Making Space for Queer Students at an HBCU

This final episode of Collegeland takes us to North Carolina Central University, a Historically Black College and University, where we talk with three people who have been critical to developing the LGBTA Resource Center. Co-hosted by Lisa Levenstein and Tiffany Holland, the episode highlights the importance of dedicated spaces for queer students on college campuses. Our guests discuss the challenges and the joys involved in carving out space for difficult conversations and fostering supportive communities.

About our Guests: 

Jennifer Williams serves as the Director of the Women’s Center at North Carolina Central University. She formerly served as the Associate Director for Diversity & Inclusion, and the Program Coordinator of the LGBTA Resource Center at NCCU, where she also teaches. She came to NCCentral in 2013 for a dual Masters in Clinical Mental Health and Career Counseling. She completed her studies in 2016.

Amber Esters is the Education Coordinator at the NCCU Women's Center. She graduated from NCCU with a BA in Public Health Education in 2014 and received her MA in Women’s and Gender Studies from UNC Greensboro in 2019.

Eric Martin is a former Lavender-Liaison and the current LGBTA Resource Center Coordinator and a member of the Diversity and Inclusion staff at NCCU. Eric earned his BS in Psychology in 2020 and his MS in Higher Education Administration in 2022 at NCCU.

For more information about the resources and programming provided by LGBTA Resource Center check out their website.

Looking to learn more about how HBCUs have cultivated cultures of LGBTQ+ inclusion, this recent study from Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions (CMSI) and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Foundation examines and highlights institutions that are doing exemplary work related to increasing LGBTQ+ student support.

For more information on HBCUs America and the threat of recent funding cuts discussed in this episode see this recent HBCU policy report. And for suggestions and resources on how to better support them check out this article.

COVID has brought new attention to what many are calling the “mental health crisis" on college campuses. A 2020 study found that nearly 40% of college students experienced depression and 13% have had suicidal ideations.

The week Lisa Levenstein talks with Gary Glass, licensed psychologist, and director of counseling and career services at Oxford College of Emory University, about the challenges facing students and the increasing pressure on faculty to address mental health concerns. Glass calls on us to expand our thinking from how to diagnose and treat individuals in crisis to how to build a broader campus community and culture that supports students more holistically.

Following the conversation, Levenstein talks with her friend and colleague Tiffany Holland, a lecturer at UNC Greensboro and Guilford College. Holland shares her experiences embracing vulnerability and building community with students in the wake of the pandemic.

About our Guests:

Gary D. Glass, PhD, is a licensed psychologist who has been working with college students and serving various campus communities for over 20 years. Committed to an interdisciplinary perspective, his professional identity extends beyond “licensed psychologist” to include Educator, and he incorporates skills and wisdoms from his undergraduate studies in English literature and Communication, as well as his deep appreciation for music, poetry, and theology.

Read Gary’s article for Inside Higher Ed “Rethinking Campus Mental Health”

J. Tiffany Holland is a public educator, freedom dreamer, and wayward scholar. Her scholarly passions focus on the expansiveness and complexities of black identity and the potentials of black liberation. A former performing artist and middle-school teacher, Tiffany has taught history and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Guilford College and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She holds an M.A. in history from Duke University. She lives in Greensboro North Carolina with her partner, her wonder-twin seven-year-old children, and her extended and magical queer family.

Episode image by: TanushkaBu

Students know who their favorite professors are on campus but they rarely know that up to 70% of college faculty are contract workers, often paid by the course, with very low pay and no job security.

To put a personal face on the issues facing contingent faculty, we talk to Jennifer Hyland Wang, a long-time non-tenure-track faculty member at the University of Wisconsin. Jennifer balances parenting, teaching, research, and organizing work as co-chair of the Precarious Labor Organization within the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

Jennifer explains what it is like to “live the contradictions” of a university system designed for the outdated model of white male tenured professors. Contingent faculty are usually paid per course and rarely have job security or benefits. They face the lack of institutional support for parenting common to tenure-track faculty as well as policies that deny them research funding, participation in governance, and even library access. How would higher education be different if we acknowledged that contingency is structural, not shameful, and that the people who have landed tenure-track positions just happened to “fit the suit” to be filled at a particular moment? Jennifer calls for new kinds of thinking, organizing, and community building that support and enfranchise contingent faculty and make non-tenure-track jobs liveable.

Teachers of indigenous languages encounter a difficult problem: how to use the classroom, so long a site of white supremacist , violence and language loss for native people, to step outside of a Western viewpoint and rebuild native ways of being?

This week we hear from leaders in Dakota Language revitalization connected to the University of Minnesota, Šišóka Dúta and his former student and now colleague Raine Cloud.

Dúta and Cloud share their stories of learning Dakota Language as adults and how they have become teachers of the language. They also are starting an innovative project designed to preserve first-language speakers’ use of Dakota in a collaboration between the University of Minnesota and the College of Sisseton Wahpeton, a tribal college on the Lake Traverse Reservation in South Dakota. They address the challenges and possibilities of working through universities to revitalize Dakota language and culture.

How can universities can redress prior wrongs? How can they build relationships with Native peoples that are empowering rather than extractive? Programs like the one Dúta helped start in Minnesota offer models for people across higher education who seek to hold universities accountable for past harms and create transformative community partnerships.

To learn more about Dakota revitalization and our guests:

You can follow Šišóka Dúta  on Twitter

@sisokaduta

American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota offers Dakota and Ojibwe language instruction. You can read about their offerings at https://cla.umn.edu/ais/undergraduate/dakota-ojibwe-language-programs

Sisseton Wahpeton College is a tribal college located on the Lake Traverse Reservation and has partnered with the University of Minnesota on the Dakota Language Journal Project.

https://www.swcollege.edu/

For information on Minnesota Transform, the Mellon Grant Program at the University of Minnesota that supports the Dakota Language Journal Project

https://ias.umn.edu/programs/public-scholarship/minnesota-transform

University of Wisconsin online Dakota Dictionary

https://filemaker.cla.umn.edu/dakota/home.php I

The Dakota Wicohan

https://dakotawicohan.org/

According to federal and most state laws, undocumented students can enroll in higher education in the United States, but do they feel like they belong there?

Our guest, Shirley Leyro, critical criminologist and Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Borough of Manhattan--CUNY asked that question in a study she conducted on the challenges facing students without citizenship status. Lisa talked with Shirley about how her experiences as a first-generation Latinx professor helped her ask critical research questions that others have overlooked.

Shirley then helps Lisa and Nan think about the impact of this time of deep uncertainty in US immigration policy on DACA and “unDACAmented” students -- from worrying about deportation, to protesting against hostile professors, to finding ways to pay for school without access to federal financial aid or work permits. While some universities have recently declared themselves “sanctuary campuses,” students across the country are calling on their universities to not only “talk the talk” but “walk the walk” to make campuses truly safe and welcoming places for all students.

The conversation concludes with a call on educators to rethink assumptions about “traditional” and “non-traditional” students and to understand the lives of students beyond the one’s-size-fits-all mold the university has created.

About our guest

Shirley Leyro is a critical criminologist and Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Borough of Manhattan--CUNY. She studies deportation effects, including the impact that vulnerability to deportation has on noncitizen immigrants. Shirley is currently working on a funded research project exploring the impact of deportability on belonging and membership for CUNY noncitizen students. She is the author of Crimmigration, Deportability and the Social Exclusion of Noncitizen Immigrants (Spring 4-30-2018) and Co-Editor of Outside Justice: Immigration and the Criminalizing Impact of Changing Policy and Practice.

You can follow her on Twitter @DrShirLo and as part of the #thisiswhataprofessorlookslike campaign.

As campuses across the country have returned to in-person education this fall, requests by faculty for accommodations have been routinely ignored or denied. So for our first episode for Season 2, we reached out to three members of the Accessible Campus Action Alliance (ACAA), an organization of disability studies scholars and activists that has called on universities to do better with their statement “Beyond High Risk,” first released back in June of 2020 and updated in July of 2021.

Aimi Hamraie, Jonathan Sterne & Bess Williamson challenge the celebration of being “back to normal” and the failing accommodations systems that have put financial considerations over the safety of faculty and students.

Our hosts learn that the very technologies that made teaching online possible last year arose from the needs and responses of the disabled community. But now that universities are pushing in-person instruction, administrations are refusing access to them.

In the final segment, Jonathan, Bess, and Aimi discuss what it would mean to build institutions imbued with an ethic of care that recognizes our mutual vulnerability and dependency.

For more information on the ACAA, read their statement and follow them on Twitter.

Accessible Campus Action Alliance (2021), "Beyond 'High-Risk': Update for 2021," https://bit.ly/accesscampusalliance.

@accesscampus

About our guests

Aimi Hamraie is Associate Professor of Medicine, Health, & Society and American Studies at Vanderbilt University and director of the Critical Design Lab.

Jonathan Sterne is Professor and James McGill Chair in Culture and Technology in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. His book Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment will be available in January 2022.

@jonathansterne 

Bess Williamson is Associate Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

@besswww

Collegeland is produced and edited by Craig Eley and Jade Iseri-Ramos

Research assistance and publicity by Danyel Ferrari 

Theme music by Josh Wilson

Show cover art by Margaux Parker

Episode cover art designed by erhui1979 on iStock

A special thanks to the North Carolina Humanities Council and the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies for their support.

Want to get in touch? Email us at [email protected] or send us a voice memo on Anchor.fm.

For this special bonus episode, Nan and Lisa sit down with Season 1 producer Richelle Wilson to talk about her experience as a first-gen college student, the challenges of student loan debt and getting a PhD in a collapsing academic job market, and why she loves higher ed even though it doesn’t always love her back.

Stay tuned for Season 2, coming your way soon!

About our guest

Produced and edited by Richelle Wilson

A special thanks to Wisconsin Humanities for their support of Season 1.

Want to get in touch? Email us at [email protected] or send us a voice memo on Anchor.fm.

Libraries are the information infrastructure of universities. And as with most infrastructure, the critical work they do is often invisible—that is, until something breaks.

You’ve probably heard the horror stories about college dorms: late nights, loud parties, and lots of questionable bathroom antics.

Land-grant universities are the legacy of the Morrill Act of 1862, which gave states throughout the Midwest and West upwards of eleven million acres to establish colleges that would focus on agriculture and the “mechanic arts.” This opened up higher education to people all over the country.