Colonial foundations of US colleges with Sharon Stein

Sharon Stein discusses her book, Unsettling the University: Confronting the Colonial Foundations of US Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022).

• Sharon Stein's Academia page 
• Sharon Stein. 2022. Unsettling the University: Confronting the Colonial Foundations of US Higher Education. Johns Hopkins University Press.  
• Vanessa Machado de Oliveira. 2021. Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism. Penguin Random House. 

Transcript

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Lauren Shepherd (00:02.734)

Welcome to the American Campus Podcast, A History of Higher Education. I'm Lauren Lassabe Shepherd. My guest today is Professor Sharon Stein, who is the author of Unsettling the University, Confronting the Colonial Foundations of U .S. Higher Education with Johns Hopkins University Press. Dr. Stein is Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia and Visiting Professor with the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation at Nelson Mandela University in South Africa. She also works extensively on climate justice and decolonial projects with a number of other entities, which I will ask her to tell us about. Professor Stein, so glad that you can speak with me.

Sharon Stein (00:46.745)

Thank so much for having me. 

Lauren Shepherd (00:51.316)

Tell us about your research, the work you do outside of the classroom, anything you'd like to share.

Sharon Stein (00:58.479)

Well, I will start by saying that I am a white settler. I'm currently living in what is currently known as Canada, was born in what is currently known as the US. And this is actually a really important part of my work because one of the key dimensions of my work is asking about our responsibilities as settlers on colonized lands and also thinking about how the colonial foundations of our institutions shape the universities that we have today. And increasingly, I am kind of trying to bring together questions of systemic colonial violence and systemic unsustainability, the climate and nature emergency that we're facing, and trying to really understand how current crises of all kinds, political, economic, social, ecological, and even psychological, are all grounded in a modern colonial system that is inherently violent and unsustainable and that our institutions are often reproducing and therefore we are often reproducing them even when we don't realize it. So in addition to the work I do as a professor, I work with a research collective called Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures. We are an intergenerational transnational collective of researchers, artists, activists, elders, and other knowledge keepers, and also really try to ask what kind of education is needed to interrupt the continuity of this modern colonial system and to gesture toward or experiment with other possibilities in more responsible ways.

Lauren Shepherd (02:48.994)

Your book makes so many profound contributions in the field of critical university studies. I'm just thinking about your background and how well positioned you are to take on a project like this. And I think one of the most important things about your work is that you ask readers to question both the desirability and the feasibility of the continuity of the modern colonial higher education system that we have.

And I'll just be frank and talk about the upfront with my partiality to the way that you've just exploded so many of my own inherited frameworks. When I read the book, I had to stop on almost every page and physically set it down and just think about what you had just told me. And this coming from someone who studies the university as a professional research interest.

In the short time that we have today, I'm going to ask you to give us a few key takeaways from the three major eras that you outline in your work. So the existing literature on the colonial foundations of the college, I think, tends to be descriptive. And even the critical accounts that we have of the Academy's colonial past are almost focused exclusively on its role as an institution propped up by enslaved labor with fewer critical examinations exploring native genocide as part of that project too. But your work surpasses even both of those understandings by challenging us to think about the academy's exploitation of the land, of continental ecology, and of indigenous ways of knowing as settler enlightenment epistemology devalued and ultimately displaced native wisdom. So could you just take it from there on the colonial and antebellum periods?

Sharon Stein (04:33.869)

Well first I have to give full credit to this analysis to Indigenous scholars and activists and knowledge keepers who have been pointing this out essentially since colonialism started. And more recently there are many scholars of higher education who have poked at the colonial foundations of the university. Sandy Grande, for instance, Eve Tuck, Amanda Taccini, Stephanie Waterman, many other scholars have made this point before. And there's something kind of difficult about, or complex about making the argument as a white settler. There's kind of a paradox where it can feel like speaking over those who have made this argument before and have not been attended to.

But then there's also a sense of responsibility. It's everyone's job to identify and try to attend to how these colonial foundations shape the present. So we all need to figure out how to do it in our own way in ways that give due credit to those who have paved the path before us. And I think in particular, you know, the Indigenous communities that we work with as part of Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures have been so central in my still very limited elementary understanding of, in many ways, the limits of my own knowledge system, of the systems that I was trained in for 20 plus years of schooling and university, even things as basic as seeing the land as a living entity instead of a property or a resource. And even when we can kind of understand that intellectually as non-Indigenous people, I think it's very difficult for us to actually sense into that beyond just the intellect and therefore it doesn't actually necessarily change our behavior. So I think that the challenge of bumping up against the limits of our own understanding are immense because it's not just an intellectual process, it's also a process of unlearning very deep held desires, investments and assumptions, many of which are unconscious, and learning how to relate to each other, to other than human beings and to the land itself differently. And we have a lack of resources within Western education and within Western epistemologies of knowing how to do that. And there's often a trap of when we try to engage with other knowledge systems, we end up being extractive or appropriative and often don't really understand the depth of the wisdom that is held, and how could we? It's not something that we're trained in. And yet we have to find ways to try and to make a conversation between these knowledge systems that doesn't reproduce the usual power relations. And it's extremely difficult as we can see in many examples in practice.

Lauren Shepherd (07:41.932)

Certainly it's definitely a complicated process. And I'm just thinking about what you just shared with me about the other scholars whom your work builds off of. I'm not too far out removed from my own PhD program. And I'm just thinking, I've never interacted with any of their work before. Your work cited is very thick, thankfully. That's a great resource for all of us. But I mean, it really, it just, makes me want to revamp my entire syllabus.

So in both scholarship and popular imagination, the land grant colleges, which you write about in a large chapter of your book--so today, these are many of our big state publics, even our HBCUs--they're idealized as the embodiment of what you describe as the democratic promise and potential of higher education. But you challenge us to see that differently, showing us how these narratives ultimately reaffirm the underlying imperatives of capitalist growth and racialized socioeconomic hierarchy that were built into the very colonial foundations of US public higher education. So I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about that.

Sharon Stein (08:54.713)

You know, I think one of the things that's most difficult for especially white settlers to grapple with when we think about the colonial foundations of our universities is that even when we allow ourselves to actually sit with some of the things that happened in the past, it's very rare that we then think about how those things didn't just happen at the same time as things like the Land Grant Act, but actually were what enabled the land grant to exist. So we oftentimes think about problems of racism or colonialism in higher ed as problems of exclusion, that we didn't allow, you know, Black or Indigenous peoples to attend the university. This is of course true, right? But the deeper dimension of that is that these institutions were founded and funded at their expense in both direct and indirect ways.

And if these institutions were funded at their expense, then there's a huge debt of redress and reparation that would be required because our institutions weren't just founded on the lives and lands of these people, but they actually continue to operate benefiting from centuries of accumulated wealth and power and institutional brand, for lack of a better word. So I think if we start to go deeply into the colonial and racial roots of our institutions without running away from the full depth of the problem, we can see that there's a great deal of work to be done and that the past is not really past. It's very much present in both sort of obvious and less obvious ways. And once you start to see it, you can start to see it everywhere, in every interaction, in every syllabus, in every sort of policy of the university.

But until you kind of activate that sense of attentiveness, of accountability for how the past has created the present and how accumulated wealth continues to flow in our institutions and benefit people like me, then it's very hard to see it. And people generally don't want to see it because it's uncomfortable and it implicates them. So we have to kind of get over that resistance and interrupt that denial so that we can actually sit with the full weight of our complicity, not for the intent of blaming or shaming or just feeling guilty, but so that we can activate that sense of responsibility for, what does that mean for the present and for our responsibilities to the future.

Lauren Shepherd (11:32.364)

Yes, those imagined possibilities that you write about. Another framework that your book works to deconstruct is the way that we think about the postwar era, which historically we've referred to as higher education's golden age, in which the premise of college education, as you write, as a means of social mobility became a central part of the postwar social contract between certain US citizens and the US nation state. And in fact, when we look back at the Cold War university, we do that with some nostalgia, seeing our current neoliberal moment as an interruption of, "otherwise linear path of perpetual improvement and expansion of opportunities." But then you argue that this framing forecloses a more thorough examination of the true cost of postwar U .S. abundance, including the cost of social mobility and the American dream itself. So can you tell us more about that critique?

Sharon Stein (12:28.545)

Yeah, and I mean, in many ways, each chapter kind of resonates a similar theme, which is that when we celebrate each of these eras, as we tend to do in the ones that I've selected, we don't consider the cost of enabling that era to happen. And I think particularly in the postwar, a lot of that is about the cost of US hegemony and the violences of the Cold War, including things that were very much hot wars and very violent military interventions, including the atomic bomb, including the Vietnam War and all of the military industrial complex that fed into that. I think it's very difficult for us to articulate a critique of neoliberalism without romanticizing the past. That's been my observation. It's actually one of the things that first kind of brought me to this inquiry.

I work a lot in Brazil and there's a saying there that, basically the hole is lower down. It's deeper down than you think, the root of the problem. And I think that's what kind of initially cued me into this is like, we would talk about how things used to be better, right? But we didn't ask better for whom, right? And at whose expense. And when we start to ask that, it's very hard to romanticize these previous eras.

And then I think there's a fear, well, if we can't romanticize the past and if the present isn't desirable, then what, right? Which sometimes feels like a stopping place for people. They don't wanna go there because they are afraid of the not knowing. Whereas for me, that's exactly where we need to start the inquiry, at that place where none of these options seems to be healthy, seems to be working, seems to be viable for the future. And therefore, we have to kind of see the limits of our imagination before we could even possibly try to go beyond it. But we would first have to notice how we're hemmed in by these romanticized imaginaries of the past so that we can think about the present differently and potentially weave together different kinds of futures.

Lauren Shepherd (14:42.317)

And that is a good segue into how you conclude the book. You ask us to face the limits of the mode of higher education that we've inherited. So we might, these are your words, "so that we might nurture the soil for the possibility of possibilities." So can you tell us about some of what you describe as enduring attachments and other complexities that stand in the way of our ability to reimagine higher education differently?

Sharon Stein (15:08.727)

Oh man, how much time do you have? I think there's a way of categorizing that's just sort of all of the modern colonial attachments that many of us have, right? Attachments to our sense of authority, our sense of autonomy, our sense that we want to be the arbiters of truth, our sense that we are entitled to the wealth that we have accumulated, our desire for certainty, control, and comfort. These are all things that go into reproducing that denial of the extent and depth of the problem. And then when they think specifically about higher education, I think it stands as such a symbol of opportunity, of progress, of even democracy in the US. And I'm not saying that it hasn't served these purposes in some ways, but if you zoom out, you see again that the costs of all of these shiny things are very violent and are the root cause of the climate and nature emergency that we're now facing. I mentioned that I work in Brazil right now. There's a drought in I think 60 % of the country and fires all over. And if we look at pretty much any country in the world, including the US or Canada, we can see that there are wildfires, that there's extreme temperatures, that there are people losing their access to water. And these are not hypotheticals. These are happening right now. If our universities could see how they have played into the creation of this crisis, then maybe, maybe we would have a chance of actually repurposing them to address these crisis with a sense of responsibility for their past role in creating them and with a sense of humility about, okay, we are one piece of this puzzle, but there's many other knowledges, for instance, that we have entirely excluded that are equally valuable, if not more so, in addressing this crisis and we will have to de-arrogantize ourselves, especially as academics, to say there is of course something we can bring, but there's also a lot that we are missing, right? And we are both, we sometimes say in the collective, individually insufficient, but collectively indispensable. We need everybody to do this. And universities have historically not recognized other knowledge systems, not recognized the practices of particularly communities on the front lines, for instance, of the climate and nature emergency and the knowledge that they hold because we like to see ourselves as the ivory tower, even as the ivory tower is clearly crumbling, we might call it a leaning tower of Pisa at best. But what if the ivory tower is crumbling? Instead of trying to prop it up, what if we helped it fall to the ground? What if we helped it transformed into a nurse log that would actually feed other life around it as it decomposed and it became something else. And that's very frightening thought for some people. And yet I think whether we like it or not, we might be facing this decline, right? So how do we do that in a way that learns from our past mistakes so that we don't keep reproducing them and that actually creates the conditions for something else that is healthier and wiser and more responsible to grow in its place.

Lauren Shepherd (18:28.174)

There's so much more that we could get into in your book. Just on the topic of climate and when you bring up other knowledges, it's like the modern settler university is founded on top of taking that ancient, inherited wisdom of indigenous people who have lived on the land and been its servant for so long. We also didn't get to talk about your discussion of the Anthropocene and all of the interventions since then. I mean, there's just, there's so much more for readers to pick up in your book. 

But I do have one last big question before you go. What are you reading now and what research should be on our radar?

Sharon Stein (19:13.583)

Right now, we're actually editing a book that the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Future's Collective is putting out, which is a sequel to Vanessa Machado de Oliveira's Hospicing Modernity. It's going to be called Outgrowing Modernity. So that's kind of what I've been pouring over myself. But I would say again that one of the things that continues to inspire me is the work of Indigenous thinkers and not just Indigenous scholars, although there are many, including those that I mentioned, as well as the work of Dr. Kyle Whyte. He's an Indigenous ecological philosopher, Potawatomi scholar, amazing for thinking about the ways that settlers tend to read the climate and nature emergency through our own settler lens and therefore miss a lot. But these kinds of thinkers are who have challenged me to to see the limits of my own thinking, and to also recognize the traps that are involved in trying to think beyond it. I think that's one of the key things about the future that we tend to maybe misread as people trained in Western education. We think that we need to be able to imagine the future we want before we get there. We have to know exactly where we're going and how.

But in fact, if we imagine the future from where we stand now, we're probably going to imagine more of the same. So we might have to say that the future, if we really want it to be different, is something that we can only craft together as we move, prioritizing the quality of our relationships and the quality of our learning and unlearning, particularly from past mistakes, as well as the new mistakes that we will inevitably make in the process.

Lauren Shepherd (21:03.754)

How can listeners keep up with your work.

Sharon Stein (21:07.929)

Well, you can check out my Academia page or my Research Gate page, but also look for this book by Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective, Outgrowing Modernity, that's going to be out in about a year.

Lauren Shepherd (21:24.622)

Professor Stein, thank you for joining me.

Sharon Stein (21:27.951)

Thank you for having me.

Lauren Shepherd (21:30.2)

For listeners, I'll drop a link to Dr. Stein's book, Unsettling the University and the show notes. If you enjoyed the episode, be sure to subscribe, share with colleagues and friends, and leave a review. Thanks for listening to the American Campus Podcast.