ABSTRACT
An experience that I had several years ago epitomizes this kind of bifurcation: I had been asked to address a group of high school students, all of them Latino and African-American young people who were potential applicants to my university. The administrator in charge asked me to speak with them about my work as an academic and of `the life of the mind'. Being a visual person, I couldn't help but imagine a disembodied brain bending over a computer, with the rest of the body unaccounted for! This was a comical image, to be sure, but it was also disturbing to me because I would never have described the work that I do in those terms. On the contrary, I had tried throughout my professional life to combine my scholarly interests with larger, social issues, a commitment to social justice, and advocacy and activism to help improve the educational opportunities of all children, but especially for those who have not had access to such opportunities. To speak of my work as separate from these commitments would make it, in my mind, meaningless. In addition, to address ` the life of the mind' with a group of young people might further have hindered their understanding of the fuller purposes of scholarship and inquiry; it might also have discouraged them from pursuing an academic life themselves. I chose, instead, to speak with them about the excitement of doing research, about how it connected with my life as a Puerto Rican woman and as a mother and teacher, and about how we needed the
passion, hard work, and intellect of young people such as themselves to help make a better world. I believe it was a more successful presentation than discussing the work of academics as simply abstract and theoretical endeavors.
