No Study Without Struggle: Confronting Settler Colonialism in Higher Education

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.(July)