We know the pain.
We wallow in the sadness.
The poets and painters, they are our light in a dangerous and depressed world.
For real. If it weren’t for the James Baldwins and Louise Erdriches; or the stories of sadness or narratives love triumphing over oppression, all of the pain, all the sadness–all of it–would overwhelm.
We need to find a way to John Keats who found beauty in the paradox. Or maybe Jean Toomer who told us pain and beauty were not oppositional but dependent on one another.
Those of us who have had the luxury of time and introspection, we know.
We know.
We know truth is worth pursuit even if it is inaccessible.
Let me say this another way.
We have railed against racism and power and the post-truth mediated sphere.
We have written essays and posted on social media.
But maybe that is not the best way.
Maybe we need to shift our tactics.
Perhaps our commitment to rationality is our obstacle.
Maybe it’s time to see that our traditional tools sufficed for a while. But then a tidal wave came.
We need don’t need sandbags to stem the force of Project 2025.
We need a new shoreline.
Because I can promise you there is no rationale, no epiphany, no theoretical praxis that will divert a tidal wave or stave off an earthquake that has already happened.
We know this.
We know it deep in our bones.
Yet, we have used only the tools of academia to defend academia to non-academics who are attacking academia. What sense is that?
We talk to ourselves. We formulate arguments. But we are fighting water with words.
We are Charlie Brown to a political sector that is often Lucy; George Forman being rope-a-doped by Muhammed Ali.
This is because we do not build. We do not disrupt. And yet, we need to do both.
I mean, seriously: how many conferences have you been to with a focus on Artificial Intelligence, and no focus on anti-DEI legislation moving across the country? We cannot add more things and hope the DEI stuff, over there somewhere in a place unnamed, is taken care of. Because in the meantime, the swell of infrastructure built on centuries of marginalization metastasizes. And a new permission structure in Project 2025 promises acceleration in some states, if not the country.
To build and disrupt requires reaching deep into the bowels of an institution, deep into the hearts of our public. We cannot rely on changing minds.
Structures and hearts.
That is where the solution is.
We need new tools that infuse current systems with different energy. A syringe to inject love into the veins of our institutions and hearts and minds of the pubic.
For real.
We don’t need critics of the architecture that already exists. We have plenty of those.
You know what we need?
We need a Commission on Higher Education 2.0.
Where higher education still exists, but the playing field includes everyone. Institutions that will not sacrifice a single person who wants to be educated.
I mean, 175 years ago, Frederick Douglas looked at some boats on a horizon and he told us then—he told us: education is the gateway to freedom and a good life. That has not changed. But we have not done well enough. We have not educated all the folks we need to.
Douglas’ literary descendants from W.E.B DuBois, Edward Said, even Ken Kesey—these artists who shook the world—they, with all their differences, knew the imagination and freedom were intertwined. They knew imagination is how we create. And who we imagine as part of our collective story matters. When we exclude folks from that story our heart is missing a valve. Our imagination is incomplete. A piece of ourselves is amputated, and that piece is no longer part of us.
Exclusion of stories from our students’ imaginations is a violence aimed at the heart; an injury to democracy.
When people say knowledge is power, they twist it so they can say because you are educated you have power. That isn’t what Francis Bacon mean, ya’ll…Michele Foucault, he clarified: Who controls knowledge has power.
And now, as Yeats forewarned, the best lack convictions while the passionate want to control education in a straight-up dangerous and inhuman way.
bell hooks wrote “The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; the black mothers in each of us-the poetwhispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free…[but] within structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive.” We are not surviving, ya’ll. We are dismissed. Survival is impossible in systems that set feelings on a low hierarchy and place primacy on rationality alone. And now, the higher education system we so love is being attacked. Like I said years ago, Radio Raheem had it right all along: Love or Hate. We gotta choose Love. We gotta make race and its intersections the focus, but through Love, ya’ll. The sort of Love Baldwin wrote in of The Fire Next Time:
I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
What if we can love a new higher education into existence? Loving a new world into reality not by strategic planning and measurement. Loving it through action, by talking about a world where all belong, not defending why we do DEI. What if love was the primary tool we used to assert our values and we wrapped our arms around all students, all stories, all knowledge?
A system predicated on Love that is elastic and flexible enough to lift everyone up and is unapologetic about that value.
Love is the tool. We just need to believe it is tangible for it to be tangible.
We just need to make it real to be real. True to be true; insist that it has meaning.
And maybe it produces the outcomes we want without it having its own process map and measures.
Yes, that’s what we need. We need to build a Love-based academia. One where :ove penetrates our institutions’ veins, and we build from there.
A Love that does not fret over arcane values of institutional neutrality–for that never existed anyway. One that does not fret over who says what when, but rather how our students feel in an academia that has shunned them for so long.
We need think of our institutions as wrapping their arms around our students who are being attacked; protecting them from those who don’t want them to be educated. A Love that builds coalitions in order to manifest a new higher education. To build a country for all.
So what are you gonna do?
Are you gonna argue?
Are you gonna take issue with this essay because it is not practical?
Or are you gonna make Love the practical and concrete construct of our time; and Love a new paradigm into this world?
Join us.
Dr. Michael Gavin is the President of Delta College in Michigan.
#Missive #Love #AntiDEI #Contexts #Education
