Dr. Eboni M. Zamani-Gallaher
In a packed ballroom filled with higher education faculty, administrators, and graduate students, Dr. Eboni M. Zamani-Gallaher delivered a stirring presidential address at the Association for the Study of Higher Education's 50th anniversary conference, weaving together personal narrative, cultural history, and urgent warnings about threats facing American higher education.
Zamani-Gallaher, who began her tenure as the Renée and Richard Goldman Dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Education on May 1, 2024, was introduced by Dr. Leonard Taylor, Associate Professor and Director of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). Taylor's emotional introduction set the tone for the morning, as he shared how Zamani-Gallaher had "lifted me up and held me down in this here academy in so many different ways."
Zamani-Gallaher traced her own educational journey from her family's roots in Mississippi sharecropping through her grandmother's migration north at age 16, to her current position leading the premier scholarly organization for higher education research.
"I am the dream and the hope of the slave," she declared, citing author Maya Angelou, positioning herself as both scholar and "griot"—the West African tradition of oral historian and cultural archivist who serves as custodian of memory and conscience.
The address took direct aim at what Zamani-Gallaher characterized as a "return to anti-intellectualism" sweeping American higher education. She drew extensive parallels between historical anti-literacy laws that prevented enslaved people from learning to read and contemporary legislative efforts like Florida's so-called "Stop WOKE Act" that restrict teaching about race and systemic inequality.
"Anti-literacy laws in the early 18th and 19th centuries, Southern states had enacted laws to prevent enslaved African Americans from learning to read, to write, particularly after major rebellions like Stono in 1739 or Nat Turner's Revolt in 1831," she explained. "These laws imposed harsh penalties on both learners and teachers because they were strictly enforced."
Drs. Candace Hall and Charles H. F. Davis III debut their documentary, "Things We Imagined" at this year's ASHE conference.Jaelin Collier
"A contemporary case in point of the ongoing legalization of education and being literate is Florida's Stop WOKE Act. It endeavors to restrict teaching on race, which has led to the misrepresentation in curriculum, limited academic freedom, bringing forth racial anxieties, racial inequity. This is not about just censorship. It's about control. About who gets to define the truths, who gets to speak it, who gets to be seen as people, who is human, in the narrative of knowledge production and dissemination and acquisition," she added.
Zamani-Gallaher catalogued the ongoing threats facing higher education.
"From slashing funding to MSIs [Minority Serving Institutions] and anti-DEI policies, dismantling offices that promote inclusion, and the rollback of civil rights, to the attacks on academic freedom and gag orders on teaching anti-CRT laws, abandoning land acknowledgements, and discussions of systemic racism and heterosexism and transphobia, to actual erasure of BIPOC and LGBTQIA folks from curricula and history and culture," she said. "There's been massive cuts in the federal research arena, a lot of it in particular, has been targeting what are studies that are deemed to be too 'woke.'"
She noted the current challenges extend far beyond legislation.
"We got the Department of Ed being stripped down to the studs, we got Grad PLUS loans getting gutted, we got ongoing federal disinvestment, rising tuition costs, fueling of anti-immigrant sentiment and the presence of ICE on our campuses,” she said. “You know, these latest pressure tactics from the Higher Education Compact or the litany of other disruptions and distractions that are happening, that are leaving many of us to feel unease and having no safety net."
Drawing on Richard Hofstadter's seminal 1963 work Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Zamani-Gallaher argued that current attacks on higher education follow a long American tradition.
"Anti-intellectualism claims education as a political topic, where reason and free and critical reflection are seen as rebellious acts of defiance," she continued. "Education became political terrain where academics were branded as elitists, suspect, and dangerous. Does that sound familiar to you?"
She noted that "in recent years, there's been a political backlash against expertise, in particular a distrust of academics and institutions of higher learning. We've seen an anti-science movement. We've seen attacks on theory, particularly critical theory, critical inquiry."
The ASHE conference itself reflected the themes of Zamani-Gallaher's address. The previous evening, attendees gathered for a screening of "Things We Imagined," a documentary spearheaded by Drs. Candace N. Hall and Charles H.F. Davis III that explores the experiences of Black scholars in the academy.
This year’s conference featured hundreds of sessions examining critical issues in higher education, from strategies for supporting minoritized students to community college transfer pathways to the future of faculty governance. The conference theme, "Bending the Arc," drew from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous statement that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
Zamani-Gallaher said that this bending requires active effort and highlighted what she termed "scholarly creative expression" as a form of resistance, arguing that "scholarship isn't just analysis, it's creation." She called on attendees to be "architects of change" rather than "apologists of injustice."
"I learned that research could be rigorous, and that it could be relatable, that it could be theoretical, but it could also be practical. That it could be empirical, but it could also be expressive. It could be critical, but it could still not be divorced from being compassionate," she said.
She positioned scholarly work as both intellectual and creative labor, arguing that academics carry forward lineages of thinkers, artists, and activists.
"Our lives are like the scholars we study. They follow us too," she said. "As scholars, we inherit lineages of thinkers and artists and activists, because it's an art—intellectual DNA. And through each of us, the arc keeps bending."
Scholarship, she added, isn't just analysis, it's creation.”
”It's imaginative, it's resistance, and through our work, we make visible what has been rendered invisible. We have the power to unveil,” she said. “Through narrative and data, through story and scholarship, we unveil multiple truths and tell truth to be felt, making sure that it also is heard."
The speech balanced sobering assessments with calls for resilience. Citing Brazilian educator Paulo Freire's concept of critical hope, she argued that "despair serves oppression" and paralyzes the capacity for change.
"Critical hope doesn't deny pain because we know there's a lot of pain, right? Critical hope works through that pain,” she said. “It's hope grounded in action, it's hope grounded in strategy. It's grounded in facts, and it doesn't skirt the truth. Critical hope acknowledges challenges, but it remains steadfast in overcoming them."
Zamani-Gallaher positioned the current moment as one requiring both courage and creativity.
"We are at a pivot and crossroads that we're at in higher education, where we're both under siege, but we're also ripe with transformative possibilities,” she said. “We are compelled to engage with what is unfolding in the narrative, a story. One that is defined by enduring tensions of progress and peril, mirroring the broader societal occurrences that shape our collective future."
She challenged her audience to consider their role in pushing the study of higher education forward.
"Our field distinctly needs to advance the public good, and we actually have to also remember that in trying to advance the public good that we are actually being good to ourselves and one another,” she added. ”And for those of us that may have felt that these recent events over the past few years have really knocked you off your feet, let me revisit the sage words of Maya Angelou who said, 'Still I rise.' And rise we must, with critical hope in our hearts, and creativity in our scholarship, and justice in our praxis, and intellect in our totality."
