The first thing I felt when I heard about Lorgia García-Peña being denied tenure was sadness; a sensation of recycled and painful truths coming to my stomach at the speed of light. In academia, tenure is like settling down to get married, as my mother best puts it. It requires professing a commitment to an institution, working and devoting an entire body of work and then, after a couple of years, that institution can decide to throw you away just because it decides that you don’t deserve security.
Professor García-Peña is a scholar who, by academic standards, has done everything to obtain this merit, receiving numerous honors and recognitions as a leader in her field of Latinx Studies, yet Harvard administrators basically said she was not good enough. To some, this may not be surprising. Colonialism is sitting, after all, at the head of the table in this house that was created to serve white male scholars.
To others, García-Peña’s ordeal is a necessary reminder to non-white scholars everywhere that intellectual genocide is alive and kicking.
Harvard’s decision camouflages what thousands of Black and indigenous scholars have been saying for decades: they don’t really want us, they just want to profit from our ideas. Denial of this fact appears in historical records. In 1492, the archives show that conquistadores first transmitted and shared their knowledge with the “New World.” Auto-correct: What they transmitted was diseases. What they shared was violence.
Black and indigenous ways of crawling, walking, running, hiding and escaping are paramount to maintaining standards of “academic excellence,” because they consist of the deepest beds of knowledge on earth. But these are not the rubrics applied to Professor García-Peña’s case because Harvard, like all other institutions rooted in colonialism, is not truly interested in academic excellence. They are interested in ensuring that words like inclusion and diversity remain as part of a higher educational institutional complex to be curated by them only.
Nothing about the existence of institutions like Harvard is a real attempt to create spaces that benefit us.
My grandfather used to tell me that in order to understand history one can learn it in a bakery. There you learn that measurements are everything. You add an extra pinch of sugar or salt to the mix and a disaster is waiting to be tasted. The taste of bread cannot be camouflaged with extra ingredients.
Denial of the fact that institutions of “higher learning” only want us for how we can be exploited is the extra ingredient added to history, and it is leaving us with the bitter taste of colonialism: intellectual, psychological, emotional, and physical destruction.
The heart of the bakery is the oven. Colonizers are interested in maintaining this engine running 24-7. Even though they may own the place, a good recipe is needed to sell the product. This is what Black and indigenous professors who bring their unique skills offer. They produce high-quality bread when using their own recipes and appliances. But these institutions introduce new appliances to replace el horno de barro, recipes are changed as per new demands, and even the baker can be swapped out once the recipe is stolen. These changes disrupt the taste, disrupt the knowledge. That is how capitalism works.
Long gone are the times when I bought the false idea that nos mirábamos más bonitas calladitas, that voice reminding us constantly that we look better when we are silent. I know now that our voices are thunder. Stealing the labor of the baker and her recipe concerns an entire body of beings demanding justice. In what language do we need to express the urgent need to have scholars that at least look like us in positions to teach us our history?
I, along with thousands of non-white scholars, have inherited yarn to weave relationships based on restoring the balance interrupted more than 500 years ago. The very same knowledge academic institutions make money off of. The collective supporting Professor García-Peña has co-existed with academic manufactured European traditions for decades that weigh us down to the bottom of the Marianne Trench, yet we rise, creating a thunder every time.
It is time to be angry.
It is time to resist.
It is time to speak up against dispossession, intellectual extractivism, and labor exploitation.
Scholars in academia have a history of warning professors-in-the-making to remain quiet about these demands, under the spell of censorship because that is how one got ahead. Silence no more! Professors like García-Peña continue to be punished for righting the wrongs of historical erasure. Harvard University has a responsibility because the full impact of this negative experience will resonate with generations to come in an institution that prides itself to be one of the best in the world.
In order to restore the damage committed to scholars of color everywhere, corrective actions need to be made by Harvard University. These include apologizing to Professor García-Peña, and the Black and indigenous scholars and students supporting her for the wrongdoing; the institutional commitment to create an Ethnic Studies Program once and for all; stopping the tokenizing of the scholarship of non-white scholars and students in catalogues and promotional material to fulfil quotas; and actions to create a working group in charge of investigating the implication of racism on campus.
We are at the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, and we are still being used for nothing more than exploitation. Change that. And if you are an administrator or faculty elsewhere witnessing these denials, act now. Act in the present. Today needs to happen.
Suggested Readings:
Black, indigenous, latinx students of color, the writings of Sara Ahmed, and Presumed
incompetent: the intersections of race and class for women in academia. Ed. by Gabriella
Gutiérrez y Muhs, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. González, Angela P. Harris. Boulder,
Colorado: UP of Colorado, 2012.
Clelia O. Rodríguez is an educator, mom, knitter, cook, auntie, speaker, born and raised in El Salvador. She graduated from York University with a Specialized Honours BA, specializing in Hispanic Literature. She earned her MA and PhD from the University of Toronto. Dr. Rodríguez has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in Spanish language, literature and culture at the University of Toronto, Washington College, the University of Ghana and the University of Michigan, most recently. She was also a Human Rights Traveling Professor in the United States, Nepal, Jordan, and Chile as part of the International Honors Program (IHP) for the School of International Training (SIT). She taught Comparative Issues in Human Rights and Fieldwork Ethics and Comparative Research Methods. Most recently, she was a Gender Academic Advisor in Bolivia as part of part of partnership between CECI and Global Affairs Canada. She is the author of Decolonizing Academia: Poverty, Oppression and Pain (Fernwood Publishing, 2018). Her publications are available in Academia.edu.
