Response: Change Agents in the Academy: On Safe Spaces, Meaningful Advocacy, and Naming the Leak in the Academic Pipeline

Jenelle Pitts’s narrative is heart wrenching. Not only does it describe the deliberate attempts of colleagues to undermine her personal character, but their calculated and disturbing microaggressive, and I would argue in this case macroaggressive tactics, do exactly what they are intended to do: to inflict undue harm to her personhood; to have her doubt herself and question her intellectual and professional vicissitude; and, had she not utilized her academic street smarts to persevere, Pitts may have even left the profession all together. The ease with which some of these behaviors occur is unsettling and makes very clear that the leak in the academic pipeline comes, not from disciplinary unpreparedness on the part of the scholar (for surely she would not have been hired if she were not qualified), but on the part of gatekeepers, the sentinels who feel they must protect a perverse version of academic reality that is unfounded in reliable data or principled administrative practices. It is this “death by a thousand cuts” that has allowed our academic halls to hemorrhage excellent and talented women of color who refuse to jump over one more arbitrary hurdle, suffer one more humiliating experience, endure one more empty conversation that has no merit. The pain that is expressed here is palpable; the decision to speak, courageous. bell hooks is right when she says that moving from silence into speech is an act of defiance for the oppressed and the exploited, for those in “the struggle” and those in struggle (hooks, 1989, p. 9). Speaking our truths makes the interiority of our being tangibly present in the dialogue of humanity. Dr. Pitts claims her right to be heard here and practices a self-healing ritual that is part of a collective experience grounded in the power of the written and spoken word. In considering the question embedded in her title, “Who Speaks For Me?,” it is quite evident that she does a stellar job speaking for herself!