Ten years to know something.
Then a system with no way to pay you for it.

I have spent five years making the Nèg Mawon podcast. In that time I have sat with more than fifty scholars of Haitian and African studies and asked them to explain what they know. Historians, anthropologists, linguists, art historians. People who have given their working lives to a subject most of the world never gets taught.

Kiltinou came out of those conversations. Not the interviews themselves. What people told me after we stopped recording.

What it costs to know something

A doctorate is not a degree you pick up. It is a decade, and often more. Coursework, then comprehensive exams, then fieldwork in a place you have to fund your own way to, then years of writing while you teach somebody else's classes for a fraction of a salary. You finish in your middle thirties, sometimes later, carrying debt that started accruing before you knew what your dissertation would be about.

What you have at the end of it is rare. A scholar of Haitian history has read the archive in three languages. They have handled documents nobody has cited in fifty years. They can tell you why a thing happened, what everyone got wrong about it, and what it means now. That took ten years of patient, unglamorous, deep thinking, and there are very few people alive who did it.

The system that produced them has almost no way to pay them what it is worth.

The second job nobody mentions

Scholars have told me, quietly, about their side work. Driving for Uber. Freelance editing. Teaching a summer section that pays less than the childcare it requires. Some of these people teach at universities you have heard of, with endowments in the billions.

I want to be careful here, because none of them said it as a complaint. They said it the way you mention the weather. It is the arrangement, and they had made their peace with it long before I came along with a microphone.

I have not made my peace with it.

And the ground is moving

In August 2026, Northwestern University changed the status of its Program of African Studies, founded in 1948 and described by the university as the oldest of its kind in the country. Northwestern said the program had not closed and was transitioning away from its standing as a university-wide research institute. The program's director of outreach and operations told the Chicago Sun-Times that staff had been told weeks earlier the program would close and their jobs would end that month. A former director of the program said its staff had gone from five people to none.

Read the reporting in the Chicago Sun-Times

Whatever the truth of that particular case, the direction is not in dispute. Area studies programs are being consolidated, renamed, folded into something larger, and quietly staffed down to nobody. Every one of those decisions takes a livelihood off the board and a body of knowledge with it.

If the institutions will not carry this work, the work needs somewhere else to stand.