“Dialogue Like Oxygen: Warriors for Teaching, Learning and Healing Against Academic Unfreedoms”

In the end of March 2026, Profs. Fine and Bishop sat down with the legendary scholar Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz.

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EB: Okay, I’m kicking us off. We will go for 30 minutes and end with a hug across geographies. So we will kick it off with some introductions. Elizabeth Bishop, CUNY Youth Studies and consortial faculty at Urban Education. I operate in the non-profit world and in the surf therapy world but I am here with my CUNY hat on to resist anticipatory obedience.

MF: I’ll go anywhere Bishop goes.

EB: And you’ve got a role or two at CUNY.

MF: I teach in Critical Psych, Urban Ed, Gender and Women’s Studies and I’m also visiting faculty at University of South Africa – a relationship I take very seriously. And these days, what is on my heart is that I’ve been giving talks about academic unfreedoms.

YSR: Yes.

MF: And I gave it in South Africa. And then last week I gave it at the National Academy of Education – really thinking through what is our obligation in this moment. I feel very lucky to be at the deeply flawed institution we call CUNY because everybody’s in the struggle. There is no silence. There is no censoring. There are old Jews yelling at young Jews and suing them, there’s folks trying to raise money for undocumented students with DACA, for trans students. Everybody’s either talking about Palestine or asking questions. There’s lots of rubs but our union is faculty, staff and students and I think it just matters that we are in solidarity together. And again, 4 adjuncts had been fired. 3 have been rehired. Fired because they stood in solidarity with students. But people are having the hard conversations about what is our obligation.

EB: And the Fired Four was the last dialogue that we did. So, Yolie why don’t we let you introduce yourself and then I’ll talk about the project and we will dive in.

YSR: I’m just grateful to be with you as two people I respect deeply as warriors for this work. You know, where I am,there is some solidarity there among faculty but I would say that we are very fractured in many ways. When I think about the work I do around racial literacy – and I’m leaning more into what I am calling “archaeology of self” – I am just as concerned about the individual’s responsibility, as well as our collective responsibility in this moment. These institutions are not going to save us. Actually, they are probably going to harm us. And so I am wondering what people are feeling about their individual responsibility in this moment while teaching in an institution that is not in alignment with the heart of this freedom work. Particularly, as an English teacher, I’ve been zoning in on banned books which might seem like a small thing to some, but it is the erasure and the misrepresentation of history as we know it. And there is so much that is behind that. When books are banned, we know that is one of the signs of a fascist regime. So I sit in the space of trying to prepare teachers for I don’t know what. It is an interesting time to be a human being who teaches when democracy is being eroded, right? And public education is built on that idea. So I am constantly in tension with myself and with the place that I work, and what is happening to this professions.

EB: The scholasticide. First they burn books, then they burn people. I learned that from Isabelle Wilkerson.

YSR: Phew.

EB: So a couple words on the project. Yolanda, if you haven’t had a chance to dig in to our Academic Commons site: about a year and change ago Michelle Fine and I kicked off “Resist Anticipatory Obedience” because what we were trying to do was to call in – like a verbal love letter to youth, youth studies, teachers, to say do not succumb to this anticipatory obedience. Do not participate in your own erasure. Do not edit yourself. Do not silence yourself in advance driven by fear – which of course we do see happening. We did a dialogue in February 2025, did a second in April 2025. Then we hit the breaks and recalibrated. We do have an archive in the background that I can share more with you about. And then about two months ago we did a dialogue with one of the folks from the Fired Four at CUNY who Michelle was just talking about. We put that out and I might push that back out again when we push this one out because I think we can make a lot of noise dropping two big dialogues about two hugely important topics. And everybody loves you Yolie and your students love you. And everybody loves Michelle and her students love her. And my students love me even though we know that the university does not love us back. So…

EB: So the question I wrote to begin was: “how are we meeting the moment in schools and universities?” And we already kicked this off a little, so I am going to throw that question in the air for the two of you to land it.

YSR: I’ll follow you, Michelle. You know, just really want to say the deep respect I have for what you have been doing. And I would love to know more about South Africa and what you see very similar between here and there. And in some ways that they are moving a bit more forward than we are – maybe. I don’t want to romanticize anything. But I’ll follow you on that. I would love to know how you are personally meeting the moment – particularly in the legacy of the work you are doing and have done.

MF: You know, I think there are three strands that I’ll name. One is that I have taken up the role of “white senior faculty who is Jewish” so… my mother was the youngest of 18 kids. Immigrants. My dad too. Not very Jewish. But a version of Jewish that was about justice and food and laughter and the stranger and… they weren’t lefties. They were just the trashy Jews from Poland who spoke Yiddish and came to the United States rather than going to Israel which tended to be those who spoke Hebrew and wanted to save space for Jews. You know, people live there. And the trashier crowd, my crowd, scattered around the world and thought that we should create a socialist Jewish network everywhere and just keep talking.

And so at CUNY, I’ve taken up that role of daring to have hard conversations with graduate students. You know, with CUNY, students can have a class that is half Orthodox Jew and half Muslim, a couple IDF soldiers and then January 6 pardoned folks and Black Lives Matter activists and three international, undocumented students. That is our classroom. So how do you hold the room even as you hold the position? Not easy. You know I’ve seen the borders. And because I put myself out, two Orthodox Jewish women found me – not students of mine or in my program. I didn’t know them. One of them was the daughter of a rabbi who said “can I meet with you and just ask questions? I can’t ask questions in my own community.” Brilliant and a waterfall of inquiry, she read everything, questioned everything she worried about asking questions in her community; others would consider such questions to be anti-Semitic. “And I can’t ask questions here because they call me a Zionist.” Both of which I think happen. So we met every other week and we had a safe word like you would in bondage (laughter). If she got a little too pro-Israel or I got a little too pro-Palestine, we would say “refrigerator” and then unpack it (laughter). I kind of love that story. It’s nothing and it’s everything. It’s like holding space. we carved a space/provisional – transitory – delicious that offers a kind of refusal – psychic, intellectual. affective – to the mainstream Jewish silence around Palestine, or the Palestinian exception or the weaponizing of “anti-semitism.” l

So that’s one place. Another is that I have been doing a lot of transnational lectures – in South Africa. I spoke at the faculty Senate at University at University at Witwatersrand (Johannesburg) on “academic unfreedoms” and I opened with a quote by Carter G. Woodson, 1933, in The Mis-education of the Negro. Woodson says “Behind every lynching, is the classroom. A white child who has learned they are superior and a Black child who has learned they will be treated as subordinate.” And I gave the same talk this weekend at the National Academy.

We need to appreciate and anticipate the consequences of structural, state sponsored silencing, criminalizing of speech. whether about race or immigration or white supremacy or trans youth or Palestine or persons with disabilities or genocide… If we don’t teach the brutal histories, vibrant forms of resistance, the coalitions and solidarities and (fragile-arities) in struggle, then we are complicit in the reproduction of white superiority, carceral and eugenic logics is in the air. How dare we step back? And it has been helpful for me to be in conversation. People do what they need to do. I was saying to Bishop, people often say “not everybody can take a risk.” I know that. Of course. But it is easy to notice that people who are taking a risk are undocumented, trans, queer, adjuncts who are international and getting their ass beaten. And the people who could take a risk = many well established, secure white colleagues — aren’t really. The brutal ironies of vulnerability, privilege and who is willing to have skin in the game.

YSR: Because you know what? It is about the risk of what they are going to lose in terms of their ties to capitalism and their ties to their comfort. Listen, I’m not saying I want anyone to be out of work. But at some point, you have to be able to put something on the line. I find that for me, most of my work is outside of Teachers College. I find myself more and more doing work in high school classrooms with programs at the Department of Education that have not yet been white washed. And also talking alot about healing. Because being in this body and doing this work – all of us are in these different bodies of ours that are marginalized in one way or another. But for me, the need of healing – healing myself, and then offering healing to others, is so important because racism, sexism and homophobia and all of these other phobias are so painful for people. And the climate that we are in, this evil that I have not seen before in my lifetime… people are waking up depressed. The folks that I am talking to, my colleagues and my students… more and more students are dealing with mental challenges. So I’m finding that as we support the communities that we support whether that is through sending money or being on the line outside protesting, whether it is through signing petitions – all of this is exacting some harm on our spirits and our bodies.

EB: The healing point, Yolanda. When I think about what I am even doing in a CUNY classroom anymore, it is all an act of collective care and some sense that we are going to try to heal in this time we have together in whatever capacity. In the last few months, if a student emails and says “I’m struggling” I say “me too.”

YSR: Yes! And that helps them. Can you say more about the response that you get from the students when you say that?

EB: Yes, everybody takes a deep breath. Everybody drops their shoulders. Actually, I taught my capstone class last Wednesday night and I was supposed to be in New York for the Democracy Now! 30th Anniversary party at Riverside Church but I ended up giving away my ticket. I couldn’t go to the airport because ICE had just been dispatched to the California airport I was headed to right when I was about to roll up. And I might not be an undocumented person but that does not necessarily matter, despite what they’re saying on the Sunday morning shows. And I did not feel safe stepping into that airport or getting myself to JFK or getting myself out of New York again after. So when I met my students on Wednesday night and I told them all this because I was behind grading their papers because I thought I was going to have all this airplane time, and I said to them “can we downshift and regulate our nervous systems together here at week 8 of the semester?” And what I find is they need it but they are not accustomed to classrooms offering it and they are hella surprised by – well they know me by now, but at the beginning of every term when they have a white educator who cares that much about them that I’m like “no no, I don’t care that your work is late or you have a baby in the background or you’re commuting home.” These fears, the shoulders at your ears… if the only thing I do is help them bring their shoulders down and walk across that stage to graduate, that will be enough.

YSR: Thank you. Yes. You know, before I traveled I cleaned out my phone. All of these things. I’m like… where are we? What is this? I’m wiping photos or posts. Where are we? What world is this?

EB: Michelle, how is that for you at the border. I’ve been meaning to ask you that. You and I have talked about it before. I’ve traveled with a burner here or there.

MF: I traveled once with a burner. I don’t anymore. I turn off my Signal chats but once somebody writes me, we are alive again. And the shit is deep. I’m trying to do admissions now and our international students are terrified. Terrified. And it is heartbreaking and enraging. So, the most beautiful women and queer folks around the world want to come to our program in Critical Psychology, to ask bold questions they can’t ask at home.

EB: Yes!

MF: In the belly of empire.

YSR: They’re still willing to risk to come.

MF: From Nigeria. From Jordan.

YSR: From Bangladesh.

MF: From Iran. And they want to come to us and they need to demonstrate that they have thousands in the bank and they’re going to endure a review of 5 years of social media history and they may be picked up on the street? And in the past I would have said “Come, we will figure it out.” And fucking rent! There is a woman who applied who I’ve just fallen in love with and I said “Look you’re accepted. There is a light on for you.” And she wrote me back this morning and said “I’m alive.” I don’t even know what to say.

EB: Right.

MF: We have caused a war. And she is a professional. She wants to look at collective trauma. On the other hand, I also have students who are in it. They are doing radical work right now and they are on fire. And the problem is…I don’t know if they want academic job, I don’t know if there are jobs out there for them. Most of them don’t, they want to do together movement work – and get paid. And the only other thing I wanted to say with the two of you is, I’m starting to think… you know that quote by Gramsci about “the interregnum”- the old order is dying, the new cannot be born and we are surrounded by morbid symptoms. I feel like that way about education. The old is dying. But there is something Gramsci missed; it’s about the flows and ruptures of resistance and desire. That too is on display. What if our universities asked: we could learn from the encampments, the No Kings protests, banned books groups, the drag shows. There is a kind of knowledge coagulating/being induced right now. Not necessarily in universities but around them. I don’t know about yours but our encampment was gorgeous. It was smart. It was engaging. We all brought grandkids. There was art. There were sessions on genocide and gentrification.

YSR: Columbia’s was beautiful too.

MF: It was mostly led by women and queer folks until they called the cops on them. There were study groups everywhere. It was kind of a version of education that got criminalized. Scholasticide in Gaza; bombing the girls school in Iran; banning books and criminalizing words in Florida and Texas; defunding CRT and DEI and Trans affirming surgeries in hospitals. What is the university’s fear, why must they silence/banish/deport these brilliant young people speaking/standing for non-violence and justice in Palestine?

EB: This academic freedom conversation, right? Or academic unfreedom. We were talking about this with one of the Fired Four last time and I often talk about academic freedom because I’m so one foot in, one foot out of the institution that I don’t think CUNY notices much when I do things. We will find out. Everytime I do something, I think “hopefully this will be fine” and we just keep going – because that is my risk analysis, right? Like we were just talking about. Yolanda, I’m wondering – I know Michelle tee’d this up for you over email but: the interior life at Columbia, people off campus – where are you finding the freedom and the resistance and the tensions of all of that?

YSR: You know, I wonder a lot about freedom and if it exists. If it is something that we know we need to fight for and aspire toward as our ancestors did but I don’t know if, within the context of this university or any of these institutions, that freedom exists. I think we are negotiating it. I think it is in some ways an illusion. I am trying to even tease out what is freedom, what is liberation, what is sovereignty of my own body in an institution where I receive a paycheck that gives me the freedom to take care of my mother and my daughter. So, it is a messy kind of thing. But I don’t know if that is truly freedom, maybe it’s more sovereignty? Which is why I am appreciating, Michelle, what you are saying about the unfreedoms. That really gives us some beginning language to examine exactly what is happening. I think we talk a lot about liberation and freedom. I don’t know that it is achievable with these people who are in power and in these systems we are in. I stand in awe and forever challenged by my ancestors.

But to answer your question, what has been it been like… disappointing is not even a word. When I tell you how quickly we saw Columbia bend a knee. How quickly things went in place at Teachers College. You can’t take students here or there – and you know I do a lot of public work around racial literacy. You have to get permission. All of this. At one point I just wanted to shut down. But what actually kept me alive was the Signal chats that we had; exchanging information and encouragement to keep going in the moment with colleagues, keeping each other in the know with new articles, writing articles ourselves, signing petitions – that is what continued to make me feel alive and to feel like… ok, supporting our students, sending money to get them out of jail, I can do this work even though I am inside this institution, I was not really free to do or say what I wanted to. Or else, what could happen? I spoke at a meeting, representing what was said at a table of people, and I was called anti-Semitic. Right? And that was okay for people to accept that. So I’m not even free to share what my colleague were talking about with a writing prompt that was given to us at a faculty meeting. So, no one has really asked me this. I feel very angry, hurt. I’m still – I don’t know if I want to say disappointed because I don’t know how much I believe in institutions. And yet, I’m tethered to one and because of the name, people will continue to come.

EB: For sure they will.

YSR: So I’m finding my obligation is to students. And to teach them about the idea of justice and not iconicize the building that they walk through.

EB: You know, I had a dumb interaction right before this. And I knew I was going to talk to both of you and what I was thinking about was sacred rage. I’ve been talking about the uses of anger and the uses of rage as a way of protecting us from these attacks on the body politic. This fascist attack on the body politic. And it happens in all of these micro-moments, micro-interactions. Can we have liberation at the university? Probably not. Can we have freedom at the university? Probably not. But there are all these micro-moments. For instance, I knew that this would be a moment of freedom for me today, talking to y’all. And I knew I would be nicer to people when I hang up this call because I needed this vibe. And this is what we do for our students. Right? So even when you are in that faculty meeting and no one comes to offer repair to you, you still offer repair to your students all the damn time.

YSR: Thank you for saying that. And that is in some ways what we signed up for. Thank you for that language of sacred rage. I think a lot about Brittany Cooper’s language of ‘eloquent rage.’ Her work gave me voice as a Black woman. But it is sacred rage because what is being attacked like freedom to think, ideas, that is what is most sacred. From bell hooks to… just all of our key thinkers and writers, Black feminists, talk about the possibility and potential of the classroom. That it can be a radical space. And this is why I show up. But you are now giving me this language of sacred rage — to work to protect these sacred spaces that I have with my students. Even if I am within a building that does not really appreciate what I’m doing.

EB: And when you wrote to us about this dialogue, Yolanda, you wrote about history, erasure and misrepresentation. And Michelle I was going to give it to you to, I was wondering how it feels inside of your classrooms. When I called in to one of the Fired Four organizing meetings, Michelle, you were the person who was there. You are holding that space.

MF: Yeah. You know, when I was at Penn – I left Penn because I was no longer funny. Really. I just thought, I am just not funny anymore. It is different to be at CUNY. And there is so much wrong at CUNY – but everyone is in the struggle. There are some old diaries, in an archive called Lost and Found, between Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich and June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara when they all taught in the SEEK program. And they write (I paraphrase) that CUNY is a prison, it will make you crazy – and it is a site of liberation. So the way I have been thinking about it is to whom and to what am I accountable? And you, Yolie – you know in your belly to whom and to what you are accountable. We can not seek audience with folks who don’t deserve it. And so I want to say to you, Yolanda, those people don’t deserve you. That is their loss. But it stings. It stings to be ignored or accused. And I now feel like everybody who is calling folks anti-Semitic are all in the Epstein files.

YSR: Totally!

MF: The guy at that law firm, at Harvard, at Michigan, in the Cabinet. oh thank you. And they’re using anti-Semitism as a weapon; a shield; a condom over the violent sexual history. And those of us who are Jewish who are challenging the weaponization of anti-semitism, these stories – of Jewish Voice for Peace, for instance – rarely get covered in the media. They are inconvenient truths; much of the resistance to the genocide is being voiced by Jewish young (and old) people and we must be silenced/ignored in order to sustain the dangerous diversion that all Jews agree, and agree with Israel/Zionism.

Well when the Jewish kids at Columbia chained themselves to the gates, I was very moved. I keep getting arrested at the Statue of Liberty and other places and there are always these young kids who actually, they know the songs…when we took over the Statue of Liberty, you know my mom came there. It was unbelievable. We were both under the green lady’s skirts. But when those kids locked themselves to the gates at Columbia, there was no coverage of that. It made me think about how a practice of domination is to annihilate the bridge builders.

YSR: And it won’t happen. I want to say that is what keeps us going too. Even being in a space like this conversation, I’m still doing the work. Even small things. And you know, I’ve been doing this racial literacy work for years –

EB: New book coming out! New book, playbook for teachers.

YSR: Holla! A love letter to teachers. But what people don’t realize is that for the last two years, that many of people who have been involved in the racial literacy book talks have been banned authors. So I don’t have to scream to say “I’m doing this.” I’m just going to keep doing my work, I’m going to keep holding these spaces, sometimes I open up my class to the public when I’m doing something about anti-blackness, and I’ll keep opening up my class until they tell me not to.

EB: I’ve got one student – I’ll tell you this as we move toward the end of this conversation – but my campus loves to be asynchronous which can sometimes feel dehumanizing. And so I have this one student, its the second to last class and then they do their Capstone. I’ve been teaching this class for nearly twenty semesters now –

YSR: What?!

EB: I know! Despite how young I remain. And I have this student who posed a research question asking what is the psychic harm of ICE in immigrant communities? And on the one hand I’m like “let’s go!” and on the other hand, it is my job to help you get precise with your language. It is my job to help you dig into the receipts, to understand why citations are receipts, why reading and citing people like Monisha Bajaj and Maria Hantzopolous and that the work existed before you. And this is not just your opinion so they’re not just coming for you and your opinion. They may be coming for 50 years of research but we are going to peacefully weaponize citations as receipts while we say to you yes you can do this study, and also how do we keep you safe? That risk to human subjects, how does it apply to you also? How are you safe? “Safe” in this work? But we’re still going to ask the damn question because we are critical educators. That’s where I end it. That’s where I hang my hat for this work I think.

MF: Do you know – so I’m going to say something really nerdy now. There is a good karma to doing the work. There is a good feel and everybody wants more… And they show up. We have these summer institutes on critical participatory action research with prisons and schools and people show up from around the globe – because they want to find to find the space to dare to ask the questions of history, praxis, critical fabulations that are on their heart – not contingent on their professor’s last funding or whatever. There’s a kind of karma that metabolizes. If we don’t light the fire in the academy, it might not happen. It is happening all around but students don’t know faculty are actually interested in engaging with the hard work. That is why I say, to Yolanda in particular, choose your audiences. Some of these fuckers, they’re just not worth it.

YSR: Also, thank you for reminding of about the importance of doing the work that will outlive us.

EB: And that you are the light. That’s Rumi, right? When it is dark around you, realize perhaps you are the light. Two yers ago I went to a Garrison Institute retreat with Yolanda, hosted by Angel Acosta, and I was having a moment in my life. And Yolie found me in that moment. And when she introduced me, she said this is my girl and she is going to burn it all down with a single match.

YSR: I said that? [laughter]

EB: To a room of a hundred people I did not know. But what Michelle just said is that we have to be the people who light the match.

YSR: Oof. Yes.

MF: And that is a little exhausting! Let me just say –

YSR: And that’s why healing. That’s why we talked about healing.

MF: There are days I’m down, everybody wants more.

YSR: And this is why I appreciate the question “how are you meeting the moment” because our healing, Michelle – especially when you are, you’ve been at this for a minute. Our healing is not a luxury. It is part of the work. Because it is exhausting after a while. And I hope that at some point you feel like you can tap out, or tap out and somebody else taps in. But also remember your legacy. You didn’t just start yesterday.

EB: No doubt.

YSR: This is work that will outlive us.

EB: Yes.

MF: And you know, you talk about healing – just one more word for us to put in the center of the room is grief. There is a sadness about everything that is dying. Poeple who are dying who haven’t gotten the time for us to mourn them. Black journalists. Journalists being killed. There is grief. Institutions that I wanted to believe in. I wanted to believe in the Supreme Court. Sorry, white girl thing. I really wanted that. Or freedom. I do a lot of work with formerly incarcerated women and you talk to them and they are out now and they are a little like, if I knew this was freedom… or I got free and now they are deporting me. And I think oh shit, I had such a white/naive/ignorant idea of freedom. That is all dying and we don’t even get to grieve.

YSR: And to mourn it, Michelle.

MF: Even though I’ve spent my life critiquing it, we don’t get to just grieve in the midst of this fascist assault; poly-crises indeed.

YSR: You are right, we do need to hospice grief around this democracy more than we have given ouresvles space. And maybe that is language we can bring. And maybe in hospicing that grief, we can allow these feelings to happen. And we don’t. And I think that is because it is hitting us everyday from every angle. When do we get a pause to time and grieve. And when we lose people, physically lose people in our families, or when we see 162 teachers and children killed and people move on, sometimes it is hard.

EB: I want to offer y’all something as we end. Maybe I told Yolanda this when I offered her my ticket but when I couldn’t go to New York to celebrate thirty years of Democracy Now!, it took me a minute to get that ticket out, but it ended up going to a documentary filmmaker from the Arab world who didn’t have any access to the event at all and ended up with my VIP ticket so she was in the room with Angela Davis and Amy Goodman and Patti Smith and all them. And my connection to her was this Palestinian writer that I know. And because I gave away my ticket because my body didn’t feel safe, they all ended up at the VIP party. It just reminded me that – they thought that they could bury us but they didn’t realize that we were seeds.

MF: Totally!

YSR: They didn’t realize that we were seeds! And you’re a bridge.You see the bridge work is always happening, even if sometimes it is out of our own healing or protection – I don’t want to say fear but you were wise. But look, it was meant for you to make sure those connections happens. And I think that is what keeps us going.

EB: That’s these connections too. That is here on this screen for me.

MF: This is oxygen!

YSR: It is! It really is. The last thing I’ll say is: if we are doing this work for a purpose bigger than us, then those things like you just described will always happen.

EB: And it lets us pause.