Just because it's always been that way doesn't make it right
This post is about the time I got fed up with the way things were and did something about it.
It's about one of my early forays into Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) work: work to improve systems and make programs inclusive and equitable - for all.
About the time I got annoyed with the lack of programming for Diversity Fellowships at my school, and the lack of respect for the lived experience students of color brought to academia.
About the time I grew tired of people who disparaged diversity funding, money created for people like me.
About the time I realized prestigious meant: “for whites only”, “not for me,” and “for real Americans.” That people were wack and I was done playing along.
About the time I had written 3 or 4 chapters of my dissertation and navigated enough BS to prove myself.
About the time I went to do research in Mexico and came back angry at all the sexism I went through everyday. On the subway and at the archives. Where as a young Mexican woman I had to raise my voice and make a scene for people to take me seriously. Where I finally understood why my mom was so extra.
But all this was good for my professional development, because before that I avoided conflict and tried to be agreeable. Not anymore. My patience had worn thin.
It’s always good to remember times when you felt powerful.
But that was only the beginning.
It would still be a couple of years until I moved on from academia.
It was like a toxic relationship you can’t get out of because you’re so used to it, and are afraid of the unknown. Who else would want me? How would I start all over, from scratch? What skills did I have other than being a nerd?
But I digress. Back to diversity fellowships. And first, a primer on how grad school works.
[How grad school works]
I got a PhD, instead of a masters, because I was told it would be free. In other words, they pay you to go to school. You don’t have to pay. And that was sort of true. But it’s a little more complicated than that.
When I got into grad school, in 2007, I received 5 years of funding (full tuition, health insurance, student fees) and a modest living stipend of $19,000 per year, with teaching requirements in my 3rd, 4th, and 5th years. But PhDs usually take longer than 5 years and students are expected to apply for research, writing, and teaching fellowships (grants) to cover their 6th, 7th, or 8th years, or take out loans.
These fellowships can be internal (funded by the university) or external (funded by some other organization).
Because I studied Latin American history, the expectation was that I would apply for internal and external funding after my 5th year, both from the university but also from the US Department of State and US Department of Education, among others.
However, as a student of color, I was also eligible for diversity fellowships, which were created specifically to increase diversity in university faculty - and address centuries of racism and discrimination in education and employment. These fellowships ask very different questions than the other ones, because they want to see evidence that you actually care about diversity and want to teach students from diverse backgrounds.
But unlike the traditional fellowships - which my school prepared and coached us for, they didn’t give the same weight or consideration to diversity fellowships. Which kind of sucks if you’re a brown girl with lots of great stories, but not a lot of guidance.
These applications were not a joke. You took months to write them and your committee of faculty advisors would read drafts and give you comments. In addition, they had to each write you a letter of support that talked about your potential as a scholar, and fill out a bunch of forms and meet deadlines. It was a whole production. You planned for it, as a team. They didn’t send you out there until you were ready. You weren't trying to embarrass them, or yourself.
This isn't something you did on your own or winged. Which is why it would have helped to have professors who took diversity fellowships seriously.
But even before I approached this point in the PhD, I had heard rumblings about diversity money from people in my program.
[Diversity money: The horror]
Remember I told you I got funded for 5 years through my university? Well, I never really questioned where that money came from. What did I care? As long as I got my check every quarter to pay rent and buy food, who cares how they got it? My school was rich. Freaking John D. Rockefeller founded it.
But not everyone felt that way. There were rumors in my department that some PhD students were being funded through “diversity money.” And some people didn’t like that.
The thinking was that we should be better than that. This wasn't some state school where you had to be "fair". This was the University of Chicago. If you made it this far you shouldn’t need extra help.
The implication was that people like me might be getting funded through diversity money. And that this was unfair to white students, who would be ineligible for this funding, and that Black and Brown students should compete on the same playing field as everyone else - without special treatment. And that we shouldn’t want that money anyway because it signaled us as somehow inferior and unable to compete with everyone else.
That diversity shouldn’t matter.
I mean, remember. This was when Obama was president. Our school was 5 blocks from his house, and our professors’ kids had gone to the same school as Sasha and Malia. So yeah. It was around the time when some people (White people) actually believed racism was over.
That diversity shouldn’t matter.
Except I kept hearing over and over that diversity did matter everywhere else. Just not here.
That "diversity" would really “help me” when I went out on the job market. And that if someone couldn’t get a job, it was most likely because they were white, and the hiring committee had an “agenda.”
As if we didn't have one.
That diversity was a real thing out there, in the world. But not here. We were above that. We didn’t need diversity. And you shouldn’t either.
But I wasn’t so sure.
Remember, I was a nerd. And I had been at this school for a while now, so I wasn’t fazed when I heard the rumors that some of us might be getting funded through diversity money. I wasn’t offended. I took it as just another intellectual exercise.
I wanted to analyze the issue and offer some hypotheses about why that might be, if it was so. And as someone who had always been curious about program design and implementation, I had plenty of theories.
Theory #1: Maybe they have diversity money for a reason. If we look at retention and completion data, we may find out that Black, Latino, and Native American students don’t graduate at the same rates as White and Asian students. And if so, this money would be there to increase their rates of graduation from PhD programs, because obviously something isn’t working. Thus, more people from underrepresented groups would need to be funded because many will never finish. This funding would exist then to guarantee that some of us do finish.
You gotta remember that finishing a PhD isn’t just about knowing how to write and working hard. It’s also about dealing with the culture and people at elite institutions, and having the support and encouragement to get through a whole lot of BS, aggressions that are not micro, and plenty of backhanded compliments. That, a lot of therapy, and enough money to pay your rent, buy books, eat, and sometimes visit your family. So maybe this special money, set aside for underrepresented students was intended just for that. To ensure that money didn’t get in the way of them finishing their programs, or to admit enough students to ensure that some finished.
But if that wasn't why, then maybe it was something else. Something much less altruistic and a lot more performative. Maybe it didn't matter if this money helped anyone. Maybe it was just about allocating funds in accordance with program regulations. A watering down of diversity directives. Or "checking" the boxes of compliance to show our university's intent to diversify its student body and future professoriate. A version of following the rules because you had to. Not because you actually cared. And who could fault them? No one can force you to actually care about diversity, only comply.
Theory #2: We live in a multiracial society. Meaning that a lot of people are biracial. Especially among Latinos, the rates of intermarriage are quite high. Thus, it may be that a lot of the current students in our department would qualify for diversity money because technically they were Latino, Black, Native American, or another underrepresented category, even if they didn’t identify as such, or even if that identity was not a great hindrance in their performance or lived experience. Some may come from middle class families and have parents with advanced degrees. In this instance, you would not have to worry that you were “lowering your standards” by admitting or funding students who couldn’t cut it.
Because that was another part of this whole mess. The idea that by admitting & funding students from underrepresented or underserved backgrounds, with diversity money, you were lowering the quality of our program.
That if these students couldn’t cut it in systems historically designed for people from elite backgrounds, they just shouldn’t be there and save everyone else the trouble of making them feel included.
Anyway, I believed it was a combination of Theories #1 and #2. We probably didn’t graduate at the same rates as white students, and yes, a lot of people who were doing just fine, and blending in, technically could qualify for that funding.
And since no one was told who was receiving that money, what difference did it make? Money is money.
If there indeed was diversity money, all that would do is free up more funding for white students and let us admit more people, total. Actually a pretty smart strategy if you ask me. See what money there is and find people who can use it, based on eligibility guidelines. If you are eligible for diversity money we pay you from that pool. If you're not, we pay you from another pool. Kind of how FLAS (Foreign Language Area Studies) fellowships work. If you study a foreign language in a country deemed of strategic importance, you get special money. If not, you get money from the general pool. Fund everyone. What’s the problem? We're going to admit smart people we want to work with and once we do that, we'll see which funds to draw from.
Have you ever run a nonprofit or written a budget? It's called business strategy. Pull from one funder and pull from another funder to pay for programs. It's not personal, it's business. No funder is better than another when they give you unrestricted funds in the same amount. They each have wacky guidelines because they care about different things. Not a big deal.
We all applied to get in and got in. How you pay me, I don't care.
But no. The idea that students of color may need or benefit from programs attuned to their specific needs. People couldn’t handle that. Similar to the way people complained about us having our own office for multicultural student affairs, or the way people joked about programs intended to increase retention rates.
I remember there was a summer program (SBE) that didn’t exist when I started, or didn’t apply to history students that year, even though we were under the Division of Social Sciences. It was a program where if you were one of these underrepresented groups, you would get extra money and have to take a statistics class to prepare for your first year in the PhD, and there was also a component where you would meet as a group during the year to discuss any issues you might be dealing with in a safe space, and for participating in the program you got paid $1,000 either a year, or a quarter. Which all sounded great. Problem is - some of the people who were in it didn’t believe in it other than for the money and would make fun of it, calling it Minority Math Camp. All the while ruining it for the people who might actually need the support or a safe space to vent about racism on campus.
But that’s what I get for going to that school right? I could have just stayed in California and avoided half of this mess. Or just not gone to grad school and jumped straight to dealing with micro-aggressions at work. ¿Quién me manda?
[The moment of truth: Who's going to fund me now?]
We never found out if people were being funded by “diversity money” but the way people talked about and disparaged it left a bitter taste in my mouth.
And while diversity funding was met with contempt internally, it was completely ignored externally.
Which meant we weren't only being racist but also leaving money on the table.
By the time I had to apply for external funding - including "traditional" and diversity fellowships, I wasn't very successful at getting them.
It wasn't a great system and I went along with it.
There was a lack of strategy and appreciation for fit and purpose of programs. In other words, my school had a track record of winning "prestigious" fellowships - so that's what it kept doing. Following the same formula that had worked before. Without questioning if it still made sense.
And what qualified as prestigious? Well, stuff not designed for people of color. Stuff designed before they started going to college and grad school in significant numbers. Stuff like area studies, studying the rest of the world for strategic defense, diplomacy, and dominance. Stuff from the Cold War that hadn't caught up with the reality of multicultural and multiracial graduate students preparing for careers as leaders, professionals, and faculty.
And this motivated me to question that formula, increase support for students of color, and create opportunities for professional development that leveraged our strengths. Where we didn't have to be ashamed of who we were or about unique opportunities made for us.
But this required a mind shift.
Acknowledging and appreciating the value that diversity actually brought. I know. Revolutionary. And I understood that this might be too much to ask of a very conservative institution.
So instead I focused on money. I made the business case for diversity. Because even if you don't care much about equity, you can't argue with money.
I called for a meeting with administrators and made the case that PhD students were not being prepared for diversity fellowships like the Ford fellowship, to increase diversity in the professoriate, as well as they were being prepared for traditional fellowships like the Fulbright, a Cold War program created to spread democracy in the developing world. (If you don't believe me, look it up.)
But I wasn't complaining. I was actually offering solutions. I explained that this oversight was hurting ALL students and not just students of color, because by ignoring this important financial resource, i.e. diversity money, we were actually losing the University money, because the University usually had to step in and help when advanced students - like myself - were unsuccessful in securing outside funding.
That caught their attention.
I had been looking at what other schools were doing: Offering students samples of winning applications for diversity fellowships, or inviting speakers who had won these fellowships to share their advice. Both of these things could improve our rates of winning diversity money, and in the end, improve our career prospects.
What motivated all this?
Well, I remember getting upset when I applied to the Fulbright, because it was literally intended for white monolingual English speakers and you automatically lost 15/100 points if you were a native speaker of the country you were researching. In my case, that was Mexico. So literally, not the best option for me.
Image: Screenshot from 2011 Application to Fulbright-Hays Fellowship for Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA)
Where it only counts if you learned a language at school, but not at home, from your immigrant parents.
Which reminds me of a silly article I read recently about the benefits of "living abroad", as well as cultural appropriation, and gentrification. Where it's only considered worthy and cool when someone else does it. Not us immigrants.
But back to the Fulbright.
When I got my response it said: "while this project sounds promising, the applicant automatically loses 15 points for being a native Spanish speaker."
Really?? How was that fair? It was at that moment that I realized I should have been applying to the Ford instead, all along - or others like it. But there wasn't a lot of institutional support for diversity fellowships, and professors really hated writing recommendation letters for them, because they were somehow seen as less prestigious and they didn't know how to write about "diversity." So it's not like you could just do it on your own.
I remember for one cycle, one of my recommenders never even sent the letter. It wasn't taken seriously. It was an afterthought. A wasted opportunity.
I mean, as annoying as it was, that should have signaled to me what an uphill battle this was going to be. And the many opportunities that awaited me outside of academia.
And it served me well.
We had in place a provost's postdoctoral (postdoc) fellows program to theoretically increase diversity in the professoriate. Postdocs are people who have already completed a PhD but are not yet professors. These fellows were funded for two years to do research towards their work. To get this fellowship they had to write about diversity, and its value in the academy. Stuff my own professors weren't always comfortable discussing. Seeing as the purpose of the program was diversity, I asked some of these fellows if they'd be willing to sit on a panel and help grad students learn how to write about diversity too. And they did.
Around that same time I wrote a grant with one of my best friends, to propose a professionalization program for underrepresented graduate students that looked at our lived experience as an asset instead of an obstacle. We got funded by the office of graduate affairs to launch the pilot, which later led to new programming to address this huge gap in services.
By the time I went on the job market I realized that other places spoke more favorably about diversity - and for many jobs it was an asset to be a student of color who worked with underrepresented students.
Other people valued it and maybe I should lean into that. Trust my gut and quit wasting my time.
And little by little, that’s what I’m doing.
Pointing out stuff that is wack. Improving systems. And asking questions when stuff doesn’t add up.
It’s kind of a shame that it took me that long to feel like I had earned that right. But that’s ok. I’m here now.