The journal Dear Higher Ed aims to provide a space for discussions about DEI as some campuses disinvest.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Liz Leyden and urfinguss/iStock/Getty Images
Campus DEI officers and researchers who study inequities in higher education say they’re watching decades of their work disappear as colleges respond to federal and state bans on diversity, equity and inclusion policies and programs by scrubbing evidence of their programs, research and milestones from campus websites.
But two former diversity professionals and an anthropology professor have made it their mission to preserve what they can of their colleagues’ efforts. The group founded a journal, called Dear Higher Ed: Letters from the Social Justice Mountain, to collect insights, experiences, research and best practices from faculty and higher ed staff currently or formerly engaged in DEI work on their campuses.
The project started with two diversity professionals at Virginia Tech who wanted to document their coworkers’ experiences as potential fodder for a book as state DEI bans proliferated. Menah Pratt and Michele Deramo, who worked in Virginia Tech’s DEI office at the time, invited their colleagues to write letters to higher ed. But they quickly realized they wanted to include voices from other institutions as Pratt met coworkers invested in DEI nationally and internationally on a fellowship with the American Council on Education at the University of Minnesota.
“What was the impetus for me is, when I came to Tech, I read 2,000 pages of reports,” Pratt said. “There was a historical record of 20 years of work that had been happening at Virginia Tech around diversity,” full of relevant data and best practices. “And then I thought, ‘Wow, these [reports] are gone from public view.’ They’re gone from so many institutions across the country.”
Pratt wanted to “start capturing some of those voices, those experiences, the strategies, the perspectives” that might otherwise be lost.
Plans for a book grew into a full-fledged journal, hosted by University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing and affiliated with a nonprofit called Scholarly Platforms for Advancing Research and Knowledge, or SPARK. Pratt and Deramo—who shifted to other roles at Virginia Tech after its DEI office closed last year—edited and released Dear Higher Ed’s first volume in 2024. They later brought on Rhode Island College anthropology professor M. Gabriela Torres, and the three of them put out two more issues last year and an open call for submissions for 2026.
The journal’s articles range widely. Some are deeply personal narratives, others detail higher ed’s historic inequities or highlight research and pedagogy tools. One piece, framed by an analysis of Beyonce lyrics, discusses the value of Black women’s voices in the academy. A professor emeritus wrote about how he used his Sicilian family background to open up conversations about race and whiteness with students in his classroom. Others expressed pain at how higher ed had retreated from DEI work and their fears for the aftermath.
“Dear Higher Education, I revere you,” one author wrote, “but I am so mad at you.”
A ‘Little Ray of Hope’
The hope is to offer a place where higher ed staff and scholars who care about diversity work can share critiques of higher ed, vent their frustrations, pour over its fraught history and delve into where it needs to improve, Deramo said. But it’s also about “why transformation is possible.”
“We wanted to get people to try to envision, ‘What’s an alternative? What can higher education be?’” Deramo said.
Torres hopes the journal reaches academics still interested in these areas of practice and research “that higher ed has divested from and want ideas as to how to continue the work.”
She argued campuses have poured resources into DEI and, in doing so, “improved the lives of so many students.” Those resources might have dried up, but the work can’t be “abandoned,” she said.
She also wants to create a home for homeless research as federal agencies and campuses cut funds for projects related to gender and race. Torres researches sexual violence and said she’s increasingly pursued partnerships in Europe and Canada to continue her work.
Scholars who study anything perceived as DEI-related now feel like “I can’t talk about my research, I can’t talk about my values,” she said. But Dear Higher Ed is meant to be a “space of creativity” and “possibility” where they can freely share their thoughts and findings, and their expertise is prized.
The editors can personally relate.
“I am someone whose position was dissolved,” Deramo said. “I was someone whose expertise, whose thought leadership, was set aside. But I’m not going to set it aside.”
The journal also includes some international voices, Pratt noted, because even if the U.S. has backed away from diversity research and practices, that work is continuing in other places, and scholars can learn from each other across borders.
The editors recognize that what they’re asking authors to do—write often deeply personal stories about a now lightning-rod issue on a public platform—isn’t easy. With rare exceptions, they prefer authors put their name on their work, if possible.
Writing for Dear Higher Ed requires “courage” because “if everything is anonymous, then you don’t have anything,” Pratt said. “At some point, you just have to believe that your words out in the world, with your background and all your identities, are more important than the silence.”
For Pratt, the journal has been “a little ray of hope,” she said.
“We’re just sitting here silently suffering,” Pratt said. “And I think to have a small little platform that says, ‘this work is not going away,’ or ‘your work is still important,’ or ‘what you did was important,’ … ‘these values still matter’” offers “that little glimmer of hope.”
