Editors Note: The quotes in this article have been edited for clarity and concision.
Dr. Eddie Glaude Jr. is a distinguished professor of African American studies and religion at Princeton University, a political commentator and public intellectual. For the second year in a row, Dr. Glaude was invited to engaging education’s (e²) annual Changemakers event. His speech and following discussion focused on self-governance, grassroots organizing and coalition building in our current political climate.
The following is an interview with Dr. Eddie Glaude Jr. that City on a Hill Press conducted after the event. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Special thanks to e² for arranging the interview with Dr. Glaude.
Interviewer: Your recent book is titled We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For. In this moment of increasing national and campus authoritarianism, what does it look like for ordinary people in the community to step into leadership and action themselves?
Eddie Glaude: It’s gonna look differently depending on where we are and what institutions we reside in. Part of what it involves is everyday, ordinary people taking responsibility for how that space will look, and that we’re not outsourcing it to some individual who will lead us, but rather we all collectively come to a sense that this is the good that we’re pursuing. Then we create the conditions for the people to actually claim control over, not only institutions like you see in Santa Cruz, but the country.
Interviewer: We’re seeing a troubling national pattern. Universities across the country, especially under Trump era politics, have cracked down on student protests and are slashing funding over speech, notably targeting Palestine solidarity encampments. What lessons can we draw from that national context about defending democracy on our own campuses?
Eddie Glaude: I mean, it’s really a longer story. There’s been an all-out assault on American higher education for at least four to five decades. It comes out of the student movements of the mid-twentieth century. We’ve seen efforts to defund public education.
What makes this particular moment so striking is that the assault on higher [education], the assault on free speech, on academic freedom, has joined with a claim around antisemitism in relation to the state of Israel’s policies. Now, it’s easier for me and you to critique Donald Trump than it is for us to criticize the state of Israel. We are freer to say that the United States is wrong in its relation in the way in which it pursues immigration policy. We’re freer to say that this particular carceral policy is wrong, but we can’t say, in pain of being accused of being antisemitic, that what the Likud party is doing in Gaza is illegal by international law.
It’s our inability to disentangle the ugliness of antisemitism from a critique of state action that, to my mind, is evil, and so you get the assault on higher education. The Trojan horse is now antisemitism.
The assault on education has been going on for five decades, but now it takes on an added intensity because of the reality of the world post October 7, and it makes it very difficult to intervene in this moment. Students have to be wise and deliberate in how they engage the moral question because that’s what it is — the moral question of our time.
Interviewer: What advice do you have, for organizing across differences, specifically bringing together, you know, students of various backgrounds, staff, faculty, community allies and intergenerationally, to really form a united front for justice.
Eddie Glaude: Solidarities are made. They come into existence and out of existence all the time, and we need to understand the politics that are required to build some of them. Oftentimes, we just assume that by virtue of the fact that we are communities of color or communities that are marginalized, that somehow we ought to be in solidarity with each other. We just presume it when in fact there could be some deep disagreements.
We have to be open to the fullness of the human being right in front of us. We can’t allow shorthands to do that work, you gotta get to know me. This man is not just a Black man, [you’ve] gotta get to know me, and understand that my position as a Black man in the United States is important. But I’m much more than that, so what does it mean to build solidarity across differences? It is to inhabit the human space that connects you and me.
We’re more than slogans, we’re not just projects, we’re not just political objects, right? We’re complex creatures with wounds and joys and dreams and disappointments. So if we’re gonna build community, let’s build it for real. Get to know each other for real.
Love, it’s so complex and demanding. It doesn’t presuppose perfection, doesn’t presuppose ongoing agreement. Think about your loves close to the ground — are we in agreement 100 percent of the time? No. But there’s something about the person that you’re willing to give space, to work through that together.
I think we overburden our politics with the presumption that we will always be in agreement. The hard work of politics is to work through those disagreements, and come out on the other side, with love still animating the relationships.
Interviewer: James Baldwin famously urges people to urge people to invent hope every day. From your perspective, how can people cultivate hope and resilience amidst the anger and anxiety of this current moment?
Eddie Glaude: It’s hard. There is a moment in his last interview where he describes himself as a despairing witness. He says, ‘Sometimes you feel like a broken motor, say the same thing over and over again. You can only go to Texas so many times,’ you know, it’s really funny. You find hope in the responsibility that comes before you. We don’t have the luxury of pessimism, because we gotta raise our babies.
Hope is found in the task. Historically, whenever the country seems like it’s losing its mind, our task is to make sure the babies get to the other side. So in the darkest of hours, that’s where the hope is found: in our responsibility to the generations to come. So what you’re not gonna do is just give up on the world and say you’re just gonna have to live with it. That’s not what we’re gonna do.
Interviewer: Despite the challenges that we are facing, what keeps you hopeful for the future of higher education and democracy?
Eddie Glaude: You know, human beings are capable of some dastardly things. So right now we’re in a moment and we don’t wanna be silly, sentimental. We’re in a moment where I don’t know if this thing is gonna survive. I don’t.
American higher education, it’s the jewel in the crown of this place. The world wants to come here to be educated. And they’re trying to destroy everything. So I don’t know. It all depends on what we do.
So the faith, the hope, is it us? If the faith is in us and human beings can do dastardly things, we’re this mixture of disaster and miracle. There is no guarantee. If we’re gonna get to the other side of this, it’s gonna be in our hands, nothing’s coming from on high.
So, I don’t know. But I don’t need the guarantee to fight. I don’t need to guarantee success to fight. The struggle itself is what’s important.
