Want to Be an Activist in Residence? A Scholar and an Activist Explain How

There are scholars and there are activists. For the most part, the two have remained in their own kingdoms, separated by university doors. The activists stayed in the streets, responding to the injustices of the world, connecting people to reach their goals. The scholars stayed in universities, writing, thinking, teaching.

When Deva Woodly, an associate professor of politics at the New School, was working on a book about Black Lives Matter and other movements, she wanted to learn more from activists in the field. In her research, the divide between activists and scholars was obvious.

So she lobbied administrators to let her bring an activist, Shanelle Matthews, former director of communications for the Black Lives Matter Global Network, into her world. With a new, yearlong, activist-in-residence position, Woodly created a link between the two groups, with an eye toward teaching more academics to solve real-world problems.

Woodly and Matthews spoke with The Chronicle about the inaugural position at the New School, and how the pair hopes to spread the idea to more colleges.

When did you realize there was a need for an activist in residence?

Woodly: After I met Shanelle, honestly. I’m working on a book on the movement for black lives, and I wanted my book to be empirically based on interviews with people involved in the movement. She was my first interview. During the interview, not only did I learn about her involvement in and thoughts on the movement, but she said a lot of things about the needless, dysfunctional separation between activist work and work at universities. She expressed interest in being funded at a university to do research that was relevant to her work.

I started to research the idea of activists in residence, if there were templates for this. The London School of Economics had a position called activist in residence. I went to my dean and said, “Look, it makes so much sense for researchers to be connected with activists, where they can share ideas and resources, so that researchers’ work can be grounded in reality, and activists work can be grounded in the knowledge that universities bring to the table.”

Through a long, ad hoc, convoluted process we were able to work with deans and donors to bring Shanelle to the New School. It was during that process that I realized the broad application that this idea could have. There should be an institutional place in universities for activists and practitioners in the same way that there are artists. Many universities have artists in residence, and this is very similar.

Is it the university’s role to support activists in the same way that a university would artists or writers?

Woodly: I don’t think it’s a patron relationship, at least not in the case of activists. It’s a knowledge-based partnership. Universities are where you learn things about the world that are useful for the people who are living in the world. To not have activists in that equation seems wrong-headed.

Did it take special convincing for the committees or donors to get people on board?

Woodly: Shanelle was involved in that process as well. People were receptive to the idea, but it was still a new idea.

Matthews: I don’t want to downplay how important it is to have a person who’s taking up the mantle of advocating for this new idea. Everybody’s orientation to activism, or how they understand it, is different. People have a desire to have this role at universities for different reasons. For Deva, she sees the necessity of it — the symbiotic relationship between activists and students and faculty and staff. For others, it makes a university attractive to students who care about activism.

How did you pitch this position?

Woodly: The pitch was that if universities are to be places where we develop knowledge about the world, then the work of activists, which is increasingly imperative in the cycle of contentious politics that we’re in right now, is essential. It’s essential for students who are themselves involved in activism. It’s essential for faculty who are doing research in these areas. And it’s essential for the activists, who get time and space to reflect on their work.

What does it mean to be an activist in residence?

Matthews: As the inaugural activist in residence, my role was defining that. It is relationship-building at its core. It’s about having meaningful conversations with people who share your interests, your values, who want to tease apart their ideas with you. Also, it’s about introducing a different world, a different way of thinking and perspective to a group of people who are oriented in a totally different place.

Woodly: Being able to think with Shanelle for the year was incredibly enriching. This goes to deeper questions of what knowledge is and how it’s constituted. I want this position to spread to many universities not only because it makes institutional sense, but also because it underscores what I believe about knowledge.

Knowledge is co-constituted by people from all walks of life who have all kinds of different expertise. And it is codified in universities. This is what scholarship is all about. It’s essential to integrate into institutions people who are dealing with the most pressing, fundamental problems that we face today.

Shanelle, what made you want to take the job?

Matthews: The first thing was Deva’s confidence in me. How she thought I would be a good fit for the position was incredibly convincing. It wouldn’t have been the same if somebody had just written to me out of the blue. We had had this rapport, I trusted what she was saying, and it doesn’t hurt that she’s a black woman and I’m a black woman.

If I am going to take time to think about how to work smarter, I need to have some space to do that. I knew that this opportunity would not come again. I’m not sure I believed in myself as much as Deva believed in me when I started this. How much people wanted me here really mattered.

It wasn’t until I got on campus and started moving through the New School community that I realized that it was the right decision.

That’s interesting, that people wanting you there mattered so much.

Matthews: Even now I still get emails from a student, “I’m so glad that you were here.” And it’s really affirming.

Do you think faculty members can also be activists?

Woodly: Yes, absolutely. I learned from scholar-activists. It is very hard to do. There need to be lots of models. There’s lots of backlash at the moment. This is a critical juncture not only in American but world history, where we’re setting the terms for the 21st century. We are litigating these questions of value.

Do you think activists in residence have freedoms that another faculty member wouldn’t have?

Woodly: Yes. Because the activist in residence is a one-year position, and their long-term trajectory is not necessarily at the university. Their purpose is to have space and time to reflect for themselves, but also to challenge the community. When they challenge the community, it may be perceived in a different way than when a regular faculty member does it. With Shanelle, the kinds of questions she asks knocked people off their script, so they really have to think. A faculty member who has been trained and inculcated into the culture of the academy at large — people have already decided what side they’re on. That’s no knock against the faculty, it’s just a process of acculturation. Somebody with a sense of the outside world just asks different questions.

Matthews: One of the variables is power dynamics among people who are multiply credentialed and those of us who are not. I neither belonged to the student community nor the faculty community. The faculty was very nice to me, but I’m not a professor in the traditional sense, and I felt I needed to stay in my lane of what I knew and what I could share, and not to oversell myself as an expert in the activism field. The students who were organizing on campus, I felt much closer to them, but they perceived me as a person with more positional power than they had.

How do you see this spreading in higher ed?

Woodly: It seems to have emerged at a couple of different places. We’re not the first. Barnard and Berkeley also had activists in residence in 2017.

Matthews: Lots of people have asked, how did you decide on this? People are curious at the moment, particularly as activism is seeping into all kinds of professions. People are realizing that this a craft people have, something they do for a living. One of the major challenges is funding it. Deans have a whole roster that they need to get funded every year. It’s important that somebody is pushing the dean to do this. Deva had to push the deans at the New School; people have to make the case for why it’s important to prioritize this.

How do universities make this a permanent position?

Woodly: We’re trying to get this position endowed. Based on the fundamental constitution of the university as a knowledge producer, this is a deep ask. This is a deficit that we have institutionally that we can correct, not something that we need only in this moment. There should always be an institutional link between practitioners for social change and people producing knowledge about the world. We want to create these positions because they’re good for universities, because they’re good for public knowledge. The university is the place where you go to solve problems.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Correction (7/24/2018): This article has been updated to reflect Deva Woodly’s current title. She is an associate, not an assistant, professor.

Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz is breaking-news editor. Follow her on Twitter @FernandaZamudio, or email her at fzamudiosuarez@chronicle.com.