Advocating for educational equity can be exhausting. The reality is that many of our colleagues don’t see the need for this type of work. They either believe in the myth of colorblind equality and/or they object to “special treatment” for some groups. In addition, we have to contend with the emotional (and physical) toll of encountering stumbling blocks in our teaching, losing students despite our best efforts, and feeling the stress that generally accompanies a journey into the unknown. The bottom line is that it is important to reach out to colleagues who can support you and that it is imperative that you invest time in your own well-being.

The first institution of higher learning in the United States was Harvard College in 1636, and according to Roger L. Geiger, “the Puritan leaders intended to provide education comparable to that of Oxford and Cambridge” (1). These leaders even went as far as to rename the town of Newtown, where Harvard was to be located, to Cambridge. Furthermore, Geiger notes that the college’s original curriculum included “philosophy (logic, ethics, and politics), the classical languages and literature, and other subjects suitable for a gentleman’s education in the arts . . . Latin was the language of instruction and communication, so that students had to be able to read, write, and speak it as a condition for admission” (2). And even though Latin is rarely taught in colleges and universities today, these institutions, whether two-year or four-year, private or public, non-profit or for-profit, still adhere to the liberal arts education that was adopted from Britain for use in America. This broad-based education privileges Greek and Roman epistemology, from philosophy to literature to rhetoric. Furthermore, this curricular focus permeates our students’ educations from kindergarten all the way up to graduate school and informs how we understand and study every discipline from business to biology to literature. In other words, our disciplines are informed by a Eurocentric pedagogy and curricula.

Empathy and compassion have a tumultuous relationship with higher education. Traditionally, emotions have had no place in the classroom. This was evident to me a few years ago when my college was promoting professional development activities around the “affective domain,” a practice that encourages educators to not only build their own capacity for empathy and compassion but to also help students develop their capacity for these two emotions. This particular incident took place in an Academic Senate meeting when a faculty senator from English bemoaned the college’s commitment to the “mushy stuff.” More specifically, she was “tired of all the mushy stuff.”

Familiarizing yourself with equity data and recognizing the need for an educational equity framework are important first steps in revolutionizing your pedagogy and curricula, but it is of the utmost importance that we as educators also understand and critique our privilege and power inside and outside the classroom. For many of us, this privilege comes in the form of white privilege (though not always). Failure to recognize our privilege could have adverse effects on the ways we interact with and support our marginalized students even when we have the best of intentions. But recognizing privilege, particularly privilege associated with one’s race or gender, can be a difficult and uncomfortable process. Nonetheless, it is a necessary step in our growth as equity-minded educators, and once we are able to identify and critique our privilege, it can be liberating both for our students and for us.

The term “educational equity” has been the latest buzzword in higher education, replacing predecessors such as “metacognition,” “affective pedagogy,” and “adaptive learning,” and like these other terms, the definition of educational equity can be quite nebulous and hard to understand. This is the problem with jargon. However, educational equity, unlike these other educational movements, is high stakes for so many of our students, particularly those who come from traditionally marginalized groups, including, but not limited to, women, people of color, religious minorities, and members of the LGBTQ community. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that educators not only understand what the term means but why we need to shift our practices to more equity-centered ones. This process can be long, tedious, and, honestly, very uncomfortable, but if we are willing to re-examine our profession and pedagogies through an educational equity lens, we can truly start to close the stubborn “achievement” gaps that exist in higher education.

Over the last couple of years, I have embarked on a journey to better understand what the term “educational equity” actually means; it is much more elusive and abstract than simply defining the words. I have discussed this topic with students and colleagues, I have read the books and articles covering the movement, and I have reflected on what this means for educators, particularly those of us who are white or male or both.

On a typical college campus, the term equity is rarely used outside the business classroom. When I asked what equity was in a recent class, one student responded, “doesn’t that have something to do with your house?” His answer was followed by numerous head nods (and a couple of looks of confusion). Unfortunately, this unfamiliarity tends to extend to colleges’ faculty, staff, and administrators – most of whom are white males, like me, like the majority of the professoriate. But with higher education’s so-called “achievement” gaps, this lack of knowledge can be devastating for many of our students.

In the maelstrom of higher education – lesson planning, research, committee work, office hours, professional development, etc. – it is very easy to lose sight of our purpose. In other words, so many of us are so busy with the myriad responsibilities of our profession that we often do not have time to reflect on our visions or philosophies. I, for one, haven’t written a teaching philosophy since graduate school, and I hardly have time to eat lunch, much less reflect on why I love teaching. This can be problematic for two reasons: first, if we lose our focus, we may find ourselves feeling unmotivated and going “through the motions”; conversely, we can find ourselves ultra-motivated and engaged in our work, but eventually this pace will become exhausting and without a clear vision, we will burn out.

Last spring, a Houston high school student named Michael Brown was accepted to all twenty universities that he applied to, even receiving full-ride scholarships to each one of them. It is evident that Brown is an extremely intelligent and motivated young man (he had well over a 4.0 GPA and a nearly perfect SAT score). However, it didn’t take long for pundits to decry this as an injustice and chastise Brown for his accomplishments. To a group of Fox anchors, in particular, Brown’s twenty applications were an injustice to other applicants, many of which they claim were waitlisted or even worse, denied admission, because of Brown’s application. And even though they never say it outright, they are obviously aggrieved that these “victims” were more than likely white (Brown is African American). I can’t think of a time when news anchors condemned a white student for applying to twenty universities. Unfortunately, this story is the most recent iteration of the “reverse discrimination” grumbles that have taken this country by storm in the last few decades, and higher education has taken the brunt of these complaints (think affirmative action).

Earlier this month, I presented to a group of interns who were part of a district program to promote diversity in hiring. I was asked to discuss best practices for creating a syllabus and for developing curriculum, the latter probably being way too big for an hour presentation (and for this essay). Because I have been thinking a lot about educational equity and social justice, I wanted to prepare a conversation of syllabi and curriculum using these lenses. Though I have reflected on (and written about) equity-centered curricula, I’ll admit that I had never looked at my syllabi through an equity-lens.

The landscape of higher education is drastically changing and doing so quickly. This is particularly true when we look at its student demographics. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) report “Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Groups 2016,” the number of minoritized students in higher education is drastically increasing. For example, the report notes that the percentage of White students has dropped from 79% in 1990 to 58% in 2013, and that the Latinx community is the fastest growing group in those two decades. Furthermore, in the California Community College system, Latinx students make up 42.7% of the students. And when disaggregated by gender, the NCES found that more and more women are attending college while the enrollments for men are falling across all racial and ethnic demographics.

Trauma has been hijacked by the political right, as conservative politicians and pundits decry the “snowflakes” and disparage the safe space movement. To them, people who experience hate speech, bullying, and sexual harassment are too sensitive with their “trigger warnings.” In fact, many would argue that trauma is reserved only for war veterans and victims of violent crimes. However, many people, including educators, do not understand the expansive reach of trauma, which can occur not only from experiencing distress first hand but even from simply witnessing a distressing incident. Unfortunately, this ignorance is having a detrimental effect on our students’ academic goals and on our institutions’ goals of educational equity. But what exactly is trauma, and what causes it? More relevant, how many students are actually victims of it, and what can educators do to serve those who are coping with traumatic experiences?

In the past several decades, colleges and universities have committed themselves to diversifying their student bodies, but more recently, conversations about educational equity have been more prevalent and substantive. More and more college students come from non-hegemonic backgrounds, and because their success rates are far below their white peers, educators and administrators have focused on how to better serve them.

It is not unusual for white people to feel uncomfortable or even angry when confronted about white privilege or racism. But where do these emotions come from? Why is it that we immediately feel threatened when a person of color describes an instance of racism or makes a generalization about whites? Unfortunately, our “knee-jerk” reactions in these situations stifle any kind of dialogue, and they tend to create a cycle wherein unresolved racial tensions lurk underneath the surface when whites and people of color share public spaces. However, whites need to confront the emotions associated with race and privilege in America. We need to embrace the discomfort of what our whiteness means so that we may engage in the discourse and actions needed to eradicate racial inequities and institutionalized white supremacy, which we as educators are in a position to combat in our schools and colleges.