Race and Anti-Racism in Higher Education

Higher education is a space that has long been considered both an essential, as well as contested space of free thought equity and justice. In our work to envision an antiracist university, many of us participated in our university's campus wide Equity Summit this past year and support the goals and plans of this effort. Covid-19, continued racialized police violence and deepening economic injustice deepen our commitment to a university future that is justice- and equity-rich.

Futures and foresight literature and methods must also be interrogated and actively cultivated as anti-racist practices, and we subscribe to futures frameworks that are intentionally oriented to be pluralistic, attentive to power dynamics and focused on equity. When only a small number of people decide what the future is - that is neither democratic, nor anti-racist.

The work of co-creating an anti-racist university of the future has never been more urgent.

How can we best assure that the university of the future is antiracist? What are the ingredients?

What are the practices and structures? What are we doing/not doing now that will best position us to co-create this future?

We strongly assert the importance of participating in anti-racism and anti-bias activities that center the experiences of BIPOC, Queer, Disabled and other marginalized identities in our work, and to imagine and co-create futures that center BIPOC student, staff and faculty success at our university. We intentionally complicate our work to discuss the implications of ideas, structures, practices and aspirations with a strong focus on equity and justice now and in the future. Numerous members of our collaboratory are also formally part of campus-wide equity work.

We are a messy work in progress - but our intention is to continue to improve the degree to which we invite knowledge and strategy that best considers, factors and shifts our methods and structures towards anti-racism.

To aid in expanding our thinking about the future of an antiracist university, we continued to scan and learn from national discourse on this issue - in the higher education literature as well as beyond it. You can see what we gathered here.

Note: In a related but different scan, we explored economic models of neo-liberalism that have greatly shaped the current racial and economic climate of higher education today. You can explore that scan here.