Online

Yacubian, Faith V.

Leadership and Developmental Sciences

2020

Ed. D.

Higher education in the United States has largely been influenced by colonial discourse. Archetypes of the academy, namely the professoriate, reflect and inhabit traces of Western or European schools of thought and colonial genealogy. Inspired by Black, Indigenous Students of Color (BISOC) at a small, private college in the Northeast, this writing aims to unveil the colonial lineage embodied by the professoriate through habits of whiteness. With the use of Critical Discourse Analysis and reflective anecdotes, observations are made about the professoriate's epistemology and academic freedom's role in reinforcing colonial epistemic principles, such as objectivity, mastery and autonomy. In so doing, critical questions about the epistemological tenets that prime the professoriate and academic freedom call upon more complex theories, such as sociomateriality, to rethink, or reorient, the professoriate.