Blogs

Photo Credit: Madia Walsh (The Berkeley Beacon)

by President Heidi R. Lewis
October 6, 2025

I write this blog from Colorado Springs, CO. Stolen land—the unceded territory of the Ute Peoples, to be precise—developed with stolen and exploited labor. I do so, because as Sandra Guzmán points out, land acknowledgements “recognize and respect Indigenous peoples as the traditional stewards of their lands and the enduring relationship that exists between Indigenous peoples and their traditional territories.”

“I’d rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.”
―“Red” Emma Goldman

 “I have declared war on the rich who prosper on our poverty, the politicians who lie to us with smiling faces, and all the mindless, heartless robots who protect them and their property.”
―Assata Shakur, “To My People” (1973)

For the past fifteen years, I’ve been teaching at what I often refer to as a PWI, W². Y’all know PWI is an acronym for “predominantly white institution,” an acronym commonly used to describe colleges and universities. So, why W²? Well, Colorado College (CC) students are also pretty wealthy.

I actually don’t know that for a fact, but here’s what I do know. In 2011, the year after I arrived, the college reported only about 10% of its students received a Pell Grant, a federal grant awarded to students with “exceptional financial need,” just over 20% received some other kind of need-based aid, less than 10% received non-need-based aid, and just over 60% didn’t receive any financial aid at all. Two years ago, the percentage of students who received a Pell Grant increased to just under 15%, the percentage of those who received other need-based aid increased to almost 30%, just over 15% of students received non-need-based aid, and just over 40% didn’t receive any financial aid at all. For reference, tuition and fees cost over $70,000 annually. Tack on about another $5,000 if a student needs health insurance. Room and board? Over $15,000. And don’t get me started on books, transportation, and so on. They estimate the total cost of attendance to be around $100,000 annually. So, the families of almost 900 students are paying almost half a million dollars for their kids to get a bachelor’s degree.

Meanwhile, I’m from a small town in northeast Ohio where almost a quarter of approximately 20,000 residents are poor, up from just under 20% in 1999 when I graduated high school. From there, I went to Robert Morris University, where more than 80% of the student body receives a Pell Grant. I was one of those kids. So, I definitely experienced major culture shock coming to CC. I had never been around that many wealthy or even rich people in my entire life. Even worse, I didn’t really know the socioeconomic demographics of the student body before I took the job. To be fair, I came here as a dissertation fellow and didn’t think I’d be staying for the long haul. I was also mom to a four and five-year-old, so I wasn’t always paying attention to such things like I could or should have been. Worse than that? I didn’t know CC wasn’t need-blind, meaning it still considered applicants’ financial conditions in admission decisions. As of December 2020, the college was still fundraising for a $250 million endowment to change that.

Before coming here, I had class consciousness to a pretty good degree. After all, I come from working class and poor folks, several who were very pro-union. But coming here absolutely turned my consciousness up much higher. In “An Examination of the Kanye West Higher Education Trilogy,” I wrote about being inspired to go to college by A Different World. I wanted to attend an HBCU, but there was no one to help little 17-year-old me make sure that happened. Once I decided to become a professor, I dreamed of teaching in classrooms just like the ones on the show, classrooms full of brilliant, curious, beautiful, and fully human Black students. But that didn’t happen either. The academic job market wasn’t havin’ it. So, there I was—a not yet 30-year-old Black woman teaching in rooms full of mostly (sometimes only) white students who, more often than not, could buy everything I owned a hundred thousand times over. I didn’t even have my doctorate during that first year, and I was one of not much more than a handful of Black faculty. So, you can imagine what that was like, what it’s still like.

“As we introduce ourselves, let’s make sure we at least say our names. I think we all need to know those. Other than that, you can share whatever else you think will aid us in getting to know one another. I’ll start. My name is Dr. Heidi R. Lewis. You can call me Dr. Lewis or Professor Lewis. My pronouns are she and her. I’m a faculty member in Feminist & Gender Studies. I’m a married mother of two. I’m from the Midwest—northeast Ohio, to be precise; Alliance, OH, to be exact. I came up during the decline of the steel mill industry and the rise of the crack cocaine epidemic, of which my father was a victim. I live, love, and breathe Black feminism and Hip Hop. It’s Who Dey all day. And my FAFSA EFC was zero.”

Last month, Clean Wisconsin reported there are at least five proposed or approved AI data center projects across the state. Two of those, the Microsoft data center in Mt. Pleasant and the Vantage data center in Port Washington, have disclosed information about potential energy use. Combined, they’re projected to use enough energy to power over 4 million homes in Wisconsin. There are just about 2.8 million homes in the entire state. You have got to be kidding me.

Last year, Elon Musk developed a supercomputer named Colossus near Boxtown, a predominantly Black community in Memphis with a median income of less than $40,000. At the request of TIME, researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville “found that average concentrations of nitrogen dioxide have increased by 3% when comparing the periods before June 2024 and afterward. They also found that peak nitrogen dioxide concentration levels have increased by 79% from pre-xAI levels in areas immediately surrounding the data center, and by 9% in nearby Boxtown.” Despite that, Musk is planning to build another data center near Whitehaven, one he claims will be double the size of Colossus. Again, you have got to be kidding me.

Wealthy folks won’t be satisfied ‘til they kill this whole planet and everybody on it, including themselves. I guess that’s why so many of them are still planning to colonize Mars. I deactivated my X account a while back. For good this time. At what point am I gonna let go of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and TikTok? Sigh.

“Get this, they asked if we would consent to having meeting minutes recorded by ChatGPT.”
“I know you fuckin’ lyin’.”
“Nope, but we all said ‘no.’”
“And I thought poor folks was supposed to be the lazy ones.”

I’m not naïve, and I’m not particularly romantic. But I do hate wealth with a passion. The minimum wage in Colorado is $14.81 an hour for employees who don’t get tips and $11.79 for folks who do. Employers are supposed to make up the difference if the tips don’t get employees to the $14.81. A person earning minimum wage with no overtime nets around $1,975 a month. The average monthly rent here is $2,090. Yet, of all the public company CEOs in Colorado (mostly men and mostly white, of course), Bryan Leach of Ibotta was paid over $28 million last year, and before stepping down in January, Christopher Wright of Liberty Energy was paid the least at almost $6 million. The greed is disgusting, sickening. And I’ve been way past over it.

“When I get outta jail, I gotta get rich. Fuck that. Wealthy. I’m tired of bein’ broke.”
“I hear you, for real. I hated bein’ broke. I used to want to be rich. But not now.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m straight. I believe wealth causes poverty. And, more and more, I hate greed. Don’t nobody need all that damn money. For what? I got a nice house, nice car. Bills paid. Kids tuition paid. I travel. I got nice clothes, bags. I can’t fly private, but I don’t want to. I’d rather the planet survive and thrive. I can’t buy a yacht, but I don’t want to. What’s wrong with rentin’ a li’l pontoon for an afternoon? Drink some cold ones. Smoke sum’n. What you need wealth for? If everybody made around what I do, we could all eat. That’s not true for a lot of places in California, New York, Jersey, Massachusetts, and what not. But that’s why I wish the cost of living was the same everywhere.”
“Well, I wanna be wealthy so I can take care of my family.”
“I hear you. I just want to live in a world where everybody in your family, mine, and everybody else’s can take care of themselves and each other. Why in the hell do somebody need to hoard millions and billions of dollars when it’s folks out here starvin’, homeless? And that ain’t because somethin’ is wrong with them. Something is really wrong with society. The minimum wage in Colorado ain’t even $15 an hour, which ain’t even $30k a year after taxes. A single person with no kids can’t even live on that. How is that fair?”
“How much money you make, for real?”
“Very low end six figures, not even $120k—more when I do extra work, like teaching here, but not by a whole lot. But I think my salary’s good, even my base. If I didn’t have student loan debt, it’d stretch even longer.”
“But would what you make create generational wealth, though?”
“Absolutely not! And I’m not tryin’ to! I ain’t tryin’ to break my back makin’ sure the two kids I have don’t gotta work, let alone some random great great great grandkids I might not ever even have. Why can’t they work? It’s so much stuff that need done! They can be teachers, beauticians, nurses, attorneys, therapists, landscapers, doctors, roofers, carpenters, electricians! Why I gotta make sure all my relatives, even the ones who ain’t even here and might not ever be, can sit on they asses they whole lives? And put somebody else in poverty to do it? Nah, I’m good.”
“LewLew, you a fool wit’ it!”
“And you betta know I know it! Now, finish them journals!”

For the final in my Feminist Theory course, students write a literature review focused on a debate central to an intellectual tradition in which they hope to anchor their work. I’ve always taught radical feminism, socialist feminism, liberal feminism, lesbian feminism, ecofeminism, and so on. But it’s been nice to see students reading more foundational and contemporary texts in those areas, taking them seriously, and finding intellectual homes there, especially because my white students often struggle with identifying a framework they want to be central to their work. They want Black feminism, Xicanisma, Indigenous feminism. They don’t want to call themselves white feminists. That’s, of course, understandable. But it also gives me the ick, because it feels like exoticization, albeit unintentional. It also feels like a cop out. It feels like they want to run from whiteness so they don’t have to wrestle with and be critical about it. Then, they inadvertently end up missing out on some good, even great, work.

Why y’all gotta have Audre Lorde on stickers all the time? Why is it always Angela Davis on your t-shirts? I’m not sayin’ you shouldn’t ever honor Black feminists, of course. But some white feminists have also been important to mine and many others’ thinking about several things—like class, for one. I’ve taught them. You’ve read them. So, why don’t you get to know them at least a little bit more?

All the way back in the 1890s, Clara Zetkin published “Only in Conjunction with the Proletarian Woman Will Socialism Be Victorious” and wrote, “The proletarian woman fights hand in hand with the man of her class against capitalist society.” You ain’t wit’ that? In the mid-1920s, Mother Jones published her autobiography and wrote, “I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.” That either? In the late 1980s, Clara Fraser gave a keynote, “Oppressions: The Capitalist Connection and the Socialist Solution” and declared, “To me, there can be no liberation without socialism. And conversely, there can be no socialism without liberation for everybody.” You don’t appreciate that? What about Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed? She wrote, “To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.” That don’t make sense to you? Okay, what about Silvia Federici’s Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, published about a decade later? She wrote, “Only from a capitalist viewpoint being productive is a moral virtue, if not a moral imperative. From the viewpoint of the working class, being productive simply means being exploited.” That ain’t hittin’? Well, what about Feminism for the 99%, which Nancy Fraser co-wrote with Cinzia Arruzza and Tithi Bhattacharya? “A feminism that is truly anti-racist and anti-imperialist must also be anti-capitalist.” That don’t do it for you? Get outta here and go study up.

Over 35 million people in the U.S. live in poverty; almost 700 million people in the world live in extreme poverty, on just over $2 a day; and more than 3 billion people in the world, or 44% of the global population, are poor, living on just about $6 a day. At the same time, the top 1% of the global population controls nearly half the world’s wealth, and the top 1% controls nearly one-third of wealth in the U.S.

October 17, International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, is near, and before you even ask, I’ll tell you I have no idea how to eradicate poverty other than eradicating wealth. For me, that means reading, studying, thinking critically about the way everything I do both supports and disturbs capitalism, changing my behavior to reflect all I continue to learn, teaching, and writing.

It also means choosing roses over diamonds every time.

Per my strategic plan, “Reconnect, Repair, Restore: A More Thoughtful, Transparent, and Trustworthy NWSA,” these blogs are meant, in part, to give you a chance to get to know me. This one is exactly that. Until we see you next month, please remember to fight poverty, not the poor.