"Dear Student of Color": An Anticolonial Stance Toward an Ethical Curriculum for Doctoral Student–Adviser Relationships

• In Event: Unsettling Ethics in the Curriculum: Research Praxis and Pedagogies

Abstract

Junior female professors of color and their female doctoral students of color inhabit similar epistemological spaces of survivance (Viznor, 2008) in academia: both groups are frequently perceived as “presumed incompetent” (Gutiérrez y Muhs, Niemann, Gonzalez, & Harris, 2012) by their white and male colleagues even though their academic accolades legitimize their participation and presence inside the ivory tower. Completing a doctoral degree and performing a successful tenure review are both institutionalized practices rooted in the racist ideology of white settler colonialism: scrutinizing, assessing, and surveilling the non-white body, and mind, for its intellectual fitness and competence to represent and disseminate dominant processes of knowledge production maintain traditions of fortifying institutions of higher education (Wilder, 2014). Moreover, the under-recognized intellectual labor of the non-white scholar is an eye-opening manifestation of how the university’s fiscal livelihood depends on the intellectual exploitation of its current (expendable) workers and those still in training.

By way of a written letter to her non-white, female doctoral students, the presenter, a female junior faculty of color, offers critical perspectives, reflections and theoretical groundings for her lived experiences with the successes and challenges of guiding, conditioning, and rehearsing doctoral students for joining the academia’s workforce. The letter also highlights a few ethical collisions between the conscientious female scholar of color and the profiteering academic institution that make transparent instances of systemic violence, institutionalized tyranny, and intellectual oppression. While the letter reveals how an anti-colonial stance in the intellectual conditioning of doctoral students is made possible by the multivocality and multilocality of formal appointments and informal gatherings inside and outside academia, the author argues for the need to documenting and disseminating curricular practices that encourage an anti-colonial bond between doctoral students of color and their academic advisors of color. The letter concludes with words of advice for piecing together strategies and practices of recovery, reciprocity and regeneration that are fundamentally anti-colonial and beneficial to both students and faculty of color.

Author

• Patricia Krueger-Henney, University of Massachusetts at Boston