Creativity Quote by Bernice Johnson Reagon

A Ph.D. is supposed to be an apprenticeship in curiosity; Reagon points out how quickly it becomes an apprenticeship in fear. She’s naming the emotional weather of the academy: the constant low-grade panic that your worth is measurable, scarce, and up for grabs. “Trying to prove themselves” isn’t just about ambition; it’s about survival in a system that trains people to treat identity and intellect like a resume bullet. The rhythm of her list - prove, get ahead, get published - mimics the treadmill it critiques, each verb tightening the belt.

The most revealing phrase is “your research” and “your topic.” Reagon exposes how scholarship gets framed as property, something you can lose to theft or competition. That possessiveness isn’t innate; it’s engineered by incentives: publish-or-perish metrics, prestige economies, and a professional culture that rewards speed over depth and individual credit over collective knowledge. The subtext is that academia, for all its talk of enlightenment, often reproduces market logic with better branding.

Reagon’s authority here matters. As a musician and cultural worker rooted in collective traditions, she’s implicitly contrasting two ways of making knowledge: one that hoards and one that circulates. Her work in the Black freedom movement treated songs and stories as shared tools, not proprietary assets. Against that backdrop, the Ph.D. pipeline looks less like a path to wisdom than a factory for anxious self-curation.

The sting is that she doesn’t blame individuals for being “scared.” She’s indicting a system that converts wonder into competitiveness, then calls it excellence.