April 2025

Part 0: a priori

Horrid title, I know. But a priori is something I always wanted to write and it kind of captures what part 0 is all about.

If you are trying to chart your growth or changes, then it’s helpful to establish a baseline, where am I at on how I think about my position in this world, in this country, and in this academic role.

Motivation

When I began my PhD in Information Science in the Fall of 2020, I was in awe. Cornell University, an Ivy-League institution, felt so impossibly out of reach for someone like me, and now I would walk through the doors of Bill & Melinda Gates Hall in Ithaca, New York to forever change my life. To become a Doctor.

I remember vividly my toxic relationship with TheGradCafe, a website where students post PhD admissions results. From late January to early February, I would refresh it every hour from the moment I woke up. Anxious to see if today was the day that I could quit my $15/hour job in the city and become something else. Something better. It was on this website that one sentence would embed itself into my brain, “I guess this year I won’t be walking up the steps of Gates Hall.” It was a notification of rejection. While not my words, they made tangible the fantasy I had been chasing. This attachment only fueled the fire that would be temporarily extinguished when I was swiftly rejected.

The following year, I applied once more. I applied to most of the Ivies and a few other elite schools. I had worked 1-2 extra jobs alongside my full undergraduate course load, so I was perpetually burnt out. I rationalized that only fully-funded programs would be worth it. Behind that sound rationale was the prestige and status that was uniquely afforded by a place like Cornell or Yale. About a week before decisions were slated to be distributed, the faculty member who would become my chair sent me an email notifying me that I was accepted to the program. It was sunset when I read the email for the first time.

My first reaction wasn’t excitement, it was disbelief. I double and triple checked the sender to make sure it wasn’t fake. I pulled up the email on my phone and stormed into the bedroom where my partner at the time was taking a nap – I woke them and asked them to read the email.

I asked them if it was real. They groggily arose and read the email three times through.

I had done it. Three years of preparation and waiting and anxiety and stress. Of over-drafting a credit card to take an online GRE prep course. Of the hundreds of emails, the tens of phone calls. The countless hours of research. All of those years released in one moment. I printed out a copy of the email, put it inside a card I had lying around and packed in the car to find my parents. We found them at a bar where I quickly handed them the envelope. I watched as their eyes grew wide when they read that I had been accepted. I remember my mother ordering a Cornell flag to hang outside her house on the drive home.

This is what it means to go to a school like Cornell for low-income, first generation college students. Those aren’t just words or boxes to check for me. It is social mobility. It is never working a dead end job again. It’s being able to dream of life not defined by scarcity.

I say this because this is the person I was when I entered Cornell in the Fall of 2020. I described myself at the time as exceptional in all the skills necessary to succeed in a PhD, except research. I had a wealth of professional experience, advocacy (in and out of the institution), mentorship, public speaking, and in policy. I didn’t know what it meant to be a grad student. I didn’t know what a faculty member’s role is. I didn’t understand the function of a university – aside from taking loans from it.

I knew that I wanted to be an academic. It was the one job free from the ethic of capitalism. It was the cheat code that let me side-step all of the moral failings of a corporation or the precarity of the non-profit world. I would take the low salary and impossible hours. It would be worth it to feel good and have purpose. To know I could sleep well at night, even if it was a studio apartment.

What We Can’t Unsee

As I progressed through my PhD, I (unsurprisingly) strove to be an excellent academic. A line of thought ran parallel to this goal. Each time in my exploration of the university I revealed a seam or fault line, when I lifted a rug to find what was swept away, when I opened a closet to find a skeleton, it brought into sharp relief the question of what it means to hold the role of academic in society. Would I ignore them or rationalize them? Would I be in forever stressful tension with them? Would I find a new way to find my peace with them? I have seen faculty try all of these strategies. When you want something so desperately, you tie your sense of self-worth to it. Whatever you tie it to, in this case the university, then you cede all control and power to it. This is how academics betray their self-interest and their values. We’re human.

This series isn’t simply an intellectual exercise. It comes with a one-year runway until I become a faculty member myself and can no longer espouse idealistic goals of the public intellectual. I will be thrust in the mess and realize why so many faculty give so little to the broader community, who neglect their students, who produce problematic works.

What’s All This For?

First and foremost, the goal of a PhD program should be to change. By changing and growing, we make mistakes and are witness to how our values change and our understanding of the world shifts. I think it is vital to contend with who we were – whether through our publications on the world stage or in conversations with longtime friends. We cannot have The Souls of Black Folks without The Souls of White Folks. There isn’t room for this transitory space. There is too much care on being right and righteous, rather than on being humble and reflexsive. I am hoping that by returning to texts about the role of the academic I can bring stories to the fore about who I used to be, who I hope to be, and how I transit the space between and beyond. I hope it emboldens academics at any stage to come back to themselves and ask who they are and how they can become who they seek to be.

The next step in my career is as a faculty member. I have rallied for years about the powerlessness of being a graduate student. So, what am I going to do with my newfound position?

As a bit of foreshadowing, I want to chart how I began profoundly invested in the imperfections of the modern university. How I could see how unequal and capitalistic (especially private institutions) are, yet believed in the baked in mechanisms to upend these inequalities. Whereas, my current attitude about the university is as fundamentally unsalvageable. The modern university is too deeply intertwined to the conditions of its birth. To paraphrase Meredith Palmer, “As Indigenous academics, we do seek to belong in your institution. We do not want your DEI, nor has it ever served us. The only place where our knowledge will belong is on our lands in our tribal colleges.” We are incompatible, so how does one become a professor?

My hope for this series is to see how texts that are often situated in a future where the modern university exists in roughly the same form still land after having this shift in my understanding of the world.