Author: Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig
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There are moments in American history when silence becomes complicity, and higher education now sits squarely in one of those moments. Faculty are being scrutinized not only for their teaching and scholarship, but for their public voices, whether those voices appear in op-eds, podcasts, social media, or community forums. Legislators, political operatives, HR departments, and…
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Why do I have the feeling that former University of Virginia President James Ryan did not sign the NDA and take the money Virginia likely offered him? The feeling comes from the simple fact that he wrote a long, unfiltered, twelve page letter to faculty that did not read like something a person writes after…
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The first time I watched Breaking Bad, I was late to the party. The cultural storm had already passed its midpoint, and I caught the final season as it was unfolding in real time. Yet from the moment I began, I could not stop. I watched every episode, tracing Walter White’s descent from a weary chemistry…
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Archimedes once claimed, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I can move the world.” It sounds like the kind of poetic exaggeration ancient thinkers loved, but it was not poetry. It was physics. Archimedes understood that power is not always about strength. Sometimes it is about…
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Last week I returned to the University of Michigan’s Department of Psychology, where I first began to understand how systems shape lives. Decades ago, as an undergraduate in Professor Lorraine Gutiérrez’s Community Psychology class, I learned something that still guides me: belonging is not just a feeling, it’s a structure. It can be built, or…
Cloaking Inequity 