Introduction
Today, I turn 58 years old. The last several years/decades seem to have flown by. I’m not young, not old, perhaps in the middle, assuming I am gifted a few more decades, but no day is guaranteed. I’d like to live to 100 and be robust at 100. I’ve seen really cool old Black ladies, and I’d like to be one of them. But, we will see. For now, I’m content with one more day. A birthday – a liminal transition. I have often reflected on the concept of interstitial liminality – an in-between state. Liminality is often associated with anthropology and rites of passages and transitions from one stage to another. Similarly, interstitial is often used in a medical context – when there is a gap, a space between cells in a tissue, sometimes where there shouldn’t be a gap.
And, today, I feel situated in that space. Last week, our Office for Inclusive Strategy and Excellence was immediately dissolved at the Virginia Tech board meeting. At that point, our team of almost 30 were placed into an interstitial liminal space – in between – out of one identity and team, and into an unknown space without an identity. Though I know this is a temporary state, it is uncomfortable and full of anxiety.
Scrolling on Instagram today, I came across a video of Oprah who said that there is a lesson in everything and there is nothing in your life happening that is out of order. She said that whatever is happening is not just happening to you, but also for you. She said we should also ask ourselves: “What is this here to show me? What is this here to teach me?” She said that if we are in an uncomfortable situation, we need to ask the question more often.
And then, today a dear friend sent me a quote from Aldous Huxley, an English writer and philosopher who wrote almost 50 books, and lived from 1894 to 1963. In his later life, he often thought about spirituality. The quote my friend sent was incredibly helpful: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.”
And, as I step in to my 58th year, I will try to walk a little more lightly.
This week, our second volume for Dear Higher Education: Letters from the Social Justice Mountain will be online at the University of Minnesota Library open access platform. Access the first volume at the link below:
Learn more about the project at:
I’m sharing the letter I wrote for the second volume below. It was written on April 2, because even as I try to walk lightly, I’m sure I am and have been “trying a bit too hard.”
Dear Higher Education: Are You Worth Dying For?
Dear Higher Education,
I am still grieving. This is a grief I have not known in many years. A dear friend compared it to the grief of losing a mother. I didn’t want to acknowledge the grief was that deep. But, sadly, it is. On March 24 and 25, at Virginia Tech, the Board of Governors voted to dissolve the Office for Inclusive Strategy and Excellence. This was a new office I was leading after an internal restructuring just a few short months before in December 2024 that dissolved the Office for Inclusion and Diversity that I had led for nine years.
For nine years, I went to work every day with a true passion for making a difference at Virginia Tech, an institution founded for White males, with a requirement to train them up in the military arts. I came to an institution where Black students represented 3.8% of the population. I came to an institution with no cultural center for Native American students or for the APIDA students. I came to an institution where the Black Cultural Center and El Centro were student organization spaces. I came to an institution where the LGBTQ space was a little closet library. After nine years, there are strong and viable spaces for these communities with directors and assistant directors and program managers. These centers host over 300 programs a year for the campus community. They are vibrant, fun, intellectual, and social spaces for the entire campus.
For nine years, I came to work to think about how to diversify faculty, to bring more women and people of color for our students – not just students of color, because White students often want to see and hear from other faculty.
For nine years, and five before that, I had founded a conference for women of color in higher education to be in community with one another – to feel valued, to feel affirmed, to feel seen, and to feel heard.
For the last seven years, I spent every summer supporting a program called the Black College Institute that focused on the experiences of African Americans. It was designed to recruit that population, largely based on the east coast of Virginia, to the southwest corner of Virginia – a five-to-six-hour drive for many. I wanted to help parents answer the question, “Why should I send my child there, so far away, so non-diverse, so big?” I wanted to help parents answer the question, “Will my child be ok, will there be people there to love my child?” I wanted parents to know that we are a community of care and compassion, that we will care for your child, and your child will grow and develop and become amazing here.
For the last nine years, I came to work with a real excitement to be in community with the most diverse team of almost 40 people that I had ever worked with, and so many other diversity advocates and allies and ambassadors across the institution – close to 100 faculty and staff. We were creating a Beloved Community here – with so much work to be done, but we had planted the seeds. For nine years, our office advocated for InclusiveVT – the institutional and individual commitment to Ut Prosim (that I may serve) in the spirit of community, diversity, and excellence. I often said that our motto, Ut Prosim (that I may serve), meant that we needed to make sure our students were able to be of service, to anyone, anytime, and anywhere. To do that, they needed to understand humanity, human differences and identities. It is work I deeply believe can and must be done.
And then, one day, with a stroke of a pen, an executive order was signed. The executive orders continued to be signed like swords striking out against the very words, “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” It was like a sword was slicing away websites, slicing away people and programs, and slicing away research on vulnerable communities.
The sword sliced away the new Office for Inclusive Strategy and Excellence. It sliced away our new team that had met in January for a two-day retreat to create a new vision and mission statement, connecting strategy to diversity. It was our new team that had created a new website to share with the world our new identity. And now, it was our new team in the midst of conversations about dissolution and the uncertainty of where jobs will go, and whether there will even be jobs.
What I did not realize, however, is that for nine years, almost invisible, there was an army that was being trained; not the corps of cadets, but a corps of social and human rights advocates, right here at Virginia Tech – often seen as a science and engineering only school. But we are more than that. Right here at Virginia Tech, an army rose up to protest on Tuesday, March 25, 2025, the day the full board voted to use the sword at Virginia Tech.
The corps showed up in mass, 1200 in total, marching more than a mile, to make their concerns known: “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, the BOV has got to go. Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, the BOV has got to go.”
This march encouraged my defeated soul and spirit. For days and weeks, since January, I have had more meetings and conversations than I can ever remember, not just with our office, but with many members of the campus community. The questions were nonstop: “Can we say diversity, equity, and inclusion? Do we have to stop our diversity committee? Can we teach “diversity courses”? What will happen with my research based on diversity? Will I lose my grants? How will I get tenure if I cannot do research in my field of interest, my area of passion and expertise, the area I have studied for years to master? What will become of my career? Will we lose community and cultural centers? Why are you changing the names of the centers? Should we change the name of our offices?” Each night I came home and often collapsed on my bed, ordering Uber Eats, trying to write a to-do list, to track what I needed to done to persist, to continue, to fight.
I often did not have answers. I only had a presence; a presence I cultivated daily of trying to remain calm, collected, and cool, for I realized that I cannot think straight if the anger is not controlled.
And then, the guillotine, the reality, the emails about the edict: “Be it Resolved, The Office for Inclusive Strategy and Excellence is hereby dissolved.” The edict required immediate implementation; the website had to be taken down immediately. It was our website that let the campus community know we existed, that we were real people waking up every day and doing important and transformation work. It was gone.
We were invisible. And so, I have cried and cried and cried – not for me. I have cried for the work, for the team. It has been uncontrollable.
Yet, there have been moments that have encouraged me. A wonderful friend came by my house and left flowers on the porch with a beautiful note. Flowers were sent to my office. I received many phone calls and texts of care and concern.
And then, the other day, I received an email from a graduate of Virginia Tech. His freshman year he interviewed me, and wrote an article in the campus newspaper, critical of DEI. His letter sent to me in advance of a campus town hall with the president last Friday, April 4, 2025:
I am a Virginia Tech alumni who graduated in 2021 with a Bachelors in accounting and information systems. When I was a freshman I wrote an op ed to the collegiate times criticizing what I thought were flaws in the DEI initiatives taking place at Virginia Tech. The op ed received positive comments from the community and at the time I felt genuinely persuaded that I had made a good point. Seven years later, I can honestly say I never thought things would go in this direction. Nor did I anticipate my thinking on this topic would grow up in the way that it has. I have learned how diversity is a central part of what enriches our lives in this country. I’ve seen how embracing diversity is a necessary component of good work. The university is one of the only places many of us would have the opportunity to be taken out of the limited box and worldview we grew up in and be exposed to all kinds of perspectives, cultures, stories, and yes, even racial and ethnic identities. I thank God that I was educated with the office for diversity and inclusion in place at Virginia Tech which, as I experienced firsthand, was led by people who were passionately determined to enrich the lives of all students using whatever was afforded to them, and with grace. This was not just another “check the box” DEI initiative that has become so infamous in the corporate world. This was a program with ideas and sincere effort towards helping to build a stronger community. Conversations about funding, budgets, structure, and content are all necessary and productive. But getting rid of this program altogether is just shutting out the conversation. And as both distant and recent history has shown us, that is never a long term solution. And if I can communicate anything in this conversation it’s that for the sake of the students still here and to come, please be serious about keeping the mission of InclusiveVT alive, and keeping the conversation around diversity and inclusion alive, even during this time that the office technically isn’t. Thank you.”
The alumni asked that his statement be read at the Town Hall. Although it wasn’t read, I am sharing it here with his permission.
I am on vacation as I write this. I hope the windy desert of Albuquerque can help to start some healing of the knife-edged sword. I rarely stepped away, used vacation days, because it was a cause I loved and felt called to do. It was a calling to show up every day, grinding away at the difficult and challenging work of social justice at Virginia Tech. There were so many days of racism and sexism, of disrespect, of being ignored, of being made subservient to men, of having to speak up when no one else did, because I was the only one in the room who shared a different view. It has been extremely difficult work, often lonely and isolating, in a community with no soul food restaurant, no oxtails, no collard greens, no mac and cheese (the way Black folks make it), no peach cobbler, no “really good” fried chicken. But, it was a calling and I had been sent here by the universe to serve.
And so, I had to take time away. Time to properly cry, as Nikki Giovanni writes in her poem, “At Times Like These.” Nikki writes, “at times like these/We are sad/We gather/We comfort/Each other/Yet still/At times like these/We/Properly/Cry.”
And that I have been doing. I took time to grieve, to cry, and to try to heal enough to write this letter through the tears. I cannot even talk about this without tearing up. I hope one day I will be able to, but at least I can write this letter to Higher Education.
Higher Education, you thought the sword was just for diversity, equity, and inclusion, and so you were willing to allow that to be sacrificed and scrubbed. That was an incorrect assumption. The sword is for all of higher education, for all of what higher education stands for – the freedom to pursue ideas, the training of minds, the freedom to research, the freedom to speak up. All of what happens in higher education institutions is at risk.
Higher Education, it is time for the revolution – time to revolve, turn around, look at yourself. It is imperative that you clarify what you stand for.
This is a battle for survival and no institution is immune or protected. Like COVID, again. Every day, we wake up and don’t know what or who is being attacked. Where is the vaccine? Where is the antidote for the poison?
How many will have to literally and figuratively die – losing grants for vital research, losing jobs, losing opportunities to find cures, to protect vulnerable populations?
The erasure of websites, of decades of work, of positions of jobs, of resources for vulnerable faculty and students is happening. The removal of the words, “diversity, equity and inclusion” is happening. The deleting of words related to environment justice is happening.
Higher Education, you must stand up and fight for academic freedom, for freedom of speech, for sacred spaces of learning, and most importantly for the humanities and the arts and social sciences. It is through those fields and disciplines that teach us about people and power and history that we might be able to save not only higher education, but also the world. STEM, AI, and technology will not alone save us.
We have to find courageous voices that can paint pictures, sing songs, and help us dance to new music to impact the world. Most importantly, we must show up, we must march, and perhaps, like the civil rights movement, we may need to be prepared to die in the fight to save higher education.
Higher Education, are you worth dying for? I hope so.
Genuinely and Sincerely
Menah Pratt
Postscript:
So, at 58, in response to Oprah’s question: What lesson is this moment teaching me? My response: This moment is teaching me to walk more lightly in the world. It is teaching me to focus as much, if not more, on individual impact, rather than so much on institutional impact. I want to focus less on trying to turn massive almost impermeable monsters into saints. As a sociologist and lawyer, I have been trained to think about structures and systems, and how to transform organizations that are rooted and grounded and perhaps even rotting from structures of inequity into new, creative systems of equity. I’ve been focused on policies, practices, politics, and procedures and revising and re-imagining them to be inclusive rather than exclusive. I’ve been focused on setting a high bar for excellence – maybe too high – that pole vault that is just a bit too high.
I want to transition a bit…to think and focus on people and humanity a bit more. I want to make sure to encourage celebrating little successes; just showing up day after day; putting on one great program at a time; being healthy; being in love and seeing love; and cherishing the lessons of growth and rebirth that spring often reminds us. I want to make sure to love my Blackwildgirl self, and to inspire other women to find and love their powerful inner voice and spirit. I want to get to the ocean and waterfalls more often, because I can almost always walk lightly there. This moment is teaching me to walk lightly in the world and to jump for joy whenever I can.
Learn more about Blackwildgirl at
www.menahpratt.com/blackwildgirl