The Pipeline Is Broken: Graduate Students of Color on Racism, Justice, and Joy in the Academy

The Pipeline Is Broken explores the reality of racial exclusion and bias in graduate student education, arguing that the insidious effects of structural and institutional racism substantially chip away at the very pipeline of future BIPOC academics―already limited for other racialized reasons.

A series of letters written by graduate students of color, this collection offers a multifaceted account of the challenges, oppositions, microaggressions, and outright discrimination that these students face in higher education settings. Graduate students describe navigating hostile mentoring relationships and unwelcoming campus cultures and peers and laboring for poverty wages to earn their degrees. Yet these letters celebrate joy, community, and agency, offering a more complete and affirming view of graduate student life. Through these brave personal stories, The Pipeline Is Broken asks readers to interrogate what it means to navigate higher education as a person of color and to understand that the reality of faculty of color’s numerical-minority status is a complicated phenomenon whose genesis rests not at the moment of job interview. Rather, these letters show, this status is an intricate manifestation of a process that begins in elementary schools, is reinforced in high schools and colleges, and is part and parcel of the minefield that is graduate education in America.

Essential reading for anyone who cares about racial equity in education, mentorship, leadership development, or student well-being, The Pipeline Is Broken is a guide, a mirror, and a call to action all in one, challenging graduate programs, faculty, and administrators to examine their complicity in maintaining inequitable systems and offering suggestions for building cultures of care.

Orly Clerge is associate professor of sociology and faculty affiliate in African American and African studies at the University of California, Davis. She is author of The New Noir: Race, Identity, and Diaspora in Black Suburbia and coeditor of Stories from the Front of the Room: How Higher Education Faculty Overcome Challenges and Thrive in the Academy.

Asia Ivey is a sociologist and research data analyst at the UC Davis Centers for Violence Prevention.Her work explores the intersections of community violence intervention and prevention, educationalequity, and racialized organizational policy, examining how these systems shape public health outcomes.

Michelle Harris is professor emerita in the department of Africana, Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx studies at the State University of New York at Albany.

Sherrill Sellers is professor in the Department of Family Science and Social Work, director of the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program, and associatedean in the College of Education, Health, and Society at Miami University. Her work focuses on expanding culturally and linguistically responsive services and promoting institutional practices that lead to meaningful, systemic change.