No Study Without Struggle

April 19, 2021
University of Pittsburgh education professor Patel (Youth Held at the Border) alleges in this impassioned if uneven polemic that U.S. colleges and universities have played a key role in maintaining the nation’s “colonialist structure.” Patel details how Eurocentric curricula leave Black and Indigenous students feeling as if “their histories don’t count,” and castigates universities for focusing on the “optics of diversity” (such as featuring minority students and faculty in marketing materials) rather than responding to student protests with real structural change. Highlighting the “intertwined nature of study and struggle” for marginalized groups, Patel discusses organizing strategies with civil rights activists including Ruby Sales, but her analysis of how contemporary student protests in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, or calling for the removal of Confederate monuments, can be informed by the tradition of “fugitive learning” among Black Americans is less clear. Though her call for decolonizing the classroom is timely, and her admiring portraits of activist scholars provide useful points of reference, Patel offers few solid guidelines for how teachers, students, and administrators can begin to do “the hard and largely unprecedented work of dismantling racism.” Readers will appreciate the expert diagnosis but wish for a clearer prescription.

June 1, 2021
Key terms are central to understanding Patel's scholarly thesis and blistering tone, shaped by her experience as professor and associate dean for equity and justice in education at the University of Pittsburgh. First, she offers a broad intersectional criticism of higher education for its embodiment of settler colonialism, a complex network of racism, Eurocentrism, capitalism, property accumulation, exploitation of labor, and erasure of Indigenous people, all functioning to validate and maintain institutional power. Struggle is not just pain but also engagement with what liberation means. Struggle's counterpart, study, examines power relations to assert learning beyond institutional limitations on what constitutes knowledge. A particularly poignant censure is aimed at universities' theatrically professed diversity and inclusion efforts, which Patel contends do not actually interrupt settler colonialism and indeed exploit the labor of people of color. Patel offers tangible examples of how settler colonialism is an ongoing, still-living practice. For example, departments studying marginalized peoples are still beholden to white, corporate models of promotion and measurements of success, and universities displace communities by buying land in historical neighborhoods. Thought-provoking interrogation for academics and reformers.

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July 1, 2021
An examination of the unsavory limitations that settler colonialism has imposed upon higher education. Patel, associate dean for equity and justice in education at the University of Pittsburgh, sees settler colonialism as a primary driver of violence and inequity in late-stage capitalism. The author ties together diverse strands including contemporary protest, structural racism, and power structures favoring Whiteness. "Settler colonialism is based on the logic of owning land," she writes, "and that there is never enough land to satisfy the landowners' thirst." Both by design and due to institutional half-measures, American educational systems have largely failed to redress this malign history: "Whenever education, specifically higher education, has been made to reckon with its settler colonial structure, it has been largely through the struggles of those cast underneath the heel of oppression, fueled by their own formations to study." Regarding efforts at diversity, which she discusses in detail, she notes, "gift economies are a colonial structure that imagines some people as worthy only through the benevolence of people with higher status." Despite such public-facing efforts, prominent universities have not properly addressed persistent patterns of class- and race-based favoritism, to which Patel responds with justified, terse fury, reminding readers how many of these institutions were built by slaves. At the same time, the author celebrates a counternarrative of persistent patterns of protests and alternative learning modes by Indigenous people, people of color, and LGBTQ+ communities. "Learning has...never yielded fully to this settler project of colonization of the mind," writes Patel. Throughout, the author builds a multilayered discussion by referencing other scholars and her experiences as a teacher and mentor, portraying contemporary academia as a minefield for her bright, diverse students, many of whom carry the extra burden of being a "model minority." Overall, it's a passionate and intermittently approachable work occasionally hampered by academic jargon. A lively, politically engaged jeremiad on issues of identity, multiculturalism, and efforts to redress enduring wrongs.

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