Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez
I am a professor in the Third World.
What do I know? Libraries in the North
Do not open their doors. I laugh at myself
-Heriberto Yépez
This talk critiques the U.S. colonial model of higher education and contemplates methods to democratize knowledge-creation in teaching, research, and civic affairs.
During the Civil War, Congress backed a program providing free land to civilian colleges that offered military instruction—the origins of ROTC: a move that linked the armed forces to land grant university campuses. Combined with “hard” power, the university system brought “soft” influence to the territories and states in the form of holidays, icons, festivals, flags, monuments, and English-only programs. In places like Puerto Rico, the intrusion of the English language was key: if you want admission, accreditation, inclusion, grant funding, or employment, you will do as we say in English, and you will do so in English. Like in Texas, Navajo Nation, New Mexico, Guam, and California but also Washington, Rhode Island, Cape Cod, and Oklahoma, this has rewarded non-English-speaking communities for aspiring to be bilingual, and then, as soon as possible, monolingual in English. This process has scarred many communities with English-only educational opportunities in a model that once represented “progress” but now is merely fossilized in place.
U.S. higher education often divides families and communities by culture and language, but Puerto Rican resistance to the U.S. “best practices”—in part per use of Spanish on the University of Puerto Rico’s campus—means we graduate more Latine engineers than any other university in the world. The Spanish language is not a problem but in fact a key to our success. However, this is not noted by U.S. academic institutions like the Department of Education, the Modern Language Association, or the National Endowment for the Humanities. Not only is Puerto Rican higher education perceived as substandard, but we rank near the bottom in all topics, including, ironically, “Caribbean Studies”. The imperial hierarchy tells us Puerto Rican universities can’t be superior to those in the U.S. On the continent, they know what is best for Puerto Rico. We do not and cannot know, and we change per their demands.
Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera is Catedrático in the Departamento de Humanidades de la Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez. He is the founding Director of the Instituto Nuevos Horizontes, funded by the Mellon Foundation. Herlihy-Mera has been a faculty member at universities in the U.S., the Caribbean, South America, and Europe, and in 2022 he was Obama Fellow at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies. In 2019, Herlihy-Mera was Fulbright Distinguished Chair of American Studies in Budapest, and he recently gave invited lectures at Oxford and the Sorbonne. His books include Decolonizing American Spanish (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022), After American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism (Routledge, 2018), Paris in American Literatures (Rowman, 2015) and Hemingway’s Expatriate Nationalism (Rodopi, 2011). Herlihy-Mera’s talk is part of a book project titled Academic Imperialism, co-authored with Héctor Huyke, which is under contract with Provocations Books. He has a Ph.D. from the Universidad Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.