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Strategic Disengagement

Preserving One’s Academic Identity by Disengaging from Campus Life

With Ja’Dell Davis

If there is one narrative that permeates research and practice on the transition to college, it is that the college campus becomes students’ “home away from home.” The campus community is believed to be capable of fulfilling students’ intellectual, social, and emotional needs. For instance, one of the items in an index measuring successful transition to college and predicting risk for dropping out is the number of times the student returns home for weekend visits. Vincent Tinto and George Kuh have been influential in establishing these campus-wide belonging and engagement perspectives of what matters for student success in college.¹ In this conception, it is not just students’ initial goal of completing college that spurs persistence, but also their connection with and commitment to their college institution that jointly determines the likelihood of leaving without a degree.²

But some students’ embodied characteristics—defining aspects of their physical being—place their college experiences at odds with these theories. We found that Black women, by virtue of their being in a body that is visibly both Black and female, reported experiencing the highest levels of microaggressions.³ The three Black women profiled in this chapter, Claire, Fiona, and Mercy, entered college with a strong sense of the central role that campus life would play in their present and future selves. They were completely open to embracing campus life. Early in their first year, however, they and many of the other Black women interviewed found it necessary, in order to persist in their education, to strategically separate their academic identity, or how they understand themselves as students, from their institutional identity, or how they understand themselves as students at that institution.

Fiona, a Black woman attending Urban PrivateU-South, rode a wave of nervous excitement and newfound freedom into college life. At the end of the second week of her first year, she and her newly acquainted friends set out in search of that standard weekend college party and landed on frat row. Fiona came to college expecting to make friends with people from different backgrounds, open to what had been advertised as the full college experience, and frat row was to be a central aspect of experiencing difference. But frat row was no more than an extension of most of the spaces on campus—from classes, to the student union, to dorms—dominated by White students. And Fiona quickly learned that she was to be excluded. “The frats weren’t Black people, they were White,” she told us. “We would go to the parties, and they would be like, Sorry. We’re not letting any more people in.”

They reasoned away not being let in. Capacity issues and fire hazards, right? It was only when they returned to these fire-code-abiding frat houses a little later that they discovered that White groups of partiers were being allowed in.

Testing her freedom and responsibility as an emerging adult also meant testing the boundaries of where this self-actualization could take place while in college. Frat parties and other types of predominantly White social gathering spaces were no longer a safe option. Though she “tried to make the best out of it,” Fiona weighed the risk of being vulnerable in the face of strangers who may or may not actively reject her because of her skin color, and she chose to establish boundaries. These boundaries delimited where she went for weekend college fun, where and with whom she enjoyed her meals, and from whom she sought critical advice for navigating college.

Claire, a Black woman attending Urban PrivateU-North, headed to the dorm office unsure of why she had been summoned, knowing only that the matter was urgent enough for a meeting. Monique, the Brooklyn-born lead resident adviser, who was also a Black woman, was waiting and instructed Claire to sit. The topic: a stolen Confederate flag. This fraught symbol, often defended as a reference for southern pride, had come to be an integral part of her transition to college. One of the dorm rooms on her hall, occupied by two White men, had a Confederate flag hanging prominently on the door. Both amused and troubled by its presence, Claire had taken a picture of the flag and passively questioned its owners by writing “Flag?” on the dry-erase board that shared the space on their door. She soon came to understand that she was summoned to Monique’s office to discuss the flag’s disappearance.

Though Clair had tried to go about life as a new college student and mostly ignore this daily reminder of racial-ethnic oppression and backlash against the Civil Rights movement, when the flag went missing she was the first person accused of stealing it. Monique insisted that the flag needed to turn up and, in her position of authority, put on the table the potential for criminal vandalism charges. This broke Claire. She spent the next half hour sobbing in Monique’s office, wondering how the disappearance of a Confederate flag was more cause for concern than its presence in the first place.

This was the first week of Claire’s first year of college, and it set the terms on which she would negotiate the remainder of her years at Urban PrivateU-North. “That blew me [away],” she said. “That’s why I don’t like spending time on that campus. It’s kind of a hostile environment for people of color and women. It just made me kind of mistrust [the university], I think. I knew that it wasn’t gonna be a safe space for anybody and that things weren’t gonna be taken seriously. It was really egregious in my eyes.”

That Monique was a Black woman, and had placed those White male students’ right to free expression over Claire’s need to feel safe, contributed to Claire’s complete loss of faith in the institution. Unsurprisingly, despite all the college preparation her elite high school provided, she was not prepared to encounter racist symbols on campus. She was also unprepared for the backlash she would receive for questioning the presence of these symbols in an educational context that touts a commitment to diversity and inclusion. The university had made its impression on Claire: This was not a safe place.

Throughout this chapter we will illustrate the benefits and costs of Claire’s and Fiona’s conscious decisions to disconnect from general college life. Claire’s approach was blanket rejection, while Fiona severely narrowed the range of spaces and people that she incorporated into her college experience. Contrary to theories that promote identification with the broad college campus as crucial to both the maintenance of an academic identity and overall persistence, these Black women reveal other ways that marginalized students maintain academic engagement in hostile learning contexts. Claire and Fiona are representative of other Black women in our study who, in response to racial-ethnic discrimination, adjusted their campus participation in ways that allowed them to maintain high levels of ambition and persist in their goal of attaining a college degree. Mercy, whom we introduce later, took a more extreme form of disconnecting. Her story highlights the role that counterspaces play in making the disconnection from college life sustainable.

Pathways to College

Pop culture images and college websites drive home the idea of what the typical college experience looks like: jovial interactions with peers and professors, participation in campus organizations, and an essential feeling of belonging in and out of the classroom. For the uninitiated, college is envisioned as the ultimate “cosmopolitan canopy.” Sociologist Elijah Anderson describes the cosmopolitan canopy as a place where “virtually all racial groups are well represented … but not in even proportions… . People appear relaxed and are often observed interacting across the color line… . This is a calm environment of equivalent, symmetrical relationships—a respite from the streets outside.”⁴ This is the image that colleges project in their brochures, images that depict just the right ratio of smiling students of various racial-ethnic groups.

College is marketed to minority students as a place where Claire and Fiona should feel safe to explore their interests and discover new passions while enjoying equality among their peers. College will become their respite from the world outside. If the recruiters are to be believed, race-ethnicity and gender should play additive and integrative roles by contributing to campus diversity. But Claire and Fiona found that others responded to their race-ethnicity and gender in subtractive and rejecting ways.

Both Claire and Fiona long desired to attend and do well in college, and each connected her ambitious career goals to obtaining a college degree. However, they traveled different paths on their road into college, and it is in their different paths that we get a sense of the campus experiences that are all too common among Black college women.

Claire did not have to put forth too much effort to get into a college-going mind-set—it was a matter of where, rather than if, she was going to college. Both of Claire’s parents had bachelor’s degrees, and her father also earned a graduate degree. She went to top-tier schools, and everything up to her senior year of high school explicitly shaped her identity as a future college student. Claire wanted to be a screenwriter and actress, and though no degree was needed for her chosen profession, for Claire college was simply something that everyone in her world does. “I think all my friends are in school. It was just expected that I would go. I don’t even know what I would do otherwise.”

Like Claire, Fiona had college on her radar long before the average child starts giving it much thought. However, for Fiona the idea and mechanics of the college-going process were not built into her family, peer, and school experiences. Her mom, a single parent, graduated from high school and did not attend college, and her older sister completed only one semester at a nearby community college. Inconsistent support from her high school would be what Fiona relied on for a significant portion of the college preparation process. But her immediate and extended family were fully in her corner, which helped her persevere through the uncertain and often ambiguous process of applying to college.⁵

The differences between Claire’s and Fiona’s backgrounds generally, and their paths to college specifically, are noteworthy. While the college-going process for Fiona required concerted effort and focus in the midst of limited guidance from home and school, Claire was bolstered early on by knowledgeable parents and highly resourced schools. These differences show up in their perspectives and experiences during the initial transition to college. The social and academic preparation Claire received before college rendered her transition uneventful, for the most part. “It seemed easier than I thought it was gonna be,” she admitted. “I guess ’cause I didn’t take any math classes or anything, which would’ve [messed] me up. All the English and all the writing stuff comes pretty naturally to me. And it’s all stuff that we worked on a lot in high school.”

Fiona, on the other hand, could not hide her jitters and fascination about what college had in store for her:

Fiona’s transition to the academic expectations of college-level work was also more challenging than it was for Claire.

Despite their differences in preparation and expectations for college, Claire and Fiona arrived at similar decisions to disconnect from their campuses. Their experiences with campus exclusion led them to realize that college life would not be the one they saw in TV sitcoms and movies. They learned that their college experience would have to be restructured in ways that would protect their core sense of themselves as Black women and allow them to maintain their educational goals and career ambitions despite their marginalizing experiences on campus. It is this similarity of experiences of prejudice, discrimination, and oppression that prompted them to seek similar strategies for navigating marginalizing terrain.⁶

Education scholars remind us that Claire and Fiona are not alone in their raced and gendered campus encounters. Joanna Williams and Tanya Nichols describe other Black women who experience these types of interactions in college.⁷ The Black women they spoke to in historically White universities and community colleges faced peers and adults who assumed that they were criminals, questioned their intelligence, denigrated Black culture, and negatively stereotyped Black women. These identity assaults are not confined to their gender or their race-ethnicity; instead they are in response to their embodied social identity of being both Black and woman.⁸

Taken individually, race-ethnicity and gender are visible identities that carry their own challenges in a society that disadvantages Black people and women. Black women, however, embody both these identities and thus do not experience womanhood the way White women do, or Blackness the way Black men do.⁹ Because of commonalities in their lived experiences and the nature of prejudice enacted upon Black women, it is entirely reasonable that Claire and Fiona would recognize when their race-ethnicity and gender impact their everyday interactions on campus. Patricia Hill Collins cautions, however, that common experiences of discrimination do not guarantee common responses, especially because other elements such as class and sexuality add nuance to these experiences.¹⁰ Therefore, the common response we see from Claire and Fiona of consciously disconnecting from their campuses is significant.

Racialized Rejection

Of all the Black and Latinx students interviewed, Black and Latinx women reported experiencing racial-ethnic microaggressions more frequently than their male counterparts by the end of their first year, and Black women more so than Latinx women. These micro- and sometimes macroaggressions communicate that they do not belong, assume criminality, sexualize them, or denigrate their culture as inferior.¹¹ Such encounters in and out of the classroom are the conditions under which the Black women we interviewed navigated campus belonging.

Claire’s reflections show how the classroom was both a welcomed and rigorous space for growth, as well as a site of burdensome racialized social dynamics, especially for students with visible marginalized identities. Claire gained a lot from her courses. “My classes were all really amazing, I will say that. And I got a lot out of them.” She enjoyed her professors and the way they taught new ideas. However, she simultaneously loathed interacting with peers in the classroom, dorm, or other social spaces. Her mostly White peers’ inexperience with racial-ethnic diversity was glaring.

Claire’s experiences also highlight how being a biracial queer woman played into the racially gendered encounters she endured on campus and in other areas of her life. The particularly sexual nature of the responses from men highlights the insidious ways in which race-ethnicity and gender interact to create unwelcoming conditions.

It is apparent that she thinks about how her race-ethnicity and gender operate in her daily interactions, as did the Black women whom education scholar Rachelle Winkle-Wagner interviewed.¹² Black women were conscious of the pressure from their White peers to think, act, and interact in ways based on the assumptions their White peers held about Black womanhood. Winkle-Wagner found that at an important time in their personal development, the sense of self that Black college women were choosing and seeking to enact was overpowered by identities ascribed to them. The imposition of these “unchosen” identities, produced in the everyday interactions of campus life, were experienced as a daily negotiation and renegotiation of the self. Claire similarly could not choose the range of raced and gendered assumptions that others imposed on her during campus interactions. She would, however, come to exercise choice in whether those interactions would take place at all.

Fiona, too, struggled with identity. She took at face value what the brochures professed about the opportunities a college experience offered, including forming meaningful friendships with people different from herself. However, that meant opening herself up for racialized rejection.

Fiona struggled to articulate that distinct yet ephemeral sense of being othered in the intimate environment of dorm life.¹³ Fiona’s roommate difficulties, like those experienced by many of her Black peers, had a dynamic in which racial-ethnic prejudices won out against best intentions. Tamara Towles-Schwen and Russell Fazio’s psychological study of randomly assigned interracial roommate pairings found that even when the White roommates were motivated to behave in a nonprejudiced manner, their negative implicit racial-ethnic biases resulted in behavioral consequences that led to poor roommate relationships.¹⁴

The academic and social spaces on campus also signaled to Fiona that she was expected to be accommodating at the expense of her own comfort, as the following interaction with public safety officers made clear.

Amid the heightened awareness of police misconduct toward marginalized groups, the experiences of Black women have largely been excluded. Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw underscores the importance of intersectionality as media coverage and protests center on Black male victims. In a recent TED talk, she asked the audience to respond to the names of victims of police violence that they recognized.¹⁵ Overwhelmingly, the audience members knew the names of Black men, but not those of the Black women who were victims of the same types of violence. Assuming that the issues Black women face will be addressed by focusing on Black people or on women in general constitutes what Crenshaw calls a “trickle-down approach” to social justice that serves to further marginalize Black women.

Intersectional understandings of misconduct among public safety officers are urgent for Fiona and other Black women who have been made to feel unprotected by the very people who are entrusted and paid to ensure their safety. In light of this and other invalidating experiences in multiple campus contexts, Fiona began to make protective choices, carving her own micro-community out of the larger college campus.

Because most incoming minority students buy into the idea that college campuses are cosmopolitan spaces, their initial openness exposes them to an identity-disaffirming process of disillusionment. The roommate situation was something Fiona would have appreciated a heads-up about, especially when she learned that this specific racialized brand of roommate conflict was common among her Black peers. Claire was groomed for college contexts and still was unprepared for the severity of her racialized encounters across campus. The college campus was not a respite from the world outside. College was, in reality, more like the world outside than popular images, recruitment materials, and administrators led them to believe.

To cope with the hostile racial-ethnic climate on campus, Claire and Fiona moved toward a strategy of disengagement from general campus life. This strategy shows up for other Black women we interviewed and in other researchers’ accounts of Black women’s raced and gendered experiences on college campuses. Psychologist Jioni Lewis and her colleagues explored the ways that Black women coped with subtle gendered racism and explained Black women’s strategy of disengagement with campus life as a self-protective response.¹⁶ Disengagement involved desensitizing themselves to the severity of the experience and seeking to escape such interactions. They found that Black women employed disengagement strategies more often than engagement strategies, such as getting involved in peer education and advocacy on campus.¹⁷ In addition, the more frequently Black women experienced gendered racism on campus, the more they turned to disengagement strategies to cope, which in turn led to more psychological stress.

Lewis and her colleagues found that, overall, disengagement was not an adaptive active coping strategy, and was instead an unhealthy passive coping strategy that led individuals to internalize gendered racism, to self-blame, and to turn to drugs and alcohol. We come to a different conclusion. We see Claire’s and Fiona’s disengagements as healthy coping because their active move away from general campus life was matched with a move toward counterspaces. These counterspaces held an important place in counteracting the negative effects of needing to disengage from campus life.

Making Space

In addressing raced and gendered discrimination on college campuses, working toward institutional change is a worthwhile goal. But waiting for campus conditions to change is not realistic for students who must sustain their sense of self in an environment that daily contests their very presence on campus. Claire and Fiona chose different ways to disconnect from campus. Claire chose complete detachment, while Fiona made strategic decisions on how and with whom to engage. These women acted on their own behalf, adjusting their college life in ways that made it possible for them to persist in college, despite the hostile campus climate.

By the end of her first year, Claire opted out of campus life completely. Any time spent on campus was for class. Extracurricular activities took place among longtime friends attending nearby schools and close family members. Claire enjoyed this and directly associated her well-being and positive feelings about college with her distance from campus.

She even offers the advice of planning for campus disconnection for students like herself who are preparing to enter historically White colleges and universities.

Fiona’s strategy was to limit her campus interactions to spaces where the small population of Black and other marginalized students hung out. She and her circle of friends managed to carve out their own space where they established their own norms. Fiona was not completely insulated from the effects of negative campus interactions, but the micro-community was there to support her in those times so she could stay on the path toward graduation.

When these college women found that the conventional social life and peer support in college would not suit them, they sought out counterspaces, what Lori D. Patton describes as “a home away from home, and a haven in a hostile territory.”¹⁸ Claire located her college-going counterspaces at universities other than her own. Fiona found in “the Crew” a social and ideological counterspace that helped maintain her envisioned future.

These counterspaces—racially-ethnically homogeneous social interactions—were more than friendship networks. These counterspaces were developed, strengthened, and sustained in deliberate reaction to feeling marginalized in the broader campus community. Claire and Fiona began college with the explicit intention of developing diverse friendship networks, but they found that to persist in predominantly White academic spaces, they had to create Black social spaces.

Disconnecting without Compensatory Supports

We now turn to Mercy, a Black woman attending Suburban StateU, who also detached from the broader campus but who had no counterspace to turn to. The challenges this created highlight how counterspaces can become assets for Black women attending historically White colleges and universities. Like Claire and Fiona, Mercy got the message early on that she needed to go to college. She approached college primarily from the instrumental standpoint of getting a job, but that proverbial “college experience” was not far away from her thoughts about what she wanted from college. “I wanted the whole college experience,” she said. “Meeting new friends, learning, obviously, that was always a passion of mine. Originally, I wanted to go to college to start identifying who I was, and I, like, originally I wanted to make my own art club, so that’s something still in process. But that was one of the minor reasons why I wanted to go. Just to start a new life and something like that.”

Both her parents had graduate degrees and were as supportive as possible, but many of the details of the process were unfamiliar to them, since they had been educated outside the United States. Her nervous excitement and the surge of responsibility she sensed when she first stepped onto campus are reminiscent of Fiona’s college transition. Mercy’s plan was to be hyper-organized; she placed a lot pressure on herself.

Early on, Mercy went with the fervor that often comes with new college beginnings—opening herself up to new friendships, attending campus-wide events, connecting with the African student organization, and making plans to bring her passion for art to the campus culture. The art piece was huge for her. She wanted to promote a message that art is relevant in all majors, especially in the hard sciences. In essence, she wanted to create a campus-wide micro- community, a space to break from the pressures. “It would be like having a group of people together who have a strong passion to create. I’d be accepting all majors… . So I think like if you’re doing math, you can still be in the art club. It’s a way of expressing yourself, so I feel like especially in college, you should have a means to express yourself, and [Suburban StateU] doesn’t have an art club, so I just wanted that opportunity to share with other people.”

Her openness was not reciprocated by the mostly White and male faculty and peers in the chemistry department or those in her pharmacy tech campus job, nor by many that she encountered in the mostly White spaces across campus. Being the only Black woman prompted her to adjust her behavior and efforts in ways that her peers were not expected to do. Mercy felt she had to respond to the demands on her “unchosen” visible identity rather than being able to simply introduce herself and have people learn about her interests, values, abilities, and work ethic.

Like Claire and Fiona, Mercy was conscious of the gendered and raced stereotypes that preceded her into her interactions. A critical difference, though, is that the need to prove worthiness was often an internal dialogue for Mercy, without the benefit of a counterspace of peers to provide needed perspective of shared experiences, or the space to deconstruct stereotypical narratives and construct counternarratives.¹⁹

The need to disprove others’ assumptions was all-encompassing and drove Mercy toward isolation. To be sure, preoccupation with college finances made working on campus and maintaining academic standing her priorities, but her particular disconnection from campus life was wrapped up in proving herself as a Black woman in chemistry. By her junior year, Mercy was well aware of the toll such isolation took on her mental health, as well as the missed opportunities to form strong relationships with her peers.

The identity-disaffirming challenge of being a Black woman in a White, male-dominated academic space figured heavily into the intensity of her desire to succeed. However, she soon learned that academic achievements are not enough and that the self cannot be sustained without external social supports.

Fiona and Claire’s response to being othered was to retreat to spaces filled with people who validated and nurtured them. Mercy’s response was to retreat into herself, putting great effort into disproving the negative assumptions about her. Overall, disconnection for these Black women was a response to the gendered racism they experienced, just as Szymanski and Lewis found among the Black women they interviewed. Mercy’s strategy, however, isolated her from not only the larger campus, but also from other supportive micro-communities where she could have located her campus core. The differences in how these women disconnected from campus highlight the role of counterspaces in enabling marginalized students to maintain a strong academic identity.

The variation in how each disconnected and what that meant for their persistence and overall well-being expands our understanding of how separating one’s academic identity from one’s institutional identity can increase the likelihood of persistence when accompanied by a counterspace. Through the lens of traditional theories of college persistence, the responses of Claire and Fiona to campus hostility would be interpreted as a rejection of a formative time in their lives. Instead, the more nuanced picture shows how their decisions to strategically disconnect opened up rich experiences that allowed each to feel competent, accepted, and satisfied when their campuses proved early on to be identity-invalidating spaces. That these young women had successful academic careers despite disconnecting from general campus life pushes us to think beyond generic prescriptions for college success that assume college campuses are cosmopolitan spaces that validate all students equally. Claire, whose college attendance was part of an early childhood path rather than one connected to her screenwriting and acting aspirations, stopped out after her third year and is currently working full-time. Fiona earned a bachelor of arts degree, and Mercy earned a bachelor of science degree within four years.

This chapter again highlights the need to integrate universalist theories of college persistence with a recognition of the diversity of macro-societal oppressions and micro-contextual experiences. Student services administrators can and should reach for theories of student development that identify subgroup differences and the intersectionality of identities.²⁰