Menah Pratt
Vice President | Chief Strategy Officer | Licensed Attorney | University Executive | Board Member and Advisor | Risk & AI Leader | Chief Compliance and Governance Officer | Board Executive Committee Leadership
March 22, 2026
Photo from: https://www.blackhistory.mit.edu/archive/black-women-academy-conference-hammonds-kilson-and-vest-1994
(Inspired by the “Black Women in the Academy: Defending Our Name Conference, 1894-1994” as a forerunner to the Faculty Women of Color in the Academy National Conference, founded almost 20 years later in 2012).
(Dedicated to Black Women in the Academy conference co-founder, Dr. Robin Kilson Tweedy, who died at the age of 55 on April 29, 2009).
(On the one-year anniversary of the dissolution of Virginia Tech’s Office for Inclusive Strategy and Excellence and the incredible and amazing colleagues whose positions were dissolved and eliminated on March 25, 2025).
In January 1994, almost 2000 Black women scholars descended on MIT for a conference with an unambiguous title: Black Women in the Academy: Defending Our Name, 1894 to 1994.
The conference was planned and organized by two faculty members at MIT, Robin W. Kilson, professor in history and women’s studies, and Evelynn M. Hammonds, MIT professor in science, technology, and society. With Florence Ladd of Radcliffe College’s Bunting Institute, they constituted the Executive Committee. The conference Advisory Committee was made up of representatives from major colleges and universities, including Charles Vest of MIT, Linda Wilson of Radcliffe College, Neil Rudenstine of Harvard University, and Diana C. Walsh of Wellesley College.
Photo: © 1994 Marilyn Humphries: Evelynn Hammonds and Robin Kilson, co-organizers of the Black Women in the Academy Conference, MIT, 1994.
“Black Women in the Academy: Defending Our Name, 1894-1994,” offered workshops, panels, and roundtables, and featured addresses by Angela Davis, Lani Guinier, and Johnnetta Cole. Performance artist Vinie Burrows presented her one-woman show, “Sister, Sister.”
Source: MIT Program in Women’s and Gender Studies
Keynote speaker Angela Davis, then professor at the University of California Santa Cruz, with fellow panelists (Decima Francis at right) at the Black Women in the Academy Conference, January 1994.
To understand why it had to happen, let’s look at one of the women who organized it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_W._Kilson
Robin Kilson was one of few women and few African American graduate students in the Harvard history department. A decade before she co-organized the conference, in 1984, she wrote in her diary: “I think that some lives, some people are just destined to be outside, always different and off-course. And I am one of them. Someone made a mistake when they put me in this world.” https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/news-and-ideas/dear-diary-american-lives-in-first-person
I know so many women of color who can identified with her words. As women of color we know that we are in spaces that were not designed for our presence. Robin was describing how higher education makes scholars feel who are not supposed to be in its ivory tower.
Dr. Kilson went on to become an MIT professor of history and women’s studies. She organized the 1994 conference out of what she called “a personal frustration through a profound sense of isolation.” It was the same isolation she had documented in her own hand a decade earlier. Although she felt like an outsider, she did not wallow in despair. She called 2000 Black women into community with her. Although she died at 55 from MS, her diary now lives at the Schlesinger Library. A quiet archive of what it cost to persist.
The political context of the time demanded the conference. Black women had been systematically constructed as the domestic enemy and were being stereotyped during the repressive political climate of the 1980s and 1990s. It was clear that Black women’s presence in public, intellectual, professional, and political life was not welcomed.
What the gathering produced was something rare. Scholar Saidiya Hartman documented it as an “audible hum.” The excitement of community that was fleshy, palpable, and within arm’s reach. Beneath that hum ran something else. An undercurrent of anxiety. The awareness that it could all disappear in a flash. The desire for community, Hartman wrote, is inevitably accompanied by a sense of loss. Mourning what was. Bracing for what might come. The landmark convening was a moment of intellectual clarity and political urgency, as Deborah Gray White shares in her book:
Featuring voices such as Angela Davis, Lani Guinier, and Johnnetta B. Cole, conference not only examined the conditions facing Black women in higher education, it also produced a collective call to action. Participants issued an appeal to President Bill Clinton, urging him to “commission a blue-ribbon panel on race relations; to promote Black women’s research; and to extend the Glass Ceiling Commission to address women of color in academia.”
Even within a conference centered on Black women, there was a clear recognition that the structural barriers shaping academic life extended across women of color more broadly. The conference dedicated itself to all the women of color who had labored in the academy and helped prepare the way for the present generation. It named the structural questions that had never been adequately answered. Who is recognized as a knowledge producer? Whose research gets funded, cited, and sustained? What structures render certain scholars simultaneously hypervisible and invisible?
Johnnetta B. Cole, speaking at the conference, pushed further. She forced the audience to attend to the differences that structured their collective life. Class. Sexuality. Age. She closed with a parable Fannie Lou Hamer was fond of telling. Boys trying to trick an old woman with a bird held behind their backs. Dead or alive? The old woman’s answer was the only honest one: “It’s in your hands.”
Thirty years later, the bird is still in our hands. And the conditions that gathered those 2000 scholars at MIT still exist and have been magnified.
One year ago this week, Virginia Tech’s Board of Visitors voted 12-2 to dissolve its Office for Inclusive Strategy and Excellence.
It was not alone. Across the country, universities have dismantled amazing and incredible diversity, equity, and inclusion infrastructures that supported all students, faculty, and staff under the threat of losing federal funding. Preemptive compliance, as Virginia Tech’s faculty AAUP chapter documented, produced a chilling effect rippling through meetings, syllabi, and daily campus life before any formal mandate landed. A student said what institutional retreat communicates plainly: “Taking that away just says, you don’t matter as much.”
This was happening while over 300,000 Black women were pushed out of the workforce. It was the result of the dismantling of federal agencies which long employed large numbers of Black women, combined with many companies overtly abandoning DEI commitments, constitutes systemic disinvestment.
In 1994, the tool was rhetoric. In 2026, the tool is policy, executive orders, board mandates, legislation, resulting in shuttered offices, eliminated positions, and defunded programs.
Robin Kilson’s diary entry from 1984 was not a private confession. It was a structural diagnosis. The academy produced that feeling deliberately. Through isolation, exclusion, and the quiet denial of belonging. She named it. Then she organized 1,500 people to name it together.
What she understood, and what this moment demands we understand again, is that the political conditions shaping who survives in the academy are never separate from the political conditions shaping who survives outside of it. Economic rights and intellectual rights are not parallel struggles. They are the same struggle.
FWCA exists within this lineage.
I founded FWCA – the faculty women of color in the academy national conference –because of the same isolation I saw and felt at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, for women of color in higher education. The annual 2013 Inclusive Illinois report documents the first conference:
“The inaugural Faculty Women of Color in the Academy (FWCA) National Conference was held April 3–5, 2013 at the I Hotel and Conference Center and the Illini Union. With nearly 300 attendees, 75 institutions, and 30 states represented, the conference offered many opportunities to listen, to be heard, and to identify and discuss the issues of faculty women of color in the Academy. The three-day conference featured presentations, poster sessions, and panels exploring politics in the Academy, the journey into leadership, research on women of color in the Academy, and women of color and promotions. The conference offered keynote speakers each day. They were Chancellor Phyllis M. Wise, President María Hernández Ferrier, Professor Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, and Professor Beverly Guy-Sheftall. The conference also included an empowerment exchange, which blended a social gathering and networking with food, music, dancing, and raffles. The conference culminated with plenary sessions that explored the health of women of color, and the economics of being a faculty woman of color.”
https://diversity.illinois.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/impactreport2013.pdf
The 2016 report reveals the growing scope and impact:
https://diversity.illinois.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/impactreport2016.pdf
The isolation I felt at Illinois is the same sense of isolation I have felt for 10 years at Virginia Tech as the only Black woman in senior leadership (dean/vice president/vice provost). The conference was a space to not be the only. To create a space for women of color from across the country to be in community and not feel alone or lonely.
Like the 1994 conference, “”sister-professors,” … shared survival tips and war stories, exchanged tears and hugs, and, most importantly, acknowledged one another in order to interdict the alienation, oppressive loneliness, and marginalization that black women too often experience in the academy. We hurriedly and desperately overcame the distance and formalities which usually accompany the meeting of “strangers” by the sheer tenacity of our desire to make connections across disciplines, institutional locations, hierarchies, and the distance of the unknown.”
It was a space to experience “the hum.” No one was ever excluded. Sometimes male partners attended to support their partners. Sometimes white women came as allies to support women of color and to learn. Occasionally white men also came to listen, learn, to support change and justice. At its peak in 2024, it had almost 800 sister-professors, as Johnetta Cole called those in attendance.
When the VT office closed in April 2025, the FWCA conference had just concluded, with women representing a smaller number of institutions because of the political climate. It would be the last conference with institutional support. And it appeared that the doors would be forever closed for the conference. But, it was not meant to die. Just a few short months later, a small 3 member board founded SPARK (Scholarly Platforms for Advancing Research and Knowledge).
SPARK was about a decision to keep hope alive. It was about a refusal to let a movement die. It was about salvaging a small spark to make a flame. When institutions pulled back, SPARK became the infrastructure.
SPARK is a platform for two initiatives. One is the journal – Dear Higher Education: Letters from the Social Justice Mountain, hosted by the University of Minnesota Publishing. The editorial board has just closed the call for a special issue on the experiences of women of color in higher education. And, the letters are powerful, insightful, inspiring, and educational. Almost 50 letters will be shared in the special edition we hope to publish in May, 2026.
The board continues to accept submissions for regular edition and will have additional special editions. Inside Higher Education called it a home for the homeless.
SPARK is also a platform for the conference. Because it was impossible to secure an in-person location when SPARK was formed in the fall of 2025, the board decided to host a virtual conference to continue the 14 year legacy, with the expectation for an in-person 15th anniversary conference!
The 14th Annual SPARK FWCA Conference builds on the intellectual and political foundation laid in 1994, creating space for to discuss issues impacting women of color across roles, disciplines, and institutional contexts. And, as always, it has never been an exclusive club. It has always been open to anyone interested in learning, supporting, affirming, uplifting and understanding the experiences of women of color in higher education.
Cole’s parable still applies. Kilson’s legacy still demands something of us. The future of women of color in the academy is in our hands.
Help keep FWCA alive. Help sustain this community that has been built for over 14 years! Join us at the 14th Annual SPARK FWCA Conference on April 9-12, 2026.
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Registration is $250. Use code SPARKFWCA2026 for $100 off. Pay only $150 to help keep this space available to advance issues impacting women of color in higher education.
This year’s virtual conference has been carefully curated by the SPARK board. There are almost 20 sessions led by women sister-scholars. The sessions include core academic issues on faculty teaching, research, writing, and publication. They include sessions on wellbeing, financial wellness, and healing. They include thematic topics on AI, liberation, and justice in higher education. And, they include time for community building. The sessions will be recorded and available after the conference to those who register.
What to Expect at the 14th Annual SPARK FWCA Conference Liberation in Practice: Healing, Justice, and AI Imagination in Higher Education April 9 to 12, 2026 | Virtual by Zoom
This is not a typical academic conference. It is a four-day experience designed to sustain, challenge, and rebuild women of color in and around higher education. Here is what you can expect across each day. (Subject to change)
Thursday, April 9: Coming Into Community
The conference opens not with a panel, but with intention. Angela’s Pulse, a movement and performance arts organization rooted in the African Diaspora, leads the opening Healing Hour. From there, the day moves through a wellness and resilience workshop with entrepreneur Kirbee Miller, a financial empowerment session with certified financial educator Chantay Moore on women taking control of their money and building generational wealth, and closes with the opening keynote from Ayesha Khanna, globally recognized AI expert and CEO of Addo, on AI and higher education. Between sessions, Chit and Chat creates informal space to build the community this work requires.
Friday, April 10: Healing, Liberation, and Scholarship
This is the day for the interior work. Sociologist and faculty wellness expert Chavella Pittman opens with a workshop on reducing teaching overwhelm and reclaiming joy in the classroom, sharing from her new book, Empowered: A Woman Faculty of Color’s Guide to Teaching and Thriving · A healing hour with Vicky Trott of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation follows, centering racial healing and narrative change.
The afternoon keynote is Annmarie Caño, executive coach and author of Leading Toward Liberation, presenting on liberatory leadership practices drawn from Latin American liberation praxis. Self-knowledge and accompaniment as leadership frameworks. Practical. Grounded. Necessary.
The day then turns to digital and scholar safety. A panel from PEN America and faculty researchers addresses online harassment, doxing defense, protecting your research agenda, and managing your presence in a moment when faculty are under coordinated attack.
Friday closes with “Healing the Writing Wound,” an interactive workshop by Aurora Chang on trauma-informed writing support. For anyone who has experienced criticism, perfectionism, or institutional harm that has made writing harder. That is most of us.
Saturday, April 11: Healing, Justice, and Imagination
The morning opens with a healing hour led by Serene Thin Elk, a L/Dakota clinical therapist integrating Indigenous healing traditions and expressive arts.
The Saturday keynote features Natalie Stites Means, Lakota feminist, activist, and scholar centering Indigenous sovereignty, justice, and community healing.
The afternoon brings a publishing panel with editors from University of California Press, University of Illinois Press, Columbia University Press, and leading journals including Signs and Feminist Formations. For anyone navigating books, journals, or the politics of academic publishing, this is the room to be in.
The day closes with a second AI keynote. Asha Saxena, Founder and CEO of Women Leaders in Data and AI, on AI and imagination. Two AI keynotes across the conference is not coincidence. It reflects what this moment demands of women of color scholars: not avoidance, but strategic engagement.
Sunday, April 12: Reflection, Renewal, and Closing
The final day opens with yoga and meditation led by Cre Dye, licensed counselor and registered yoga teacher. Then the closing keynote: Moya Bailey, Northwestern professor, founder of the Digital Apothecary, and author of Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. The intellectual and political anchor the conference has been building toward.
The conference closes with a collective intention-setting session. Not a reception. Not a goodbye. A commitment. To carry what was built here back into the institutions, classrooms, and communities that need it.
This conference treats sustainability, strategy, and solidarity as inseparable.
Registration is $250. Use code SPARKFWCA2026 for $100 off, if you need a scholarship. The full registration supports those who are not able to attend without a scholarship.
Register at https://events.guidebook.com/sparkfwca
#HigherEducation #WomenOfColor #AcademicLeadership #FWCA #EquityInEducation #SPARK
Hartman, S. (1994). The Territory Between Us: A Report on “Black Women in the Academy: Defending Our Name: 1894-1994.” Callaloo, 17(2), 439–449. https://doi.org/10.2307/2931742
https://www.blackhistory.mit.edu/archive/black-women-academy-conference-panel-angela-davis-1994