- I am, a full time university professor.
And my job is exactly as sexy as it sounds.
(audience cheering)
On most days, I simply read an ungodly amount.
And when I'm not doing that I'm teaching.
And when I'm not doing that I'm either
prepping for classes or grading students work
and when I'm not doing that
I'm sitting in on committee meetings
doing service work for my department,
my college, my discipline, the committee, community
in which I live all while trying to maintain
a full time performance poetry career
and conduct my own research, in other words,
I put in work, y'all.
(audience cheering)
I love my job though.
On most days teaching for me
is like one of those really complicated math problems where
if Johnny had 17 candy bars
and then he boarded a train from Kansas
going 90 miles an hour
how many basketballs can he burn on the roof
before the children start crying again?
(audience laughing)
In other words,
it's confusing as fuck.
(audience laughing)
But I love how we come together
and almost always figure it out.
I had this one student y'all.
Brown as the border that crossed her.
Asked if I think her white colleges understand
that her family had been trying
to get her into college for generations.
Said she wanted to understand the weight of that,
wanted them to know that she picked this campus
the same way her grandfather picked fruit,
that it was slow, and painful,
but what else was she gonna do.
(audience cheering) Said, said she was upset
that her colleges seem angrier with illegal immigration
than they do with banking practices,
fact, if it cost this country's government
roughly 70 billon dollars
to pay for all tuition at public colleges and universities
instead we spend that much to subsidize
the cost in over 100 billion in student loans,
when tuition is steadily rising
and starting salaries are dropping,
degrees become no different than a designer bag,
a cheap fashion statement,
not even worth the trip to the mall,
(audience cheering) no one ever tells you,
no one ever tells,
no one ever tells you that you have to drown in debt
in hopes of making it to the shore,
that the loan system is a lot like Alcatraz,
like Rikers Island,
we're getting screwed while the guards
don't even have the decency to pretend
to look the other way,
the only difference between student debtors
and prisoners is that students
are taught to think they're on the outside of the bars,
what world do we live in
where we bail out banks who are too big to fail,
even though they bank on the failure on our students.
What world do we live in where college professors
struggle to pay back student loans,
it's like we learned nothing from Biggie,
we're getting high on our own supply.
(audience cheering)
Some days y'all,
some days I feel like a wolf in sheep clothing.
Or better, I feel like a shepard
leading his flock to slaughter.
I teach classes on structural racism and gender inequality,
in a system that is more willing to punish it's students
for plagiarism that it is for sexual assault.
What are we telling-- (audience cheering)
What are we telling our students
when we teach them that the thoughts of dead white men
are far more valuable than their own bodies,
the university has become a black Friday sale,
it does not care whose body gets trampled in the stampede
of it all but us being here, is a revolutionary act,
we force them to peel back the curtains
to a well manicured show,
we watch them squirm whenever we open our mouths
because they know we're not comfortable
with just getting into the system.
We wanna claw this motherfucker down
and that should, (audience cheering)
and that should, and that should make them uncomfortable.
It ain't called growing pains for nothing.
So, if Johnny left Kansas,
on a train going 90 miles an hour,
with 170 thousand dollars in debt,
how much longer will it take for us to realize,
that if he actually burned basketballs on the roof,
it would still make so much more sense, then all of this.
(audience clapping and cheering)