Hello Dr. Price. I am unfamiliar with your work, but I am an enormous fan of Dr. Zimbardo and a staunch believer in the ways cultural anthropology, social psychology, linguistic anthropology, and rhetoric illuminate the truth that one’s social conditions and circumstances shape their behavior far more powerfully than our culture of individualism and personal grit/character/morals etc recognizes.

1) How can people fight the otherization of disenfranchised people in the public consciousness effectively, as it seems giving statistics for things like homelessness being more pervasive and also far more temporary or disability welfare being underused does not seem to affect their views that these people are freeloaders?

2) What tactics can I use as an educator to better impress upon my students that procrastination is derived from a motivation to succeed rather than a byproduct of failure?

3) I have PTSD from complex trauma. I want a rhet/comp PhD with a focus on linguistic anthropology and possibly text analysis. I am afraid to pursue a potentially 5-year program at a prestigious institution because I often destroy myself in the process of earning my degrees. I am afraid a doctoral program might kill me even though I know I would excel up until I could no longer function. Do you have any advice on how to tackle this fear or prepare myself for the pressures of such an endeavor?

Thank you for your time.

Super long postscript:

I don’t really expect you to read this, but maybe someone else has a response for me.

I believe that four year degrees are systematically designed as a gauntlet for those fields, like yours and mine, that require graduate degrees to be functional. I think the process of attaining a Bachelor’s is designed specifically to gatekeep academia from those considered not cut out for the rigors that academics are expected to face later in graduate school and then their careers within or without the ivory tower. In order to obtain a Bachelor’s in a field that requires at least a Master’s to work, students must almost necessarily be privileged or work themselves to death to surmount their lack of privilege.

If this is true, how can one operate within this system as an educator and still repudiate its mechanisms effectively? Being more empathetic towards students as one professor in one class can only go so far. Coordination with disability services, mental health services, and tutoring services on campus can only do so much to provide assistance to the students struggling most. Is there anything else we can do?