Q&A with Roderick A. Ferguson

On Mon., Sept. 29, Roderick A. Ferguson, professor of African American and gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago, delivered the annual James E. McLeod Lecture on Higher Education. In advance of his visit, the Center for the Humanities spoke with him about his upcoming talk.

This lecture series honors longtime Washington University leader Jim McLeod. Did you happen to know him?
No, I didn’t. After I was invited, I started researching him and found out that we had similar trajectories. We’re both from small towns in the South: He was from Dothan, Ala., and went to Morehouse, and I’m from Manchester, Ga., and went to another historically black college, Howard. I feel a connection because of that biographical link.

The other half of the lecture’s title is “on higher education.” What do you think are the most pressing issues in higher ed today?
Access to higher ed for economically and racially underrepresented folks. The growing cost of college is a gargantuan impediment. I don’t know what I would have done if I were a student at this time and didn’t have a scholarship. I feel really passionate that we have to find ways to reclaim higher education as democratic space and a reality for more people. It’s an untapped opportunity for intellectual and institutional change. There are people who are waiting to be students, waiting to be faculty members who have untold possibility and potential. We have to figure out how to encourage and mobilize those possibilities and potentials. The people who are just a few blocks over from where we live and where we work — how do we get them into these institutions?

Why does this topic resonate with you personally?
When I moved out to attend the University of California, San Diego as a graduate student in 1994, the first issue on the ballot for me as a voter was Prop. 187 [withdrawing social services such as health and education for immigrants]. Then a few years later, it was Prop. 209, an anti-affirmative action initiative. These were hugely impactful for me as a young graduate student of color. I realized just how precious educational opportunities are and how we have to fight for them. As a faculty member, it has become the issue of how we can create more opportunities to hire and retain faculty of color, especially in the universities that have struggled with this.

How does this relate to your book The Reorder of Things?
That book was largely motivated by my work at the University of Minnesota to create a space for faculty and graduate students of color for their intellectual nourishment, to produce a real social community. In that book I wanted to think about this moment when there’s all this buzz around interdisciplinary work on race, on sexuality, on gender, and yet, at the same time, there is a real underrepresentation of the constituency that that work addresses. How do you have the promotion of these forms of difference and marginalized histories and cultures without the people? What is the history of that problem? How did it come to be?

Tell us about the title of your lecture ("The University and the Combinations of Heart and Mind") and what you plan to cover.
Part of what I wanted to do in The Reorder of Things is talk about the history of the university around these questions of diversity and difference but also I wanted to have voices that don’t usually show up in a book about the university. I wanted to have folk sayings or voices in there: I wanted to read certain passages and hear my grandfather, who never went to university, and people who gave me bits of wisdom about how to be a student even though they had never been students themselves. My grandfather used to say to me when returning to Howard after a vacation: “Roderick, still be Roderick.” He was talking about kids who went off and became strangers; they lost touch with themselves. I wanted to have those little words from the heart in the book. I was reminded of this while reading about Dean McLeod. There was a line that captured me: “If a student has a problem, their whole world is in that problem. We’ve got to figure out how to address them where they are with that problem.” What he’s talking about is not necessarily the product of theoretical or philosophical training; he’s talking about mobilizing a kind of training that comes from the heart. The lecture title has to do with trying to say that the university can be a place where we mobilize not only critical, scholarly knowledge but it can also be a place where we mobilize the heart’s knowledge: How to meet people where they are, how to acknowledge all of the parts of them as human beings. If it’s going to be a place that opens itself up and creates access to people who wouldn’t otherwise have it, then we’ve also got to mobilize the knowledge of the heart.