Dispatches from the First Day: Teaching Amid Crisis, Refusal, and Solidarity

This essay offers a reflective dispatch from the first day of the academic year amid overlapping crises in public higher education, including immigration precarity, political repression, and the erosion of academic freedom. Drawing on classroom practice in Africana Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Cultural Diversity, the author examines how these structural conditions materialize in students’ lives and shape the possibilities for teaching and learning. Centering student voices, trauma-informed pedagogy, and solidarity-based classroom practices, the essay situates Mutual Assistance and Defense Compacts (MADCs) within longer traditions of collective survival and resistance. Rejecting pedagogical neutrality, the piece argues that the first day of class is a political threshold where educators can either reproduce fear or cultivate collective hope, refusal, and possibility.