Confronting horror,embracing fantasy: A conversation about Lovecraft Country and radical imagination in higher education

Abstract

Higher education is at a pivotal point of reflection due to the forces of neoliberalism, anti-Blackness, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In the past, higher education has overlooked the university’s far future, opting to focus on readily conspicuous change. Along with this disregarded conversation, these crises present higher education faculty, administrators, and staff an opportunity to critically re-think the future of higher education given what we know now and what we do not. In this dialogic essay between a higher education policy doctoral student and a tenured media and communications professor, the authors peer into the hit HBO series Lovecraft Country and its underlying themes of horror, fantasy, and historical reality to extract vital lessons for higher education. The authors further participate in conversations about utilizing world and storymaking tactics to help higher education envision the university of the future—a future that is radical and boundless.

Setting up the conversation

Over the past year, a deadly pandemic and a reckoning with race and racism have brought to light the inequities tied to both neoliberalism and white supremacy. What is clear is that neoliberalism and white supremacy operate to constrain our collective imagination and vision for a more equitable and just society. Slow to innovate, higher education is one particular institution that could benefit from a more targeted reckoning with neoliberalism and white supremacy, especially given its “white male-only” foundation (Wilder, 2013). Higher education shifted along with the United States when the public good mission transformed into a more neoliberal mission. Neoliberalism—the organizing principle of today’s society that asserts and champions values of individualism, marketization, corporatization, and privatization—has a stronghold on higher education and has caused colleges and universities to refashion their policies, practices, and day-to-day operations away from the public good goals and missions (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004 ). The result of neoliberalism’s haunting presence in higher education is a concentration of power at the top, the rise of for-profit institutions, increased numbers of contingent staff and faculty with little to no job security, and increased competition amongst students, staff, and faculty (Kezar et al., 2019). The rise of neoliberalism also allows higher education to prepare for more probable and possible futures that are aligned with maintaining inequality and legitimacy instead of preferable, more radical ones that center liberation and innovation (Bell, 1997).

Film and television are places where preferable and radical futures find a home. There is a type of creativity and imagination that flows through writers’ rooms, and the results are often bold and otherworldly. In film and television, specific genres cater to the type of radical and boundless imagination we discuss in our conversation around higher education. Those two genres are science fiction and horror. In 2020, HBO premiered a limited series, Lovecraft Country. The show, based on Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel of the same name, takes viewers on a journey through 1950s Jim Crow America as characters Atticus Black, his Uncle George, and his friend Letitia (Leti) journey to find Atticus’ missing father, Montrose. However, as the show goes on, the message of the show goes deeper. Every character, including more supporting characters such as Hippolyta (Atticus’ aunt), Diana (Atticus’ niece), and Ruby (Leti’s sister) go through their own journey toward re-finding their power, agency, and magic through confronting historical and contemporary evils (i.e. working together to disempower white supremacists) and leaning into futuristic elements such as time-travel, witchcraft, and shoggoths, monsters that show up in HP Lovecraft’s novels. Essentially, the show grapples with intense and irrefutable realities and uses the fantastic and other horror elements to tell a story that allows viewers to confront horror, embrace fantasy, and advocate and imagine something greater—something that extends beyond society as imagined and envisioned through the white gaze.

In this dialogical essay, we construct an equation that adds together elements from science fiction and horror genres, neoliberal and white supremacist realities, specific scenes from Lovecraft Country, and our collective expertise around collective action, civic engagement, and higher education to advocate for a more fantastic reimagination of higher education, one that confronts the all-too-familiar on the way to the radical and otherworldly. Throughout the conversation, we call attention to specific scenes, plots, and characters in Lovecraft Country. While we understand that some readers have yet to see Lovecraft, we hope that those readers will use this essay as a launching pad into a detailed, more critical view of the series. Broadly, this conversation is meant to offer a new perspective, a transdisciplinary and multi-generational perspective, around what the future of higher education looks like when we embrace the fantastic and tell the truth about the institution and its problematic inception. We invite readers to look to more preferable futures of higher education and to use a more fantastic frame, not one that is guided by neoliberalism and white supremacy. We hope this conversation will push readers to think more critically about collective and collaborative ways of “doing” academia: doing leadership, academic research, teaching, and learning.

The conversation

Jordan Harper: 2020 was the year of the blacklight. So many of the blemishes that have, over time, blended into the fabric of our country and our institutions have been exposed. 2020 has shown that we have not made as much progress as once believed. And I have been thinking a lot about additional reasons as to why we have not made progress for marginalized and oppressed communities, especially in higher education. After much thought, watching, and reading, I have recently concluded that our lack of progress emerges, in part, from a lack of radical imagination—imagining what could be and how our current social order, policies, and practices prevent the liberation of marginalized and oppressed groups and the betterment of higher education as an institution. Scholars like Henry Giroux (2010) have noted that higher education has transformed into a space with neoliberal priorities. The result of such a stark transformation is that a more radical and liberating imagination is pushed toward the back of our minds, and progress toward equity and liberation is slow-moving. However, I do not think we are at the point of no return. Instead, we have to prioritize a radical form of imagination concerned with learning about and confronting systems of oppression and domination and imagining more equitable and just policies and practices. Policies and practices that are aligned with liberation, joy, and ecstasy.

The HBO series Lovecraft Country did an excellent job showcasing the power of imagination, liberation, joy, and ecstasy. One of the things I loved so much about the show was the clear creativity and imagination that guided the writers’ pen in the writer’s room. The show writers presented a real gift to the world by telling a sophisticated story that simultaneously looked to the past and the future. The show writers tell this futuristic yet historical story, acknowledging the subhuman treatment of Black people in society while also flipping that history on its head by reissuing Black people access to magic and stripping white people of their access to magic because of their misuse of it. The writer’s room enacted this radical, boundless imagination that kept us on our toes; we had no clue what was coming next, and when next came, it was an element of surprise and excitement because it pushed our thinking—what could be Next was beyond what we could’ve ever expected. The idea of Ruby gaining access to a potion to shed her skin into a white woman for good? The idea of a Christina Braithwhite taking a potion to turn into a white man for evil? There were so many undertones of magic and imagination apparent. It became clear that the writers engaged in some type of imagination exercise to produce a show that would blow us all away.

Because I always joke about having a higher education brain, I began to think about the many lessons for higher education in Lovecraft Country. The biggest lesson, I believe, is that we must, collectively, activate a radical, boundless imagination to profoundly and sincerely transform our institutions that have been exposed as problematic, especially in the last year. However, we must first reorient ourselves and engage in different exercises, different ways of doing things. I believe we must assume the role of historians by looking to our institutions’ past and acknowledge the harm and oppression that has been done to communities of color and other marginalized groups. By assuming the role of historians, we can also bring back to life forgotten traditions and “spells.” Leti, Tic, and Montrose do that by stepping into the time machine and finding themselves in the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, trying to find the Book of Names, a spellbook with spells that heal and transform. By journeying back in time and securing the Book of Names, they were able to change the course of the future and even heal Diana, Tic’s niece, who was cursed. We must also think about reissuing power and stripping it away from people who want to use “magic” for evil or individual, neoliberal purposes. After becoming aware of Christina Braithwhite’s plan to become immortal and hoard magic, Leti uses a spell from the Book of Names to strip Christina of her immortality and magic overall. The result is the reclaiming of magic to those who had it first, Black people.

Most importantly, radical imagination requires us to think of the impossible, dream big, and think of a future where inequities do not exist, oppression does not exist, and people have the agency and autonomy to live fulfilling lives. This message is apparent throughout the entire Lovecraft Country series. The Black characters in Lovecraft (Leti, Tic, Uncle George, Ruby, Montrose, Diana, Hippolyta) stand firm in their agency and autonomy by fighting back against oppressive evils and quite literally imagine themselves in worlds where such evils do not exist. I think what is clear is that a reawakening process is needed to enact a radical imagination fully. In Lovecraft, we see this transformation happen in Hippolyta. Hippolyta, known to most in the town as George’s wife and Diana’s mother, realized how much she shrank herself to fit into what society asked her to be—a housewife, a mother, and someone who stayed at home while her husband traveled the world creating a travel guide for Black people. It took the death of George for Hippolyta to begin the process of imagining herself in a different light. She finds herself going through a euphoric process of self-realization where she is suspended in a galaxy, and wherever she wants to go, Seraphina, a goddess, sends her. She finds herself dancing in Paris alongside Josephine Baker and even at the front lines of a war. The message here is that, like Hippolyta, we must imagine ourselves in different worlds so that we too can engage in a reawakening, a sense of radicalism, that invites us to see ourselves and the world differently. Through this reawakening, we demand more, we demand better, and we build worlds centered around liberation and pleasure.

I am reminded of how Lovecraft Country is a form of speculative fiction. In their book SpeculativeEverything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming Dunne and Raby (2013) offer one perspective on why we cannot fully engage in speculative fiction. They purport that we only ever see ourselves in the future in our mind and that our market-driven (neoliberal) society consumes not only our imagination but also our ability to create the future we truly desire. They use the analogy of the shop window by stating, “When we see a strange shoe or ritualistic object we wonder what kind of society must have produced it, [etc.] … We enact a form of window shopping, trying things out in our minds” (2013: 140). Neoliberalism and other dominant forces such as white supremacy have policed our imagination and severely dominate our conception of the future. In many ways, neoliberalism and white supremacy have made us believe that we can only window shop instead of actualizing the future we want. Instead of upending such forces, we name them, brush them aside, and then try to build futures around them. We instead try to build probable and possible futures that are constructed in the presence of neoliberalism and white supremacy, not the absence. In Lovecraft, the writers push against notions of neoliberalism and white supremacy and center the joy and awakening of marginalized individuals at the center. Throughout the series, individual characters find themselves in conflict with white supremacist people and institutions. However, they also hasten back to their community of people and strategize ways to fight oppression. In the presence of strife and struggle, the Black characters in the series work twice as hard to center their joy, realize their magic, and imagine their liberation. I think that is powerful, and there are many lessons to be learned from that alone. Our liberation and the future of our institutions are genuinely bound up in how and to what extent we use our imagination.

Henry Jenkins: I have been spending a lot of time lately thinking about, researching, and writing about what my research group calls the Civic Imagination (Jenkins et al., 2020; Shresthova and Peters-Lozaro, 2020). We start from the premise that you need to imagine what a better world looks like before you can build a better world. So much of academic life is preoccupied with critique, which for me is part of a very vital cycle of intellectual and political change. We need analysis that helps us describe existing conditions and how they have emerged, which then helps us identify problems in the current circumstances, advocacy that helps us present viable alternatives to the status quo, and intervention that allows us to partner with others to make the necessary changes. Ideally, imagination is what drives this process. Critique within this cycle plays a vital function, but by itself, it becomes a dead-end, indulging an academic tendency for critical pessimism. So our approach to civic imagination starts with world-building and goal-setting. Still, it also goes beyond this to think about personal and collective agency, to think about the collective values of an imagining (not the static imagined) community, to propose a process of change where we can act on our critique and towards the alternatives we’ve found viable, and to identify points of solidarity and empathy with other groups that bring different perspectives and needs to the table. We also draw deeply on ideas from the black radical imagination, especially those expressed by Robin Kelley in his book Freedom Dreams (2002). Kelley teaches us that imagining freedom, dignity, democracy, inclusion, and respect before they have been directly experienced is a radical act of the imagination. Many have risked their lives towards achieving those fantasies. Kelley’s book works through a range of different kinds of Black dreams through the years. It lays a pavement for us to think about more contemporary models for Black expressions of the utopian imagination.

You are right to look towards Lovecraft Country as an example of a “freedom dream,” even though it may seem odd to think about a horror story in that way. Lovecraft Country is less coherent as a series than HBO’s Watchman, which also offered some moments of critical utopianism. For most of its run, Lovecraft Country was very compelling at the level of the individual episode and less coherent on the level of seriality. The parts always felt better than the whole that it was building towards. But you hit on an important throughline here—an ongoing narrative of radicalization, empowerment, solidarity, and transformation, which each of the characters in their way undergoes across the series. Robin Wood (2002) tells us that the horror genre might be described as normality disrupted by the monstrous, inviting us to think about three core terms—normality, the monstrous, and the relationship between the two. Unlike most horror texts which construct Blackness as a threatening Other, normality is represented in Lovecraft Country in terms of Blackness. Compared to the reductive stereotypes of Blackness running through media history, this series presents us with a range of characters with different experiences of Blackness, most of them shaped both by love and by pain and the dysfunctionality that comes from the everyday forms of systemic racism, sexism, colonialism, and homophobia that plagues and deforms their lives. The monstrous here is often white supremacy in its various forms. And the relationship between the two is complex—since it operates both on a realistic level as seen in Lovecraft Country in terms of sundown towns, abusive cops, redlining, and job discrimination, and on the level of magical realism, which is where the magic comes in. It is through the monstrous that the structures shaping their lives come into focus for them—accepting a world of magic is a moment of radical recognition of their own conditions. And having recognized the place of magic in their world, the characters in Lovecraft then begin to deploy it, to seek ways to empower themselves: just as you mentioned, Hippolyta’s journey was the most compelling to me on this level since she redefines herself through a dense, epoch-spanning pedagogical journey. The various characters eventually find ways to overcome differences and work towards shared ends. Ultimately, they transform the institutions that have hindered their lives and look towards a changed future together, with much sacrifice along the way. The book, written by the next generation, represents their changed future together. What makes the series unnecessarily fragmented is that each episode explores different subgenres within horror and the ways they help us to see this tension between Black lives as they are right now (and as they were historically determined) and what they might be with a redistribution of power (as constituted by magic).

Though we still need to think about what this means concerning higher education, I want to end with the suggestion that speculative fiction more generally represents a powerful toolkit for thinking through these issues. Two books I strongly recommend are Octavia’s Brood (inspired by the works of Octavia Butler) (Imarisha, 2015) and A People’s Future of the United States (LaValle and Adam, 2019). In both, a mixture of science fiction writers and activists envision alternatives to current conditions. Most of these stories start with a dystopian reality and work towards a more utopian alternative. This is the dialectic at the heart of that genre. All utopias include an implicit if not explicit dystopia against which the utopian alternative is a reaction, and most dystopian stories include a resistance movement that has begun to work towards transformative change. Why is it that we so rarely see this mix in critical theory in the academy? That’s why I want students in higher education to acquire the skills that form the basis for speculative fiction—first and foremost, the analytic process of world-building, which constitutes the first step towards changing our current social conditions.

Paulo Freire’s Teachers as Culture Workers (2005) includes a strong argument for the importance of imagination throughout the educational process. Here, imagination is understood not only as a means of escapism but also as a critical tool for understanding current conditions that require more rewarding alternatives. Freire writes:

It is necessary to stimulate the learners’ imagination, to use it in “blueprinting” the school they dream of. Why not put into practice right in the classroom the school they dream about? Why not, in discussing imagination projects, point out to students the concrete obstacles to attaining imagination, obstacles that, for the time being, are not easily overcome? Why not emphasize their right to imagine, to dream, and to fight for that dream? The imagination devoted to the possible and necessary dream of freedom has to confront the reactionary forces who feel that freedom is exclusively for them. (2005: 93)

So, I come back to where you left us before. How might we imagine an alternative to the practices of higher education as it is currently constituted?

Jordan Harper: As I alluded to earlier, there exists an imperative for us to be historians if we are to imagine a different type of institution of higher learning. We must inform people about the horror story of higher education—what is normal, who are the monsters, and the relationships between them, as Wood would advocate (Wood, 2002). I believe this understanding is pivotal if we are to radically and boundlessly imagine a new higher education.

In higher education, whiteness and inequality are normal and they mimic inequalities/inequities apparent in the larger society. Also, this idea of struggle, strife, and sacrifice is normalized in higher education. We have become complacent with the idea of surviving, not thriving, and become really good at critiquing but not changing. The idea of normal is etched into our brains and it prevents us from radically imagining more equitable and liberatory policies, practices, and spaces. It is also important to point out that both overt and covert forms of whiteness and anti-Blackness are normal in higher education. And when we internalize and assimilate to such standards, we lose ourselves and, subsequently, our ability to imagine—much like Ruby in the earlier episodes of Lovecraft when she would shed her Black skin to turn into a white woman just to chastise and look down upon her Black coworkers at the department store. She did this because she wanted to experience the power that white people had over Black people in 1950s Jim Crow America and the loss of her precious life was the consequence of her actions. I actually believe many senior-level administrators think in this way and leaders of color wake up and put on a white mask to assimilate, belong, and keep their jobs. To me, that is why diversity efforts alone cannot do much for higher education. Diversity is necessary but it cannot be an end-goal (Ahmed, 2012).

Monsters in higher education come masked as faculty, students, or staff who are either complacent and resistant to equitable and systemic change or those eager to disrupt the system, dismantle the institution, and create something new. In this sense, monsters are either delinquent and mischievous beings who try to yield all power and stop transformative change from happening, like Christina Braithwaite and the police in Lovecraft, or radical and tenacious beings who will stop at nothing to take back opportunities, traditions, and imagination that was stolen from them, like Leti and Tic in Lovecraft.

The worldbuilding you speak of, Henry, is so pivotal. And I believe that by telling the higher education horror story that consists of a narrative and characters (monsters, ordinary people), we can begin to think about a resolution. Once we are aware of this horror story and not this glamorized idea of higher education, we can have a forward-thinking conversation. As one of my colleagues, Antar Tichavakunda, once said, “We need to be real about higher education’s limited potential to serve the project of [Black] liberation. When we recognize where we stand in relation to the university, we can be more strategic about where we place our energy” (Tichavakunda, 2020, para. 6).

I want to kick us into the direction of beginning to radically and boundlessly imagine a new higher education. For starters, I think of radical and boundless imagination like a time machine. We close our eyes and courageously step into the time machine that takes us into both the past and the future. We don’t bring anything from the present day with us—no worries, no struggle, no strife. When we open our eyes and our minds, we can begin to see something we have never seen before; kind of like Hippolyta when she found herself dancing with Josephine Baker in France. But, just like Hippolyta, we must come back to the present day. We must bring our vision of the future back to the present day and chart a way forward. In future studies, we call that backcasting (Dreborg, 1996). Our imagination is going to be full of contradictions and that is just fine—we must welcome that. Contradictions start conversations. I think it would be beneficial for us to engage in our own speculative design and imagination exercise, thinking deeply about what the future of higher education could and should look like.

Henry Jenkins: We all bring with us burdens of history which limit our capacities to imagine and to act upon that imagination. Those burdens reflect my own personal journey as someone who was born into the Jim Crow South, who grew up in a segregated world, who absorbed much Lost Cause ideology and grew up in Atlanta at the peak of the Civil Rights era. My cohort had to make conscious choices about where we stood as white youth in the racial politics of our era—some of my classmates joined the Klan and some now work for the Southern Poverty Law Center. As someone who chose to ally myself with struggles over equality and inclusion, and who has seen education as a tool in that mission, I have still had to struggle to unlearn various forms of internalized norms about whiteness and to discover ways to work on behalf of and in conversations with students whose backgrounds are different from my own. I still make bruising mistakes, still have bracing encounters, and still am shocked to find white supremacist attitudes buried in myself. So, yes, it is amazing to embrace the possibility of shedding all of that—freeing our imaginations with “no worries, no struggle, no strife.”

The time machine is too tempting an analogy; it potentially suggests a technological fix—computers rather than teachers, games rather than texts—but I see the need for social, cultural, and institutional changes which could be substantiated through the forms of participatory learning and networked education—though these seem less utopian in the wake of the pandemic—but would always need to go beyond a focus on new tools and platforms. I would start with the idea that the university of the future would embrace multiple epistemologies, multiple ways of knowing, multiple traditions of knowledge building. To imagine such a place, I would need to shed my histories, but I would not want the students and faculty of such a school to have to shed their own histories. They should all have the right to be aware of their histories and to be proud of who they are and where they have come from. My hope is that we will no longer understand race through a Black and white dual racial narrative. I get that we have not yet overcome anti-Blackness and white supremacy, but it may already be too late to be thinking in those terms, given the reality of a university that has students of many races and nationalities who need to learn to interact with each other. In this regard, Lovecraft Country is itself a transitional narrative in its preoccupation with reclaiming Black history and healing wounds within the Black community, as important as that may be at the current moment. I am struck at how rarely Lovecraft Country thinks beyond Blackness—we have one story that involves a Native American character who is treated no better by the Black characters than they were by the white colonizers and is quickly expelled from the text, and we have one Korean character who eventually finds a secondary role in the fellowship at the center of the narrative but only after being otherized and abandoned. I want a university that welcomes all (without either universalizing or otherizing its members) and values the differences within its own communities.

For this to work, the university will need to shed its current disciplinary structures because the disciplines, each in their own way, have emerged through histories of exclusion, have centered whiteness at the cost of other epistemologies, have created boundaries that make it hard to configure knowledge in new ways, and have created hierarchies where some claim knowledge as a birthright while others are forced to know things only on other people’s terms. To continue with the Lovecraft Country analogy, everyone should have access to the magic of learning, but that magic should be something that they access on their own terms, for their own purposes, and with full legitimacy. Students of color should not have to feel like they have stolen the magic, but that it was theirs to use all the time, and that’s another way that Lovecraft Country fails us.

And ideally, the new university would be a center for multidirectional learning. I learn from every student I work with, as they help to broaden my perspective and expose me to new ways of seeing the world. But the university’s administrative structure is one where, as a faculty member, I am granted enormous privilege and assumed to already know all of the answers. This cuts all of us off from the best ways of learning from each other. I don’t want to abandon the idea that I have things to teach as a consequence of my prior learning—in the classroom, through my research, and as an elder with a lifetime of experience behind me—but I also want to live in a world where the value of peer-to-peer learning is recognized, when students are respected for what they learn outside the classroom (through involvement with other communities, through life experiences), and also where learning can flow in other directions, where faculty can learn from students, where all can learn from surrounding communities within a much more porous institution (or, better yet, community of practice), and where community members can return throughout their lives to learn and to teach. We may all learn through trying to do new things, by embracing new identities, by entering new communities and trying out their practices, as the time machine allows people to do in Lovecraft Country. To work, such a community may need some people who can help identify and forge meaningful connections between people, between bodies of knowledge, but the possibilities for fluid movement must be central to the ways universities work. Indeed, in such a world, we might shed the concept of the university with its focus on “universal” knowledge in favor of the multiversity which is defined through its expansions, inclusions, diversities, and fluidities.

And finally, I would want the multiversity to be a place that experiments with new kinds of lifestyles, new ways that people can live together. I have seen something of this experimentation within the dorm where I was a housemaster at MIT but I also saw a dean of students office that was deeply hostile to student lifestyle choices, that distrusted those whose choices did not fit current social models or transgressed against their conservative moral systems. In the more fluid structure that I am proposing, not all learning will occur within classrooms. Indeed, most of it will not, and so the housing system of the university must be established with the goal of creating opportunities for people to learn from each other with the recognition that, as we say in Cultural Studies, “culture is ordinary” and embedded in our everyday practices. So, diverse groups of people should live side by side, learning from each other’s culturally resonant practices, and be free to experiment with different ways of living. These participants should be free to ask each other questions without embarrassment and all should bear some burden to help each other to understand this diversity of ways of living. But all will also have some obligation to suspend their prejudices and remain open to discovering something of value from other cultures.

Some of this will sound naive, but that is because we do not get to suspend our histories except through fantasy. Sooner or later, we need to bring these utopian ideals back to confront the realities we are living in and figure out how much of this we can achieve and how we might set out to build such open learning structures in our world.

Jordan Harper: I was particularly struck by what you said regarding the magic of learning. And, accordingly, in my conceptualization of the new university, we would strip this idea of tenure from faculty because I believe that the magic of learning and magic of producing is confined in the pursuit of tenure. I wrote about the carceral logic of tenure in my post for your blog, Confessions of an Aca-Fan, titled “Stop Stressing Graduate Students about Tenure” (Harper, 2020), as I truly believe this idea of tenure constrains our ability to think radically and produce creative and widely accessible material. What if tenure was obliterated and academic freedom was given and not earned? How would graduate students navigate their respective graduate programs? How would the early-career faculty prioritize their responsibilities? Would they do more service work? Care about teaching more? Would they partake in public scholarship more? These are truly the questions that keep me active in the work I do, and I believe an institution without tenure would be a stronger one and academics would have more sense of freedom, autonomy, creativity, and community. Everything would change and priorities would be shifted, which I think we are in desperate need of. I actually believe that stripping the formal process of tenure away would be a large step in eradicating neoliberalism and returning back to the mission of the public good.

I think it would also be beneficial for the future university to have open elections for higher education leaders. That is, allow members of the campus community to vote for the next president, dean of x school, vice president of student affairs, or provost. A great deal of these hiring conversations are done behind closed doors and I fear that those at the hiring table know very little about what the greater campus community wants and needs from those in formal leadership positions. And, no, there would be no electoral college—popular vote wins. I’m imagining debates and open forums where members of the community ask hard-hitting questions, demand answers, expose the track records of job candidates, and allow candidates to propose their visions for the new university. One could argue that we often see the uncovering of problematic track records through opinion pieces in places like Insider Higher Ed or The Chronicle, but there is something way more democratic and in alignment with accountability and transparency for such job candidates to actually have to answer to these questions and concerns in public and with an audience.

In the new university, graduate education would get back to its originating idea, being a place for intellectual curiosity. And as a result, graduate admissions would change drastically. If we are to think about and honor this idea of graduate education as intellectual curiosity, we would remove exclusionary barriers and logics such as the archaic qualifying exam and the GRE. Graduate students would be able to have full autonomy to create their own curriculum of study. They would be able to complete collaborative dissertations and spend more time engaging in life-giving and personally meaningful work for and with their communities.

Finally, I want the new university to honor the knowledge, experience, and insights that campus support staff (e.g. custodians, administrative assistants, building operators) have to offer. It is my dream for these looked-over members of the campus community to have a seat at decision-making tables. Peter Magolda did an excellent job capturing the experiences of labor workers and how their experiences are shaped by corporatization and neoliberalism in his book The Lives of Campus Custodians (Magolda, 2016), and in the book, he exposes the wealth of knowledge custodians carry and how they are excluded in a university that preaches about inclusivity. This sad but true notion ties back to what we talked about earlier in the horror story of higher education and the intense, yet irrefutable truths about the institution and the stronghold neoliberalism has on it. In their roles, both assigned and unassigned, campus support staff get a grassroots look at the departments they report to and the institution at large. They are also likely to outlive faculty and staff in their respective departments, giving them critical insights into change in higher education. In the future university, we will ask campus support staff for their input in decisions about change and reward their contributions accordingly.

Wrapping up the conversation

The ability to radically and boundlessly imagine a new higher education is tied up in neoliberal and white supremacist realities. Such realities have significantly limited our imagination of what can and should be and, thus, our progress toward equity and liberation is sluggish. In this dialogical essay, the authors looked to Lovecraft Country as a model for reaching back into history to understand historical wrongs in an effort to use our positions in the present to build a new and better future. The authors also engaged in their own speculative design and imagination exercise to ruminate on both their individual and collective visions for the future of higher education. The dialogical structure of this essay is in itself a departure from the normalized form of academic scholarship. Our goal here is to flatten some of the differential power and authority of faculty and student, to actively listen and learn from each other’s perspectives.

If we are to understand neoliberalism and white supremacy as normal monsters in higher education that support inequality and notions of individualism, then we cannot actually reimagine higher education without a concerted attack on those monsters on the way to envisioning a more liberating future. Lovecraft Country shows us what it looks like to simultaneously confront present-day evils, journey back through history to learn more about ourselves, our cultures, and our institutions, and compose multiple ideas of the future in the present. Lovecraft actually serves as an exemplar for higher education. Even though it is a fictional TV show, some of the most marginalized individuals on campus can locate themselves in the characters. People that society’s oppressive and dehumanizing systems have disadvantaged desire for something new—a new world where they can live joyous, autonomous lives; that is in itself otherworldly and fantastic and transcends what our current social order would even allow. It is, by nature, a form of radical imagination.

What does it mean to confront horror and embrace fantasy in higher education? To confront horror means to get real about the exclusionary nature of our institutions, to be transparent and accountable regarding institutional harm put onto marginalized groups, to organize attacks on the monstrous in higher education (i.e., fallacies of white supremacy, neoliberal manifestations that further produce inequities, false dichotomies around who is the teacher and who is the student), and to experience an individual, epoch-spanning pedagogical journey like Hippolyta to discover how and where you went wrong and supported oppressive and dehumanizing projects that are antithetical to the actualization of equity, ecstasy, and liberation. Through the journey of confronting horror, we can arrive at embracing collective and individual fantasies, and we can change higher education as we know it. We can shift from possible and probable futures to the preferable futures we so radically and boundlessly imagine and deserve.