2025 Equity Conference in One Word: Solidarity

Whether the discussion focused on protecting immigrant families, defending free speech and academic freedom, addressing the risks of A.I., or deepening our understanding of disability and fostering an educated workforce, the 2025 Equity Conference made two things abundantly clear: not only are we never alone, but we are strongest when we are together.

At the conference, we released our CFA Equity Paper, titled “Shortchanging Students: How the CSU Is Failing Our Future.” The paper examines the CSU’s shift to a business-oriented and market-driven model that services corporate needs over the core education mission of the university. In this rapidly changing environment, our racially diverse student, faculty, and staff populations face increasingly under-funded and under-resourced campuses.

In his presentation, educator and activist Dr. Jalil Mustaffa Bishop encouraged us to explore power dynamics to fully grasp the roots of racial capitalism and its role in exacerbating student debt. With student debt now exceeding two trillion dollars – a crisis deeply structured around racial and gender lines, we must rethink how debt financing works in higher education systems.

For Bishop, it isn’t absurd or radical to believe in free college or debt cancellation, for both would allow us to live freer lives and create more inclusive societies. What’s absurd, he argues, is the way debt transforms the education system into a predatory marketplace that exploits and perpetuates racial inequities.

Bishop asks us to reframe how we understand the return on investment on education – that it should not be in terms of securing a job, but on what it can do to shape our society and our people for the good.

Political activist Linda Sarsour highlighted the dangers of our culture of individualism. In a society that has long taught us that we must rely solely on ourselves for protection, Sarsour reminds us that we must remain united, for we are the conscience of our nation and the very people we are looking to for leadership.

She illustrated the growing signs of fascism around the world: the protection of corporate power, the suppression of labor rights, and the unrelenting attack against intellectuals and the arts. Sarsour notes that our higher education institutions are where the next intellectuals are being developed, and where they learn to express themselves and cultivate their own consciousness.

Ultimately, Sarsour emphasized the importance of seeing one another – not just in our work but in our daily lives. It is through this genuine connection that we can affirm our shared humanity.

This point was not lost on CFA Los Angeles member Pau Abustan and CFA Northridge member Kelan Koning, who presented on fostering neurodivergent-centered learning and organizing spaces.

While many of us are aware that not all disabilities are apparent, we must remember to approach others with patience and assume the best of them. Abustan, a professor at CSU Los Angeles, referenced activist Julia Feliz, who asserts that she is not disabled because of her neurodivergence, but by the lack of awareness, understanding, acceptance, and accessibility in most spaces. 

As workers and activists, to try and understand disability is to engage in the everyday work of confronting ableism. In doing so, we must rethink societal norms of intelligence, productivity, and excellence – concepts that are strongly ingrained in colonialism and racial capitalism.

When addressing these changes, professor and author Dr. Jonathan Metzl warns us of the dangers of using shared resentment rather than shared values. In his book, “Dying of Whiteness,” Metzl reveals a sad truth: white people are suffering and dying because of racism.

In resisting healthcare that would benefit everyone, many lower- and middle-class white Americans are choosing austerity – even at the cost of their own lives – just so they can deny healthcare to racial others that they believe are exploiting the system.

Metzel emphasizes the urgency around strategies to replace systems of austerity, competition, and resentment with systems that help foster cooperation in everything we do. By investing in diversity, equality, and an educated workforce, we can instead achieve what is both financially and medically advantageous for everyone.

UCLA Distinguished Professor Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble stresses that, by having moved much of our resources into technology rather than human beings, we have lost much needed human connection.

Without careful consideration, our use of A.I. could unconsciously reinforce existing systems of structural oppression and racial inequities. While education has long been a marketplace for the tech industry to sell their wares, it does not mean these wares are always in education’s best interest. In the same way that students have a right not to be in hazardous environments, so too do they have a right not to be educated with faulty technologies.

“In a time of immense crisis, we are also in a time of immense possibility… While the status quo continues to define the present, we will continue our fight to define the future.”

– Nataki Garrett

“Exposing students to the limits of A.I. and other technologies is a form of resistance,” said Noble, remarking that we must always be thoughtful and responsible in our engagements with technology while recognizing the amount of labor exploitation that goes into teaching A.I. models.

As theater director and artist Nataki Garrett shared, systemic power operates not by firing you, but by making your work environment so untenable that you resign yourself. As she explains it, the system is designed to instill fear and isolate workers from one another.

“When a man yells, the world expects the woman to go quiet,” said Garrett. “This is how power is maintained.”

Her own journey into leadership was marked by those questioning her competency and motives, assuming she was only seeking validation as a Black woman rather than wanting real change against injustice. For Garrett, she refused to allow others to reframe what was happening to her as merely “creative disagreements.”

She stressed that our struggles and sacrifices are not just for us, but for the generations that come. These future generations, however, must not solely inherit our struggles, but also our strategies to overcome the same cycles of harm.

As an artist, she acutely observes that the erosion of liberal arts has everything to do with undermining creativity and marginalized voices who have the power to tell their own stories and reflect onto the world its own injustices. “It’s about controlling the imagination, because that is where revolutions begin,” said Garrett.

All of these conversations both inform and shape our movement for co-liberation. What has been shared here is only a small glimpse of the long line-up of extraordinary speakers who presented during both the in-person and virtual portions of the conference. Many of these sessions were recorded and will be available in the near future on our Equity Conference webpage.

As Garrett powerfully stated in her closing remarks, “In a time of immense crisis, we are also in a time of immense possibility… While the status quo continues to define the present, we will continue our fight to define the future.”