Photo Credit: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The semester is ending soon, and with it, my time as an undergraduate is also coming to a close. As I reflect on my college career—four years fraught with rising climate catastrophes, a global pandemic, and escalating international conflicts—I owe my sanity to one particular community: the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF). Designed to foster diversity within academia and cultivate future professors, MMUF provides hefty guidance and financial support for undergraduates pursuing research in the humanities. The fellowship brings together an often overlooked field—the humanities—and an often marginalized demographic—minority, first-generation students, and low-income (FLI) students—to shape the future of academia.
Throughout my time as a Mellon fellow, I have met the most wonderful, ambitious, and intellectually curious people whom I am proud to call my friends, mentors, and teachers. Having dedicated nearly four decades to diversifying the professoriate, MMUF has seen countless fellows earn their PhDs and go on to teach and work at the very institutions we now attend. That means you could bump into a Mellon anywhere on campus—whether it’s your LitHum classmate, your favorite professor, a helpful TA, or even someone in the administrative offices—Mellons are everywhere! You never know when or where you might encounter a Mellon, or at what stage they may be in their career. But when you do meet one, you’ll discover someone who gets you, someone to share a sense of community with, and someone whose footsteps you might just want to follow.
Above all, being a Mellon during these tumultuous years has meant relying on my Mellon community for guidance and support. Despite the fellowship’s extreme selectivity (with Columbia’s chapter admitting only five people annually), our small cohort allows us to engage in a carefully curated community of like-minded individuals who share similar struggles and aspirations. Every week, we convene in a small seminar, gathering around lunch to engage in candid discussions about the inner workings of academia’s ivory tower and our roles within it as scholars and emerging researchers. Over the past two years, these weekly conversations have been the highlight of my week. I have come to view these moments, where we share both serious and lighthearted anecdotes from our academic and everyday lives, as a form of collective consciousness-raising. Through these exchanges, I have begun to question the academy, my role within it, and the purpose of my research. Although we all strive to advance human knowledge and do good within the world with our academic research, my Mellon peers and I often grapple to understand what it means to be a marginalized individual striving to break into a predominantly white and elitist academia often responsible for perpetuating the same oppressions that we have experienced as students.
At my first Mellon meeting, we were each given a copy of Lorgia Garcia-Peña’s Community as Rebellion: A Syllabus for Surviving Academia as a Woman of Color (2022). This book was intended to guide our discussions throughout the year and provide a historical context for our experiences as people of color in academia. In her work, Garcia-Peña recounts the student protests that erupted at Harvard University following her tenure denial. She discusses how people of color in academia are vulnerable to being seen as “The One”—a token figure deemed “worthy” by the university to ascend the academic ranks. This precarious status often leads to the exploitation of their labor under the guise of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. In her book, Garcia-Peña describes how she navigated between her pursuit of liberation and her efforts to reform the university from within, aiming to make it a safer space for people of color. She writes:
“To not ask the university to ‘love us back,’ to not demand the university—a neoliberal, colonizing, racializing institution—to provide that which is against its own nature, but rather to take its resources and structures and repurpose them to create freedom spaces, freedom schools, and liberation movements within and through its violent exclusion. Making our labor conditional— returning the discomfort, flipping the project of diversity and inclusion even if only briefly—is an act of freedom-making that contradicts the logic of The One.” (20)
For me, Mellon has fundamentally challenged the concept of The One. In our weekly meetings with our faculty advisor, graduate student mentor, and fellow peers, I have come to understand that The Ones are ubiquitous in academia, present at every level from faculty to undergraduates to administrators. Ironically, when we stand together in solidarity, none of us is “The One.” Instead, many of us are making our presence felt in academia and asserting ourselves by reclaiming its resources to uplift our communities. By making our contributions to the academy conditional and through our collective efforts, we, as Mellon fellows and emerging academics, are laying the groundwork for a more equitable and inclusive university.
I will soon be graduating and leaving Columbia behind, but the lessons I’ve learned as a Mellon fellow will accompany me as I progress through graduate school and eventually into the professoriate. The people I’ve met—those with whom I’ve laughed, cried, and stressed over assignments—will forever remind me of the community that populates academia. These are the students with whom I stand in solidarity, shaping my journey and perspective in transforming the academy.