Sandra Buatti-Ramos (Hofstra University) discusses the highs and lows of doing social justice work in college and university careers services. How can we maintain our resolve and resilience as we experience setbacks and a feeling of futility?

Those of us working within institutions of higher education, particularly individuals operating in settler colonial Western cultures and locations, are often called upon or driven to conduct social justice work within the scope of their roles.

In the U.S., the professional associations that inform college and university career services practice call for practitioners to engage in social justice and advocacy work as demonstration of professional competence and ethics. However, engaging in this work often brings frustration, disappointment, and heartbreak, all of which can eventually jeopardize practitioner effectiveness via threats of burnout, disillusionment, and resignation.

The will and action to interrupt

Engaging in social justice work requires of individuals both the will and action to interrupt historical patterns of behavior that uphold systemic and structural oppression and to advocate for equity. In U.S. higher education, this work is situated to take place within a system intentionally designed under principles of exclusion and through the vision of white supremacy and settler colonialism.

The academic enterprise is not in essence a site of social justice or social mobility – it was not designed with the intention of producing equity, it was designed to ensure the enduring social elevation and domination of white settler colonialism and white supremacy culture. Further, academia is a capitalist enterprise, focused on knowledge and research production, meeting enrollment targets, and driving tuition revenue generation. It is both a subsystem and byproduct of capitalism, and operates with the same goals, inequities, and forces of oppression evident in capitalist societies at large.

As Audre Lorde so aptly noted, “the Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house,” and yet, those of us who work for institutions of higher education in settler colonial Western cultures and locations, are positioned within the Master’s house and use the Master’s tools as we attempt to engender more socially just practices within our institutions and society at large.

We engage in this work knowing that, at best, we will make institutional-level changes, and most often we will make individual-level impacts on students – hoping they will bring about the generational rippling effect to create positive societal change, but we, as individuals or practitioner coalitions, will likely not achieve in our lifetimes the dismantling of the oppressive systems required to see the justice we so desperately seek. In this sense, the work of social justice in college and university career services and higher education more broadly seems to be a futile effort.

Working in higher education careers services

In higher education career services, as many scholars have documented and demonstrated, we exist under the influence of political pressures. We are dependent upon the oppressive labor market to employ our students and graduates and uphold our institutional outcomes numbers. We are dependent upon the agendas of administrations and institutional leaders as well as those of external stakeholders like that of wealthy alumni donors and local, regional, and national politicians. The politics of leadership greatly influences the quality of our service to students and other clients and the autonomy we maintain to carry out the work of social justice. Our ability to create change or equitably serve marginalized populations is determined by higher powers that operate within inequitable structures.

Those of us who participate in social justice work and liberatory practices take personal risks and expose ourselves to the vulnerabilities of speaking out and speaking up against injustices and the indignities that play out before us at the expense of individuals with marginalized identities. As such, we often find ourselves with few public allies and supporters, but with many spectators and fraudulent, performative bedfellows. We also frequently find ourselves at risk of termination, discrimination, retaliation, and other harms.

We put our reputations, careers, financial security, and relationships on the line in order to advocate for equity, justice, dignity, inclusion, and to meaningfully address disparities we observe in our work. We invest in education, self-reflection, and community engagement, and take on the burdens of awareness and knowledge that others can blissfully ignore as they enjoy the fruits of ignorance, silence, and inaction. We fight our administrations for crumbs of change, and when they’re awarded, we are expected to graciously express a level of profound gratitude warranted by that of feasts. We do this as we face betrayals, undue criticisms, threats, and heartbreak, and we understand that we are at best applying diminutive bandages to the gaping wounds inflicted upon marginalized populations by the hands of oppression.

We acknowledge the endless work and fighting ahead of us and the insignificance of our work production as solutions to systemic and structural problems, yet we continue to engage in it – despite the wounds we endure – because there exists the promise that one day, the collective bandages of disruptive work will eventually stop the systemic bleeding and allow the necessary and too-long denied healing to take place.

Those of us who do the work of social justice in college and university career services face the ongoing reality that we often work against our own personal interests and the interests of our employers in order to disrupt the systems that oppress our students and other clients (and our colleagues). We cycle through periods of grace and exasperation as we act as both advocates and as agents of the academic enterprise who perpetuate oppression, settler colonialism, and white supremacy as we attempt to prepare students and other clients for the expectations of the labor market regarding “professionalism,” knowing full well that such a concept is rooted in expectations that individuals adhere to conformist and exclusionary notions related to appearances and behaviors that marginalize those who do not fit within the rigidity of majoritized norms and often ill-defined preferences of individual presentation. Our work requires us to participate in discussions about which identities and cultures are deemed “acceptable” in the workplace and we are often expected to coach students and other clients about the risks of double standards that disproportionately impact individuals with marginalized identities and further perpetuate systemic forces of oppression.

Dancing around advocacy and social justice

Despite the growing bodies of literature, critical inquiries, and modernized professional standards that call upon us to enact change, the nature of our roles in the academic enterprise necessitate that we dance around advocacy and social justice, thereby jeopardizing our ability to meaningfully contribute to social change because every time we vacillate to appease the politics, we silence marginalized individuals and populations and enact upon them further harms. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. eloquently expressed, “Justice too long delayed is justice denied,” yet many of us work in the discomfort of denial arising due to institutional constraints or pressures to appear “neutral.” Even those of us who engage in the work often cannot do so unapologetically or with impunity should we transgress the speech and advocacy limitations imposed upon us by our institutions and political leaders.

We are at once just as much as part of the problem as we are trying to be part of the solutions to systemic oppression because we are academic capitalists attempting to disrupt capitalist norms, we are colonizers seeking to decolonize our stolen goods and dispossessed lands, we are oppressors trying to advocate for liberation. We attempt to reconcile these truths at the same time that we are criticized and asked to shrink and work down to the expectations of those in the academic enterprise unwilling to push for a more just future – all the while knowing that very little might change in the time we invest in the work.

Doing the work

The work is difficult, it is often painful, and it may feel momentarily futile, but we continue to engage in it despite the wounds we endure because there is a foundational hope that in a distant future, others will enjoy the fruits of the labor and finally find refuge in the absence of plaguing societal illnesses we seek to cure.

To those who are doing the work, remind yourselves that every insignificant disruption has the potential to contribute to the dismantling and reimagining. To those who are facing resistance to their movements, remind yourselves that the pushback is a signal of progress – even when it hurts. To those burning out and those whose hearts are breaking, remind yourselves that the ache you feel signifies the magnitude of your care and emotional investment in creating a more just future, and that the hurt and exhaustion are necessary parts of your renewal. Your resilience is, in and of itself, as Caitlin Ryan frames it, an act of resistance.