I was honored to get to introduce Tressie McMillan Cottom this week when she delivered the opening keynote at the Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute. Here's what I said:

When I was first asked to introduce the keynote today, I thought about wearing my Denver Broncos t-shirt to troll Tressie, who I haven’t seen since my team – go Broncos – beat her team, the Carolina Panthers, in the Super Bowl. See, I would have tied it all together though, something about Cam Newton and how society demands certain bodies – Black folks in this case – perform a certain kind of emotional labor alongside physical and intellectual labor, what that looks like not just in post-game interviews, but what that looks like in academia, what that looks like in a public talk.

I was also sorely tempted to tell you an anecdote from that one time we were together on the 17-hour flight from Johannesburg, South Africa, to Atlanta, Georgia and Magic Mike XXL was one of the in-flight movies. But the set-up is kinda long and it perhaps require you have seen the movie and know a little about “Where Mike Got the Magic.” So I’ll save the story for the cocktail hour.

I actually want to be serious with this intro, because Tressie does some of the most seriously important work of anyone I know. In the last four years, her scholarship has become foundational to my own, as we work to analyze the systems and stories surrounding “skills,” “markets,” “certification,” and “schooling.”

I can tell you the first time I heard of Tressie McMillan Cottom. It was 2012. Tressie had written a response (or two) to an article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education by right-wing pundit whose name isn't worth mentioning and started a petition to have Schaefer Riley dismissed from the publication. I caught wind of this all on Twitter (because thankfully, I’m not in academia anymore and I needn’t subscribe to The Chronicle).

In the Chronicle article in question, this pundit argued for the elimination of Black Studies departments by viciously mocking and attacking the work of three doctoral students. The work of three female doctoral students. The work of three Black women.

Perhaps it’s a familiar story to us now: a publication hires someone it knows is going to say outrageous things. That person writes something outrageous. Outrage ensues. Outrage and virality. The publication then solicits articles, from the offender and the offended, in response – “We encourage you to weigh in!” – an attempt, let’s be honest, to extend not resolve the outrage. As the business model for online publishing increasingly depends on page-views, we get rage clicks. Hate reads.

And Tressie, then a doctoral student herself, named it. She named it for what it is – not just the baiting (link baiting, click baiting, race baiting), but “the institutional logic of racism.” The institutional logic of racism at work on the pages of the premier publication for higher education, one that echoes the institutional logic of racism in higher education.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is just one of the many, many gatekeepers in higher education. It’s the publication that faculty, staff, administrators, and yes graduate students are urged to turn to for the latest on the state of the institution, the disciplines, the politics, the future. It helps identify and shape the important issues, the important characters. The Chronicle, like all gatekeepers, carves out who belongs, whose scholarship – whose lives – matter. These gatekeepers distinguish, designate, and reinforce prestige.

Higher ed is, as Tressie’s work reminds us, a “prestige cartel.” (Her book Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy will be out in February.) This distinction, this stratification – “high” and “low” – coincides, overlaps with others – “real” and “fake,” “public” and “private,” “open” and “closed,” “Ivy” and the rest of us plebs, and perhaps central to our purposes here at this event, “offline” and “online,” “standardized” and “personalized.” The keywords of the new higher ed-tech economy – “innovative,” “disruptive,” “at scale” versus the old, the traditional, the outmoded, the irrelevant.

I’m honored today to introduce the Digital Pedagogy Institute’s opening keynote, assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom – a model public scholar, openly and ferociously engaged in issues of education and justice. My friend…