The Language of Academia

I sat at home with my feet on the kitchen counter, a bad habit that my mother has hated since I was in high school. My mom walked into the room, scolding me for the transgression. I laughed, obliged, and could only focus on how good it felt to be home after my freshman year of college. My brother and father walked in a little later, joining me around the counter.

We dove into a discussion. I can’t remember what it was about. It could have been about the presidential election, the history of rap music and its relation to "Hamilton" the musical, or whether or not casting the founding fathers as people of color was an unfair rewriting of history. The topic that particular afternoon didn’t matter much. The important part is that it was intellectually challenging, as all of the conversations between the three of us have been for as long as I can remember. My family, unknowingly, was the first group to prepare me for the environment at Harvard—for classroom discussions of readings, political arguments in the library, and all the rest of the daily conversations that require me to challenge and defend my peers.

But something is different during this conversation after a year across the country. I hear myself speaking, and my sentences sound too long and too large for my kitchen. My vocabulary is foreign, and I’m using words that I’ve never wielded against my brother or my father.

As the conversations go on, I find that I’ve absorbed so many new phrases in two semesters at school. Although I’ve made them mine in section and in papers, they now feel unnecessary, as if in the process of creating knowledge and seeking truth alongside those who share my blood, they’ve lost their meaning.

Dissonance, paradigm shift, intersectionality, and code-switching come out of my mouth but, for the first time in months, they feel like the words of someone else. They are the words of a stranger, an academic, not a teenage Latino boy trying to have a conversation with his family.

Academia is a language in itself: a complicated, and often times unnecessarily polarizing part of a larger institution. The language of academia can be excessive and long-winded simply for the sake of complexity, as if being complicated means the academic’s ideas are of higher quality. Knowing the language of academia is a privilege, and often a result of whether or not people in your communities have had the chance to engage with higher education. The pursuit of knowledge, and the creation of understanding, is universal and can be accomplished by anyone, regardless of how much money you make, whether or not your parents went to college, or the complexion of your skin.

While the pursuit of knowledge is universal, the opportunities provided through academia are not. Students of color have a tougher path to entering and completing graduate school, a path that is made even more difficult if that student is a first-generation college student from a low-income background. The faculty at most universities is overwhelmingly white. In 2013, only five percent of full-time faculty across the country were Hispanic. These measures try to tell me that academia is not for me or for my brother, and separate from those dinner table conversations from home. But I know that the only thing that separates the conversations in my kitchen from those in academia is a language—one that represents nothing more than a lack of opportunity and resources.

I’ve seen the intelligence, and capability, for academia from all my Latinx peers at Harvard. They adapt and mold themselves to this new environment, pick up new phrases, figure out how to perfect them in an attempt to survive in a world that values a different kind of learning than the one they’ve perfected at home.

But the creation of knowledge is not only for those who can afford to go to college and learn this new language. The creation of knowledge is everywhere, throughout wildly different communities with different resources. It’s in Jaime Escalante’s classroom, where he managed to teach calculus to near perfection, regardless of the resources available to the high school where he taught. It’s in the undocumented high school valedictorian who will be attending Yale in the fall after escaping dangerous situations in Mexico. It’s in the story of the four Mexican immigrants whose robot was competitive, even without the opportunities afforded to other teams. These three stories are unaffected by the complex language of academia, proving that intelligence and knowledge is not simply about thesis papers and written theory.

Academia is regarded as the pinnacle of education, and it does a lot of good. But it is not the only way to gain knowledge. It is an institution that is not yet open to all, and while we fight to make the language of academia equitable for everyone, we must keep reading, writing, and thriving in the languages we already own.

Ruben E. Reyes Jr. ’19, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Leverett House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.