The Fight for Ideas

Dr. Jennifer Ho’s impact on inclusive education

By Wendy Swat Snyder

From a CNN opinion piece on the Atlanta mass shooting to a documentary film following Asian voters across America, Dr. Jennifer Ho is on a mission to raise awareness of issues surrounding biases—racial, ethnic and gender. Her activism was sparked in a childhood classroom, where she was told life wasn’t fair, particularly for girls. Today, as the first non-male, non-white director of the Center for Humanities & the Arts (CHA) at the University of Colorado Boulder, Ho uses her platform as a distinguished academic and award-winning author to create more inclusive spaces and reimagine the role of humanities and the arts. As the CHA celebrates its 25th anniversary, we reached out to Dr. Ho to learn more about her journey.

You assumed the role of CHA director in 2019. What made you stand out? 

I believe CU’s interest in me had a lot to do with the fact that I’m an Asian American studies scholar who also teaches critical race theory (CRT) and race and racism. And while I’m simply a steward for the years I’m here, I believe I was chosen because there are people at Boulder who want the center to be more actively involved and engaged in issues of equity and inclusion, and my area of expertise fits very well within that mission. I have two different boards to keep me honest about that, because I very much believe that it is not the Jennifer Ho Center, it’s the Center for Humanities & the Arts of which I am the current director. 

What has your experience been like as the first woman of color appointed to the CHA directorship?

Positively gratifying. I may be a first at Boulder, but a first along with other women of color across the US and Canada—becoming leaders in various positions—and that’s been a really affirming space to come into because the generation before me would have come in as “the first,” without any critical mass.

How important is critical mass in sustaining women in the workplace?

The conference I was just at in Santiago, Chile—the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes—was a very male enterprise when I first started attending six, seven years ago. Now, it’s about 50-50. And there are also many more women and people of color. So now I have cohorts. They may not be at Boulder but through spaces like this annual meeting, we can share notes, and I can assert myself—as a leader, as a woman of color.

Solid gains, yet challenges persist.

In May, Fast Company published an article about women in leadership. They’d done studies about women across various fields—Fortune 500 companies, non-profit—and would you like to know the number one thing that hinders women in leadership roles? Being a woman! What they found was that women were told they were too old or too young, they have too much or too little education, or not from the right type of schools, they have too many children or are too fat, or too something, because we don’t accept women as leaders. 

Sometimes it feels like we’re rolling things back, and The Handmaid’s Tale is being used as a playbook. I’m not going to see an end to racism in my lifetime, but that is part of what drives me. If I can create any kind of foundation—build upon the people who came before me, one that someone else after me can build upon, that’s what keeps me going.

Several states enacted bans on critical race theory, claiming it’s being taught in elementary and high schools. 

What would be wrong with it? It’s not happening, but what if we did try to distill to students what the actual history of the United States was and that we were not going to be afraid of what that meant. Because that’s what we’re really talking about: There’s a really ugly history of the United States, but the country is composed of humanity, the best of it and the worst of it. We shouldn’t be afraid that our children can’t absorb these lessons from the past and move forward with that awareness to the future.

Describe your vision for the CHA.

My vision is to really have the center address the most pressing issues facing humans, and right now it’s fascism, in my opinion. Everything we’re doing next year will be under the theme of liberty, freedom, democracy and the fight for ideas, because these words have been co-opted by certain elements of US society. I want to break down what we mean when we talk about liberty and freedom: freedom to, freedom from, what are people afraid of, what are they aspiring to, when they invoke freedom, liberty, democracy. I think humanities and the arts play a central role in addressing that, especially around book banning, which is antithetical to anything to do with education.

So, this theme has been discussed with both of my boards and my staff and it’s in harmony with the messaging of the university, and also what the university at large wants to be known for—that it’s an inclusive space that encourages its students, staff and faculty to show up as their full self.