An Indispensable Discipline

Many graduate students can point to a lightning moment that placed them on their academic path. For Clarisse Wells, a PhD candidate in South Asian studies, that lightning moment was a “Pass the Mic” lecture series with philosopher Cornel West, sociologist Michael Eric Dyson, and talk-show host Tavis Smiley that passed through her hometown of Baltimore in 2003.

“Of course, I did not want to go,” Wells remembers ruefully. She had just gotten home from school and would have rather relaxed. But Wells’s mother, who was forever providing as many opportunities for education as possible—visits to museums, music performances, documentaries, book reports for books her school wasn’t assigning—insisted. At the Lyric Opera House, Wells saw something special. “Three genuinely brilliant people talking about abstract theoretical stuff, like existential philosophy, but applying it to what it is to be black and how we can use it to overcome some of the daily, everyday obstacles.”

 

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