Written by Dr. Melik Peter Khoury
What Thirty Years Inside the Academy Forced Me to Admit
I came to the United States from West Africa. I was the first in my immediate family to earn a degree beyond high school. Where I grew up, higher education was not a system to critique. It was a privilege most people never touched. I arrived at the University of Maine at Fort Kent in 1995, a first generation American with little more than my own intuition, and an acceptance letter changed the trajectory of my entire life.
I did not enter higher education through a faculty lounge or a dean’s search. I entered it as the exact kind of student the sector now invokes in every mission statement and protects in none of its decisions. I was the demographic. I am still the demographic. That is why what I am about to write costs me something to say.
I started working in higher education in 1995. I have spent the last fourteen of those years at Unity. Before that, I held nearly every operational and academic role a person can hold inside a university, at multiple institutions, across multiple decades, in service of something I believed without question. I believed in the mission. I believed in the language. I believed in the people. I believed that if I worked hard enough, rose far enough, and earned enough trust, I would find myself inside a sector that did what it said it did. I dedicated my entire adult life to this belief.
I was wrong.
I am writing this knowing it may end my career in higher education. I am writing it because if I do not write it, the next thirty years of my life will be spent participating in something I can no longer pretend not to see. And because the people who could write it before me, the elders I once admired, chose not to. They retired into emeritus titles and consulting contracts and board seats, and they took the truth with them. Someone has to break the chain. I would rather be the one who broke it than the one who passed it forward.
What follows will sound harsh. It is harsh. It is also true, and I spent three decades not saying it out loud, including to myself.
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