to be invited into an already racially stratified environment marked by exploitation and profound inequalities. The university cannot—in its present form—be antiracist.

The full article ‘Pedagogy Toward Refusal‘ is currently free to access in the Horizons journal.

[i] Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone, “Land-Grab Universities: Expropriated Indigenous Land Is the Foundation of the Land-Grant University System,” High Country News, March 30, 2020.

[ii] Morrill Act of July 2, 1862, Pub. L. 37–108, Enrolled Acts and Resolutions of Congress, 1789–1996.

[iii] Sandy Grande, “Life Beyond Evidence: Hospicing the University” (keynote address, Conference of Ford Fellows, remote, October 9, 2020).

[iv] Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle.”