Scholar Strike - screen shot of You Tube presentations
If I had gone into academia, I would like to have studied labor movements and revolutionary theory. But I didn’t go into academia for one specific reason: I was sure I couldn’t keep my political opinions to myself long enough to secure tenure. I’m a loud, unabashed progressive, and the advice I had gotten up until that point was that I couldn’t reconcile that activism with scholarship.
For a long time I believed that I could either be the one to study the revolution, or the one marching in the streets. I could not be both.
While in college, I watched with dismay professors who seemingly ignored large social movements. As a freshman, the relative nonchalance of my sociology professor to the shooting and murder of Tony Robinson broke my heart. How could something that traumatized BIPOC across this city and country not even warrant a mention in a classroom that studied human society?
With the recent police murder of George Floyd and police shooting of Jacob Blake, I expected more of the same. Silence in the face of systemic racism translates to a complacency, a disregard for the very human casualties of institutionalized white supremacy — I prepared myself for disappointment similar to what I felt during the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement when I was an undergrad.
However, much to my delight, there seemed to be a shift on social media; scholars were retweeting, posting, and holding not only police but their own profession accountable for systemic and systematic racism.
Last week the Scholar Strike (#scholarstrike on social media) wrapped up two days of activism where thousands of academics across the United States and Canada struck for racial justice. A click on the hashtag on Twitter led to wonderfully detailed threads on inequality, diversity, race and racism. A wide variety of lectures, teach-ins, and live panels were streamed to stand in solidarity with Black lives. Some of those presentations are available on YouTube. Here at UW-Madison, the Teaching Assistants' Association promoted a variety of actions and presentations to its members, including a teach-in on improving hostile climates in academic departments and one on racial disparities in debt and higher education funding. The union also directed its members to email UW administrators demanding the defunding of the UW Police Department. For the first time I saw how wrong I was about academia as a static structure that stood adjacent to social movements — I saw it for its potential to be a significant vehicle for revolution.
The scholar strike highlights a key thesis on activism — the nature of the action matters, but so does the intention behind the action. Any kind of activism that is done with good intention counts. The revolution, in fact, takes place in the collective of those intentions.
Words, spoken and written, hold power to influence students, colleagues, entire communities over time. Resources to expand scholarship and disseminate that scholarship are available to academics at a far greater rate than the general public. So an essay, a lecture, even a discussion equates to a similar vehicle for change as a sit-in, speech or rally.
It is important for academics to understand that they wield enormous power to bridge the gaps between theory and practice when it comes to racial justice. Institutions of higher education have historically been gatekeepers of academia; the scholarship they produce is often inaccessible to a significant amount of the public, and that scholarship is important to social movements. Making academia accessible, then, is an act of revolution in and of itself.
The scholar strike healed a part of me that had lost hope in the last few weeks; it was heartwarming to see a bunch of nerds come together to stand for my Black life and that of my community during a time when they are already sacrificing a lot to teach during a global pandemic. They’ve reminded me that knowledge is power, especially when it is shared, and for that I’m grateful.
Nada Elmikashfi is a former candidate for state Senate and chief of staff to state Rep. Francesca Hong.
