A Statement on Higher Education from our Director of Education Abroad
While I have worked in higher education long enough to know better, I still have hope that those of us who find our way here do so because we believe it gives us real opportunities to help dismantle the structural racism that has taken the lives of yet more Black Americans at the hands of police and pandemic. Or maybe this is just what I tell myself when considering my own roles and responsibilities as a participant at the professional level in something that can, at its worst, disingenuously self-commodify and predate on that basis, enable a cudgel-like notion of customership, and thus further engraft the systemic inequity that upholds white privilege, elitism, and their concomitant manifestations of violence. What I am sure of is that I am not alone in experiencing the past few months in horrific relief against a backdrop of what we see, experience, and have a responsibility to combat within higher education every day, and to do so with the tools that higher education at its very best can give us.
I grew up on a small liberal arts campus, and that a kid who loved to write and act and took seriously the social justice teachings of the church (even if it took her awhile to figure out how to start living them) ended up channeling all of that into a career as an historian of, and then as an education abroad professional specializing in the Middle East makes sense in my own head. What I like about what I’ve gotten to do is that, warts and personal and institutional disappointments and all—and there are so, so many warts and disappointments—it allows me to learn about and engage issues of equity and justice in myriad ways with many different people, and a real chance to try affecting something in a positive way.
What I like about education abroad is that, much like the humanities, it ideally serves to make us better people. What I like about AMIDEAST is that it is foremost not a provider of education abroad programming, is rooted in and committed to the Global South context, and just can’t keep pace in that corner where “making us better people” has been mass-produced as an ironic widget, packaged and offered with a free iPad at the fair on the campus where a year of school costs more than $70K. And yet even that mass-produced thing—and the very real chance every student has to make it unironic again—has never been intended for the majority of US higher education.
In keeping with the vision, mission, and goals of National Higher Education Day, AMIDEAST Education Abroad has committed to using its new Virtual Learning & Cultural Exchange Program to help affect positive change in the way of equity in US higher education, with full acknowledgement that true equity will not be achieved until it is fully realized as a public good. Anything less fails to help redress the traumas of this moment.
- Elena D. Corbett, Ph.D., Director of Education Abroad
