Still on the Plantation: The Dear Colleague Letter and the Restructuring of Higher Education

0:17 Welcome to the discourse with Dr. Shetty, where storytelling means scholarship, rich in knowledge, culture, and lived experience. I'm your host, Dr. Shelley, higher education scholar practitioner, and truth teller. And this podcast is a space for honest, unapologetic conversations about race, power, identity, and institutions. Here we break down the realities of higher education, explore how systems impact Black professionals and communities, and connect research to real life.

0:57 Let's get into the discourse. Over the past several months, something significant has been unfolding across higher education in the United States. Offices that once served as an institutional home for diversity and equity work are quietly closing. Programs are being restructured. Staff members who spent years building initiatives to support marginalized students and employees are suddenly finding themselves reassigned or in some cases unemployed. For many people outside of higher education, these changes may seem abrupt or distant.

1:41 They are often framed as policy adjustments or institutional restructuring. But for those working inside colleges and universities, and particularly for black professional staff, these shifts carry real consequences. At the center of this moment is a policy directive that many people have likely never heard of, the Dear Colleague letter issued by the U.S. Department of Education. Following the February 2025 Dear Colleague letter, we've witnessed a coordinated surgical removal of black authority from the American Academy.

2:25 While the letter was presented as guidance about civil rights compliance, its impact has reverberated across campuses in ways that extend far beyond legal interpretation. It is March 2026. We are standing in the wreckage of what I'm calling the massacre. In today's episode, I want to pause and examine what this moment means for higher education and more specifically for black professionals working within these institutions. Because when offices close and programs disappear, the story is not just about policy.

3:10 It is about people. And for many black professionals, this moment raises a familiar question. When institutions say they are restructuring diversity efforts, are we witnessing reform? Or are we simply watching another chapter in the long history of plantation politics in higher education? We aren't looking just at policy. We're looking at the anatomy of an eviction. We're bridging the gap between the co statistics and the lived realities of the black professionals who were sacrificed to protect the institution's property.

3:56 Pull up a seat. It's time for the discourse. So let's start with the catalyst. On February 14th, 2025, the Department of Education issued a dear colleague letter. It weaponized Title VI, threatening federal funding for any school maintaining divisive equity offices. And so in my research, I focused on plantation politics. And one of the features of the plantation is preemptive compliance.

4:38 Historically, white institutions didn't wait for court orders. They moved with chilling efficiency to fire people, scrub websites just to stay in the good graces of the state. They sacrificed the people to save the property. And so let's look at a scenario, the disposable architect. Let's look at Dr. Joy. Dr. Joy has spent the last decade working as the director of inclusive equity at a prominent historically white institution.

5:18 She was the one who drafted the 50-page strategic plan for equity after the 2020 uprising. She's the one who sat on every search committee for free, doing the invisible labor of ensuring the pool wasn't just a mirror of the department chair. In the eyes of the institution, Dr. Joy was their shield. Whenever a racial incident happened on campus, a noose in a dorm, a slur in a group chat, the provost would put Dr. Joy on stage. Her blackface and her EDD were the property the university used to prove they were civilized and progressive.

6:07 Then comes February 2025. The dear colleague letter hits the provost desk. Suddenly, the property value of Dr. Joy's work drops to zero. In fact, it becomes a toxic asset. Dr. Joy gets a calendar invite for 430 on a Friday. The title is vague. When she enters and logs in into the Zoom, she doesn't see the provost she's worked with for years. She sees a junior HR representative and legal counsel.

6:50 They don't use the words anti-blackness. They don't even mention the dear colleague letter. They use the clinical language of plantation politics, realignment, operational efficiency, and fiscal responsibility. They tell her that the entire office, the one she built from the ground up, is being dissolved. Not because it failed, but because it succeeded too well at a time when the state demanded silence. They offer her a transition package, which is really just hush money, on the condition that she doesn't speak to the students she spent 10 years protecting.

7:39 By 5 p.m., her access to a university email is revoked. Ten years of her research, her files, and her connections, which is her intellectual property, are locked behind a digital wall. The institution just didn't fire an employee. They harvested her labor for a decade. And then the moment the political weather changed, they burned the crop and told her she was never part of the family. Notice how Dr. Joy was treated as a tool, not as a colleague. That is the definition of anti-black racism in the professional sphere.

8:24 You are value for your utility in managing black bodies, but you are discarded the minute you become a political cost. This is also the overseer dynamic. The institution wanted her to manage the unrest of the population, but when the owner, the state, or the federal government in this case, threatened the plantation's profits, the overseer was the first to be sacrificed to show loyalty to the system. So let's look at the math of this massacre.

9:05 So numbers don't lie, even when institutions do. According to the Economic Policy Institute's report in 2026, we are looking at a targeted hit. So in the year following that letter, over 277,000 black women were pushed out of the workforce. Black women with bachelor's degrees saw a 3.5 percentage point drop in employment, losing jobs at seven times the rate of their peers. This is a credentialed eviction of black brilliance from the academy.

9:47 And so when the data shows black women with degrees losing jobs at that rate compared to white women, we aren't looking at budget cuts. We're looking at the systemic removal of black authority. And so finding a singular official government number for black professional staff, specifically distinct from faculty and the general workforce was notoriously difficult because institutions often hide these losses under the guise of natural attrition, unfilled vacancies, or departmental restructuring.

10:29 However, when looking at the 2025-2026 data from the lens of higher ed labor reports and EEO6 equal opportunity categories, we can see a clear, more devastating picture of the massacre within the Academy. So while the 77,000 figure represents the broader workforce impact on college-educated black women, the data specifically within higher education reveals a more concentrated hit. So since 2025, the dear colleague letter, over 440 institutions across 22 states dismantled their DEI offices.

11:19 This resulted in an estimated loss of 12 to 15,000 Black professional staff roles, so that's directors, coordinators, program managers, in a single academic year. According to a 2026 preliminary report from the Chronicle of Higher Education, institutions in hostile legislative states reduced their non-academic student support by 18%. And because black professionals are overrepresented in these student-facing and belonging roles, they bore the brunt of these costs.

12:02 And a significant portion of Black professional staff, especially in research and outreach, are funded through grants. As institutions performed pre-emptive compliance, they allow grant-funded positions held by black staff to expire without renewal at a rate of four times higher than their white counterparts. And so why is this massacre hard to track? Easy. It's institutional gaslighting. Universities rarely say we are firing the black staff. Instead, they use these three methods to invisibilize the losses, the ghost vacancy.

12:48 A black director leaves due to the chilly climate, and the institution permanently freezes the position. On paper, is not just a layoff, but in reality, the black authority is gone. The reclassification. Moving a black professional from a director of black student success to a general student advisor. So they keep the person for the time being, but strip the specialized mission. And then the preemptive resignation. The psychic tax becomes so high the staff leave before they are pushed.

13:35 If you want to use the most academic data available, you would look at the iPads, which is the integrated post-secondary education data system. And so a preliminary snapshot in 2025-2026 shows a sharp decline in the other professional category for Black employees. And this is the category where most advisors, coordinators, and student affairs professionals live. So when the university tells you they didn't lay anyone off, the question then becomes: what about the vacant seats? What about the 15,000 DEI professionals whose offices were locked on a Friday afternoon?

14:21 They aren't just cutting budgets. They are performing a credentialed eviction of black expertise from the campus footprint. And so I want to pause here and give a tool for your toolkit. Some people will tell you that these layoffs are just the economy or bad luck, but as a scholar, I look at the work of Derek Bell, the godfather of critical race theory. Bell gave us a concept called interest divergence. He argued that black progress only happens when it serves the interests of white elites. That's interest convergence.

15:02 In 2020, the university needed us.

16:19 That's the property right. And so when DEI became a threat to that property, which is again that funding, the institution reclaims the space. So black professionals are evicted from their roles because their presence is no longer seen as an asset to the institution's brand of whiteness, but it now becomes a liability to its property. Again, its reputation, its budget. And here again brings in one of the tenets of TRT, the permanence of racism. And so using Bell's idea that racism is endemic and a permanent fixture of American society, and that also includes higher ed.

17:10 And so this dear colleague letter didn't create anti-blackness, it simply gave institutions a legal out to stop pretending. And so when Dumas and Ross talks about anti-Black racism serving as the erasure of black life or black humanity, anti-Black racism will manifest as the psychic erasure of black staff. And so it's not just about losing a job, it's about how the institution signals that black expertise on race is unscientific and divisive.

17:51 And so let's look at the story of Dr. Anthony. In 2020, doing what many called the Great Awakening or the DEI Gold Rush, Dr. Anthony was a rising star. The university, a historically white institution that ignored these issues for decades, suddenly couldn't move fast enough to hire him. They offered him a beautiful corner office, a staff of three, and a seat at the President's Council. For four years, Dr. Anthony poured his soul into that institution. He built the bridge.

18:32 He did the work. He felt like a partner in the mission. He felt like he finally owned a piece of the academy. But then the political interest diverged. In early 2025, when the dear colleague letter threatened the university's federal research grants, the administration didn't call Dr. Anthony to the table to strategize. They called him to the office to tell him he was moving. They didn't fire him, not yet, anyway. Instead, they told him his equity office was being repossessed for a different use.

19:15 They moved him from that corner office to a windowless cubicle in the basement of the registrar's office. His staff was reallocated to general administration. His seat at the president's council, it just stopped appearing on his calendar. This is the visceral reality of whiteness's property. The university didn't view Dr. Anthony as a colleague. The university staged Dr.

19:56 Anthony to look progressive in 2020. But in 2025, the landlord, the state and federal government, changed the terms of the lease. And because the institution considers whiteness and funding as its only permanent property, Dr. Anthony was treated as a guest who had overstayed his welcome. He realized in that windowless basement that he never had a seat at the table. He was just being used to hold the chair until the owner wanted it back. Dr. Anthony's credentials were high, but in the hierarchy of the plantation, his expertise was subleasable.

20:44 The institution reclaimed the property of his office space and his title the moment it became a threat to their primary asset, federal capital. This is the sunset of the convergence. In 2020, the institution needed him to protect their reputation. In 2025, they needed to get rid of him to protect their pocketbook. When interests diverge, the black professional is always the first to be evicted. Now let's look at Marcus. Marcus did not get the 430 Zoom call like Dr.

21:24 Joy did. He survived the massacre. But survival in a plantation structure comes with a price tag that does not show up on a W-2. Before the Dear Colleague letter, Marcus was the assistant dean of Black Student Success. His office was a sanctuary. It had books by James Baldwin, Bill Hooks on the shelves. It was the place where black faculty could come in and close the door and students and finally excel. On Monday morning, Marcus receives a memo. The word black is to be removed from his title.

22:08 His office is now the center for general student belonging. He is told that if he mentions systemic racism in his orientation speech, it will be flagged as a divisive concept and a violation of the new state compliance code. This is where the psychic text kicks in. Marcus has to spend his afternoon taking down the posters of the ancestors. He has to scrub the word equity from his departmental website. He has to sit in meetings where his white colleagues, the ones who were wearing Black Lives Matter buttons two years ago, now look at their shoes when he speaks.

22:52 They are playing it safe. And in doing so, they are making Marcus a ghost. He is physically there, but his expertise is now illegal. He has years of experience in critical race theory, but he is forced to speak in hollowed-out language of neutrality. Every time a black student comes to him crying because of an incident on campus, Marcus has to perform a compliance-heavy version of empathy. He can't name the fire while he's standing in the smoke. He has to use neutral terms to describe anti-black acts.

23:36 How in the world do you do that? This is the psychic erasure that Dumas and Ross warns us about. Marcus isn't just an employee. He is a ghost in the hallway. He is the living remains of a commitment the university has murdered. He stays because he has a mortgage and a family. But every day he walks into that building, he leaves a piece of his integrity at the door. Marcus effectively becomes the hired hand, who's been told you can stay on the land, but you can no longer plant your own seed.

24:19 He must plant the crops the owner demands. This is the definition of intellectual sharecropping. So the institution has repossessed Marcus's voice. They are using his black body to fill a seat so that they can claim they are still diverse, but they have stripped away the property of his expertise. This is the slow death that Bertland and Dumas talk about. It is the stress of being forced to lie for a living. It is the high blood pressure of the black professional who has to pretend that the dear colleague letter was a logical policy shift instead of a targeted attack.

25:08 And so I want to pause here to hold space for the windowless basement or the calendar invite that stopped appearing on Dr. Anthony's calendar. That silent erasure is what anti-black racism talks about as being particularly violent. These things are violent, not physically violent, but emotionally, psychologically violent. And in Dr. Anthony's case, where they didn't fire him, they ghosted his authority.

25:52 They rendered him useless, invisible by putting him in a windowless basement. And that is a specific trauma that many of us, and many of you who are listening, are currently navigating. And this is the importance of talking about our stories and talking about how anti-black racism particularly manifests the violent ways in which these egregious acts infiltrate our mind and our psyche. And so again, when you're looking at Berlant and Dumas, and also Dumas and Ross, when you're talking about anti-black racism, in Marcus's case, it is the same.

26:42 They're rendering him invisible. He no longer has a title. His office space has been stripped of identity, of black identity, and being a safe space. So that renders you effectively invisible. The institution doesn't recognize you as an intellectual expertise on blackness. It is stripped away effectively any power, any authority you have in providing this expertise and this knowledge and also this space to other black students, black faculty, black staff at the institution.

27:32 That is violence. And this is where anti-blackness, anti-black racism is important here when you're looking at these examples that I'm sharing about what this effectively does to an individual, and how does it show up and manifest? And so let's talk about the invisible engine. And this is the part where you rarely talk about the administrative labor that keeps institutions from imploding. And so this labor is performed by black professional staff.

28:12 They are the ones who translate this institution into something that where black students can actually survive, these cold white-coated policies. And so this is the labor of middle manager as a mediator. And it is exactly what the institution is currently dismantling. And so when you think about a black professional named Keisha, Keisha just isn't the assistant director of advising. She is a cultural broker.

28:54 When a black freshman feels the chilly climate of a STEM lecture, they don't go to the dean. They go to Keisha's office. When a black graduate student is being exploited by their PI, they don't go to HR. They go to Keisha. She is the one who knows which faculty members are safe and which ones are toxic. She's also the one who spends her lunch break helping a student find a local barber or church because she knows that retention isn't just about grades, it's about belonging. Keisha's invisible labor is the literal life support system of the university.

29:37 But on the plantation, the people who keep the system running are seen as interchangeable. And so again, when this dear colleague letter hit, the university consolidated Keisha's role. They told her that her specialized affinity-based advising was a liability. They replaced her with a general list and a dashboard. They assumed that because Keisha didn't have a research lab or a tenure line, her work could be automated. They didn't realize that Keisha just wasn't processing paperwork.

30:20 She was performing anti-black racism intervention. And so by removing Keisha, the institution didn't just save a salary, they intentionally destroyed the bridge. Now those students who are they're on an island now, and the institution is running and wondering why their student success metrics are crashing. This is the interest divergence in action. The university would rather see a student, a black student, fail, than be seen as supporting them through a divisive office.

31:02 And so this expansion of Keisha's story is critical because it highlights the specialized sacrifice. In my 28 years, I've seen keishas on every campus. The institution loves the keishas when there is a crisis, but they fear the keishas when the state is watching. Why? Because keisha's labor proves that the institution is fundamentally broken. If the university were truly inclusive, Keisha wouldn't have to work 60 hours a week just to keep black students from leaving. By firing Keisha, the institution is trying to hide evidence of its own anti-blackness.

31:49 They are removing the mirror. And when you look at the work that Keisha did in terms of providing a safe space for those black students, creating a sense of belonging and a connection to a community that goes beyond her job description, you are creating student success. You are creating retention. And those things are important to institutions because they give you the outcomes that you need. So when you're recruiting black students into an institution, you need somebody like a Keisha to keep them here so that those outcomes translate into revenue dollars for an institution.

32:38 But when this dear colleague letter hit, Keisha is now expendable. That stuff that Keisha did that she wasn't getting paid to do, but she was doing it because she valued the experience of black students and what it takes to keep them there in a sea of white, that was uncompensated labor. But now it's expendable because it doesn't fit the narrative, because it's a danger to the bottom line, to their property rights, which is funding, and that again is violent because now it renders keisha ineffective, invisible, and the students suffer.

33:29 Their safe space is gone, their keisha is gone. Now, why did I tell you those four stories? In my research, I don't just list examples, I use counterstory telling this is a methodology powered by Danny Solozano and Tarioso that challenge what we call the majority narrative. The majority narrative is the official story the university is telling right now. It sounds like we value diversity, but our hands are tied by the budget and the law.

34:10 It's a story designed to make the removal of black staff look like a neutral and unfortunate accident. But the stories of Dr. Joy, Keisha, Dr. Anthony, and Marcus are the counterstories. They trouble the official record. They prove that when the university says realignment, they actually mean erasure. When they say fiscal responsibility, they mean interest divergence. By telling these stories, we are refusing to let the institution name our reality. We are reclaiming the power to tell the truth about the massacre.

34:55 And so I want to leave you with these four questions. What parts of your brilliance did the institution try to claim? And what parts are you taking back as you walk out the door? Now that the institution's interests have diverged from yours, who are you actually being loyal to? When they say budget cuts, can you see the anti-black elimination? The institution will write a press release about restructuring. What is the counterstory you are writing to tell the truth?

35:38 The letter may be dead in the courts, but the logic of the letter is still alive in our HR departments and boardrooms. We are seeing a whiteness is property move where the institutions reclaim the space previously lent to diversity efforts. For 28 years, I have seen the Academy operate as an extractivist machine. It mines our emotional labor, our cultural capital, and our specialized expertise until the moment the political winds shift. And I want to acknowledge the weight of that.

36:20 Livelihoods have been disrupted. Careers that were built over decades were dismantled in a single board meeting. This massacre isn't just a statistic, it is a profound systemic betrayal that has left real families and real leaders in the wake of its compliance. It is devastating. It is a thief of security. But while the institution is extractivist, we are generative. They can take the job title, they can take the office, and they can take the funding, but they cannot take the brilliance that produced the work in the first place.

37:02 We have survived the interest divergence of this country for 400 years. And as we always have, we will rise. Not because the institution helped us, but because our brilliance was never theirs to keep. The massacre is their legacy, the rise is ours. They can close the office, they can rename the department, but the scholarship and the community remain, and they cannot stop the discourse. Take care of yourselves, keep telling the truth. I'll see you in the next one.

37:44 Thank you for spending time with me on the discourse with Dr. Shea. If today's conversation spoke to you, I invite you to subscribe, share the episode, and continue these conversations in your spaces and communities. You can also stay connected with me online. Follow me on Instagram at Dr. Underscore Shay. On TikTok at Dr Shay slash Gen X, and follow the podcast on TikTok at Discourse with Dr.

38:25 Shay. You can also visit the podcast website at theddiscourse with Dr. Shay dot com for episodes, resources, and more. Remember, storytelling is powerful, scholarship is necessary, and our lived experiences matter. Until next time, keep engaging, keep reflecting, and keep pushing the discourse forward.