We Built This: Redesigning Higher Education from the Ground Up While They Try to Burn It Down

Authors

Shawntay King, National Louis UniversityFollow
Juanita E. Marquez, National Louis UniversityFollow
Keisha Rembert, National Louis UniversityFollow
Jolene Taylor, National Louis UniversityFollow
Thera Tilmon, National Louis UniversityFollow

Abstract

Our text, We Built This: Redesigning Higher Education from the Ground Up While They Try to Burn It Down, examines how recent federal policy shifts, particularly the 2025 Dear Colleague letter and the Project 2025 educational platform, function as deliberate acts of deconstruction. These measures threaten to dismantle equity infrastructures in higher education while intensifying the erasure of Black women’s labor, leadership and legacy in the academy. Through Critical Policy Analysis and Black feminist thought, we argue that these policies operate simultaneously as blueprint and wrecking ball, systematically unraveling decades of progress and constraining the very communities that have sustained higher education’s growth.

Our conceptual framework, Awaken–Disrupt–Ascend, emerges from collective storytelling and communal analysis among Black women in higher education. Rooted in Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness and Patricia Hill Collins’s concept of the outsider within, the framework demonstrates how narrative functions as both diagnostic and design. Awaken calls for critical recognition of systemic devaluation and internalized oppression. Disrupt demands a rejection of institutional complicity and a confrontation with white supremacy disguised as neutrality. Ascend insists on building new blueprints centered in joy, rest and collective power, offering visions of higher education that cannot be easily dismantled.

Grounding this analysis in the historical lineage of Black women’s contributions, from Reconstruction-era classrooms and citizenship schools to contemporary scholarship and pedagogy, we reveal how their intellectual and institutional labor has long been foundational yet continually marginalized. We critique the ways contemporary DEI initiatives often obscure the specificity of Black women’s struggle and brilliance, rendering them hyper-visible in performance but invisible in policy and power.

At a moment of widespread institutional retrenchment, we call for a radical redesign of higher education that positions Black women not as symbols of inclusion but as central architects and protectors of its future.

Recommended Citation

King, Shawntay; Marquez, Juanita E.; Rembert, Keisha; Taylor, Jolene; and Tilmon, Thera (2025) "We Built This: Redesigning Higher Education from the Ground Up While They Try to Burn It Down," SPACE: Student Perspectives About Civic Engagement: Vol. 8: Iss. 1, Article 2.
Available at: https://digitalcommons.nl.edu/space/vol8/iss1/2