I Know This Story: What Jill Damatac’s Cambridge Account Reveals About Academic Survival

Sometimes leaving the university is not evidence that you could not survive academia. Sometimes it is evidence that you finally understood what survival was costing you.

I came across Jill Damatac’s essay in British Vogue today.

Its title stopped me:

“I Aspired To Get My PhD At Cambridge – I Left Because Of The Racism.”

I knew, before I had finished reading, that I knew this story.

Not her story.

I would never claim that.

Damatac is a Filipino-American writer describing her own years at Cambridge, first as a Master’s student and later as a PhD student. She writes about being questioned, diminished, overlooked and treated as though her presence required explanation. She describes being invited into university marketing intended to recruit students of colour while simultaneously encountering an intellectual environment in which whiteness remained firmly centred.

Her experiences belong to her.

But the architecture felt terribly familiar.

That is what caught me.

When the institution wants your image more than your presence

One of the most striking parts of Damatac’s account is the contradiction between being wanted and being welcomed.

Cambridge, she writes, invited her to appear in photographs and videos intended to recruit students of colour. Yet she also describes faculty decisions, reading lists, academic encounters and professional opportunities that repeatedly communicated something quite different about where people like her belonged.

There is something almost perfect about that contradiction.

The university can want diversity in the photograph while remaining deeply uncomfortable with diversity in the room.

It can want the brochure.

The website.

The recruitment campaign.

The smiling racialized student standing beneath centuries-old stone.

What becomes more complicated is when that student begins speaking.

Questioning.

Writing.

Disagreeing.

Naming what she sees.

Expecting opportunities.

Expecting fairness.

Expecting the institution that celebrates her presence publicly to value that presence privately.

That is when diversity stops being an image and becomes a demand.

And institutions do not always respond to those two things in the same way.

I know something about wanting the doctorate

I entered doctoral studies believing that education could make certain things possible.

That belief was not foolish.

Education had already changed my life.

I had entered university through a program created for people who historically had not been welcomed through its doors. I continued through an undergraduate degree, then a Master’s, and eventually into doctoral study.

I was not wandering accidentally through academia.

I had earned my place there.

And yet there is a peculiar psychological violence in repeatedly having to demonstrate that you belong somewhere you have already been admitted.

You begin by doing the work.

Then you find yourself doing another kind of work alongside it.

Reading rooms.

Interpreting silences.

Deciding which battle is worth having.

Wondering whether something was racism, sexism, ableism, hierarchy, personality, bureaucracy—or some exhausting combination of them all.

Calculating how much of yourself can safely enter the room.

Learning when to speak.

Learning when speaking will cost you.

Learning what happens when you refuse to make yourself smaller.

Eventually the doctorate can become only one of the things you are studying.

The institution itself becomes another.

Leaving complicates the story we tell about success

Damatac left her PhD at Cambridge in 2023.

She writes that racism was the reason, although she did not feel able to tell the faculty that at the time.

I keep returning to that.

Because academia has a very convenient vocabulary for departure.

Withdrawal.

Attrition.

Non-completion.

Left the programme.

These words make people disappear remarkably efficiently.

They record that somebody left without asking what staying required.

The institution remains the stable object.

The person becomes the variable.

Perhaps they were not prepared.

Perhaps life intervened.

Perhaps they lacked resilience.

Perhaps academia simply was not for them.

But what if the question were reversed?

What if, sometimes, the person was entirely capable of completing the doctorate?

What if the institution was incapable of providing an environment in which completing it remained psychologically, physically or ethically tolerable?

Those are very different stories.

And our statistics rarely tell us which one happened.

Survival is not the same thing as success

Universities love the language of resilience.

It sounds admirable.

Students are encouraged to persevere, adapt, overcome, develop coping strategies and seek support.

But resilience can become a dangerous institutional expectation when nobody asks why certain people need so much of it simply to remain in the building.

How resilient must someone become before we admit that the environment is the problem?

There is no particular virtue in enduring unlimited harm.

Sometimes remaining is resistance.

Sometimes leaving is resistance.

Sometimes leaving is simply survival.

And survival deserves a more complicated vocabulary than failure.

Then there is Jason Arday

Damatac writes her essay in the aftermath of the death of Professor Jason Arday, and his presence changes the weight of her argument.

She describes his experience as part of a broader history of anti-Black racism at Cambridge and contrasts the extraordinary scrutiny surrounding him with the institutional treatment of another Cambridge academic accused of improper use of a former student’s writing.

Her point is larger than either case.

It raises a question that extends far beyond Cambridge:

Who receives the benefit of complexity?

Who gets privacy while facts are determined?

Who is understood as human and therefore fallible?

Who receives proportionality?

Who gets protected by procedure?

And whose alleged mistake becomes evidence about an entire race, diversity initiative or supposedly declining institution?

I have been thinking about these questions while building the Black Academics Archive.

Jason Arday was one reason I began.

But the archive cannot only be about people who die.

It must also teach us to notice what happens to people before disappearance becomes memorial.

The people who leave.

The people who become ill.

The people who change careers.

The people who stop publishing.

The people who quietly withdraw.

The people whose departure becomes one line in an institutional spreadsheet.

The people who survive but are never quite the same.

They bring flowers when you’re dead

I have written elsewhere about something I find deeply disturbing in institutional life.

We often become extraordinarily generous toward people once they can no longer ask anything from us.

The difficult colleague becomes brilliant.

The troublesome scholar becomes courageous.

The person whose complaints were inconvenient becomes deeply missed.

There are flowers.

Tributes.

Scholarships.

Statements.

Photographs.

Memories.

Sometimes the recognition is sincere.

But I increasingly find myself asking a less comfortable question:

What did we offer them while they were alive?

Did we believe them?

Did we protect them?

Did we defend their humanity when doing so was inconvenient?

Did we notice when they were disappearing?

Did anyone ask what remaining was costing them?

Jill Damatac did not disappear

That is one reason I am grateful she wrote this essay.

She left.

And then she spoke.

There is power in that.

Because institutions produce official records extraordinarily well.

Transcripts.

Personnel files.

Withdrawal forms.

Investigations.

Committee minutes.

Policies.

Annual reports.

What they do not record nearly as reliably is what it felt like to live inside them.

That record often survives because somebody tells the story.

Damatac has told hers.

And those of us who recognize something in it should resist the temptation to collapse our experiences into one another.

Cambridge is not every university.

Her racial identity is not mine.

Her circumstances are not mine.

Her departure is not mine.

But institutions do not need to be identical for patterns to deserve attention.

Sometimes recognition begins with a simple and unsettling sentence:

I know this story.

Not because I know exactly what happened to you.

But because something in what happened to you has happened often enough that I recognize its shape.

And perhaps that recognition is where another kind of archive begins.

Not an archive of failure.

An archive of testimony.

An archive of survival.

An archive that refuses to let institutional language have the final word about why people leave.

Source

Jill Damatac, “I Aspired To Get My PhD At Cambridge – I Left Because Of The Racism,” British Vogue. Read the original article.

Bring This Conversation Into the Room

For organizations, classrooms and communities ready to examine institutional harm, belonging and survival more deeply, Grandma Knows Best offers facilitated workshops and community conversations.

Explore Workshops and Community Conversations