Room Writer

There is always something we can learn from the past. We can learn the art of mastering a healthy living, or we can learn from or identify the mistakes our ancestors made. A recent visit to the Royall house and slave quarters in Massachusetts, made me question-have we changed our ways? The Royalls, or Ryalls originally came from Antigua, bringing with them a life of slavery and servitude. They owned a sugarcane farm there, and were rampantly exploiting their slaves. As they settled in the North America, they propagated their farm in and around Medford, indulged in slave trade and made a fortune out of it.

Well, I don’t have to be a scholar or a historian to understand why they did what they did. One of the hallmarks of power abuse is taking advantage of the unfortunate. The modern day slavery can be seen almost everywhere, and academia is not untouched by it. While considered a fancy career, the power play in academia is not unknown. While scholars are expected to live with a meager salary, minimum work-life balance, and limited freedom of choice, often culminating from constant pressure to secure references and recommendations, for a better prospect, the ones sitting at the top, enjoy the lavish life, not entirely a result of their hard work, but because of strategically placing themselves in the right place at the right time. For instance, someone who made all the right connections, never spoke up, never stood up for any wrongdoings, delegated the toughest job to the poor subordinates and colleagues who don’t know how to refuse, stole credit for everything shiny, and probably had no spine-these are the kind of people I typically see in the top rung of the academic ladder, sans few exceptions. The only thing they worked hard on was their oration, that often made them sound nothing less than the Julius Caesar.

The modern day slavery is not something the Royalls would understand at the first look, as it is cloaked within the tapestries of suffocating dogma. A good scientist does not run after money, whereas the ones in the top have nothing on their minds, but money; A good scientist sacrifices their lives for science, while ones in the top would happily replace your sacrifices with someone else’s.

As I feel my freedom to choose shrinking to the size of a rice grain, with surmounting equation of my caliber with the recommendations that I get, I cannot help but feel what the slaves in the Royalls household would have felt. They must behave, for the entirety of their lives. They must stay silent and suck up, for it’s not their place to speak. They must do what is expected of them to secure a bleak chance, a chance to reach the top.