On the Necessity of McNair
Sometimes the words were dizzy. They brewed, they simmered, they stumbled and rocked back and forth. They got big like they were facing a bear, and then they shriveled, petulant. I chased after them with a butterfly net.
It is a horrid irony that one who seeks to study language could lose her language. And yet this is what happened to me, and the journey back to the world, the journey out of that spicy, oppressive forest of careening thoughts and desperate paranoias, because of the Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program. This was the highlight of my undergraduate career, and, now that I am preparing for doctoral work (to begin this fall!), it is essential to outline here how the McNair Program changed everything for me on every level. I became a person again.
The Trump-Musk Administration has cast its sights on federal funding for programs like the McNair. There is nothing sensible about cutting funding for research, and despite this, this is where we stand as a national community. For the first time in as long as I can recall, I have drafted a personal note to send to my House Representative, a small plea that I will send out to her later today. I repeat: It is right, it is just, and it is good to invest our tax dollars into our scholars at all levels of their education, to press forward with science and humanities united in the quest to give life, and to make life worth living. This is our global responsibility as human beings, to utilize our voices.
For anyone who does not know about McNair (both as a person and a program), it can be difficult to tidy up the words that will explain how completely it changed my life, leading directly to the path in which my language would return. Ronald E. McNair was an astronaut, physicist, and inspiration to generations of children and adults alike who saw the trail he blazed through the sky like he was holding aloft a torch. It crowned his legacy with fragrant flowers that chirrup in the wind like tiny chimes. He perished in the Challenger disaster. But, as Anne Frank phrased it, he went on living even after his death.
In 2014, when I was accepted into the program as a McNair Scholar, I recall feeling excited, but not knowing the twisting, bramble-like journey ahead. I ended up in the hospital for much of my time as a McNair Scholar, weaving between illness and my research topic (first language acquisition). To quote one of my peers, Bridget: We were shiny rainbow love beams. What a relief it is to make friends who share your ambition for change in the world. I grew closer to Mika, whose friendship I treasure even today.
We were activists, scientists, art historians, sociologists, writers, dreamers. We studied chemical engineering and planted breathtaking gardens. We giggled at our mutual shiny rainbow love beam-ness. We studied for the GRE together, we helped each other with our poster presentations. In my first hospitalization, my new friends came to visit. We were one. We went on to enroll in doctorates. We went on to achieve doctorates.
It is imperative that the McNair Program continue to change the lives of our University of New Mexico students and our academic community. The central experience of my undergraduate years, the way I comforted myself from my hospital bed with the gratitude I felt towards my peers, the lectures and the early mornings and late nights….it shaped me like I was dough ready to rise to the challenge of research. I formulated a dream there, marching alongside Kristi and Divana and Nicole and others, of what I could be. Of what I could become.
When the language returned, I reviewed my journal articles, my abstract, my papers. It was like being a ghost in the ruins of a Victorian attic, desolate and windy. In some ways, I felt that my life was ending after the hospitalization. But I realized, pawing through those documents that spoke to a woman with a plan, that life was only beginning.
We are not different from the stories we read about, or the heroes we pin on our walls. We are all Ronald E. McNair, dreamers with the potential for shaping and loving our world. Keep the dream alive, and I encourage anyone reading this, please contact your Representatives and Senators and ask them to understand, to conceptualize what the McNair Program means to so many of us, how many lives it has pushed into flying as though it were a gentle gust eddying beneath our timid wings.
Preserving these opportunities for future scholars is, fundamentally, what we can do to stand firm in our convictions that research matters, that people matter. That every step we take in that research world is a step forward for humanity as one. Please consider this, contact the necessary people, and know that we are united as a single species, drumbeats guiding us on like the metronome of our curious hearts.
We will never stop learning.
