The Colonialization of the Mind

Déjà vu…On November 6, 1960, my parents took my brother and me, along with a change of clothes and $300 from Habana, Cuba, to Miami, Florida. The president of Cuba suspended elections, the judicial system, and the free press, nationalized all bank accounts, and politicized the educational system.

When I was elected President of the American Psychological Association (APA) in the fall of 2016, we discovered that the association had a $9 million deficit, the New York Times reported a major organizational problem involving national security and ethics that involved APA, and because of the uncovered situation, 75 percent of the association’s executive management leadership were fired or retired.

After my tenure at APA, I was elected president of the board of trustees of Carlos Albizu University in 2023. Thereafter, executive orders posted in rapid-fire order indicated that higher education was under fire, becoming a perceived enemy of the state. Diversity, equity, and inclusion were, by order of the president of the United States, no longer part of the mission and vision of institutions receiving federal support. Before long, academia began to experience a seismic shift toward the almost-century-long legacy of the federal government as the largest and most important supporter of academic pedagogy and science.

What would likely have happened in each of these situations if unusually challenging situations had not occurred? Let’s see. Cuba: After a period of familial insecurity involving food, shelter, related resources, and documentation, obstructions were eventually overcome. APA: After a period of significant self-doubt and organizational doubt, APA split into two separate but mutually intertwined organizations; a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization (APA) and a 501(c)(6) organization (APA Services, Inc.), with a vision to serve all, founded on science and advocacy. Albizu: After significant turbulence, a heart-wrenching retreat in Santo Domingo, the board of trustees, with the engagement of the administration and leadership, reconsidered and reframed everything—from who we were as a university to where we needed to go—and from the ashes, a beautiful phoenix arose.

When faced with insurmountable obstacles, the human and organizational spirit can, in some of her kindest moments, allow for the resurrection of what is valid, meaningful, and sustainable; of what, deep down, we are all here to do on this earth. What is common to the three challenges presented? What is common to their solutions? And why should we and how should we transfer these emerging commonalities to the structure and function of the governance board and leadership of a special institution of higher education.

Albizu is indeed a unique institution. Established 60 years ago by Carlos Albizu, a Puerto Rican native who, after pursuing a PhD in clinical psychology at Purdue University, returned to the University of Puerto Rico (UPR). Neither the knowledge he brought back from the States nor what the UPR administration thought matched what the island wanted or needed. The potential solution was a free-standing, nonprofit professional psychology school established to help develop a culturally sensitive interpretation of North American psychology with a special focus on social justice. The university is thriving and has grown to almost 4,000 students, three campuses, including one in Miami, the inclusion of related disciplines, an undergraduate program, and the producer of the most significant number of doctorates in Spanish-speaking psychologists approved by APA in the world.

Albizu focused on educating those who were qualified, not those who were privileged; those who sought to understand and serve all, especially the Spanish-speaking, not those who were privileged. Albizu prompted those students (and faculty) to serve the community during disasters (such as Hurricane Maria) and during everyday challenges (like poverty), seeking primarily to serve the disenfranchised. As with every institution of higher learning, the board of trustees is charged with developing and revising strategic plans. It was time to take on this charge. Further, this charge aligned with a paradigm shift in the role of the federal government in colleges and universities. Our unique mission turned out to be in the bull’s-eye of many unrelenting, unexpected, and discriminatory federal policy challenges. The board and university leadership were faced with unexpected pressures. And instead of relenting, running away, or even challenging them, we came together to develop a strategic plan that recognized the guardrails we needed to legally adhere to, accepted who we were and where we were, and, finally, where we needed to go. Our board has a history of looking inward and micromanaging the university leadership, sometimes even the board chair. The combination of a scheduled revision of the strategic plan and an assault by new federal policies forced the board to have soul searching discussions, eventually leading to a brighter, more sustainable future.

The first and most critical question is not what we are facing with these new executive orders, but who we were, and more importantly, how we restructure to ensure we remain true to core concepts such as cultural sensitivity and social justice. Most importantly, we believed that who we were and what we offered should not be limited to Puerto Rico and Miami, but to all the United States and beyond, especially to Latin America. The challenges became an opportunity to sharpen our vision, mission, and strategy, making Albizu’s dream a solution to the demands of a complicated, chaotic, and crumbling world.

The recalibration and unification of the board and leadership could not have been accomplished without the riskiest proposition of all: putting everything on the table, subjecting it to deep and impartial scrutiny, and aligning our interpretations with the marketplace of intangibles around us. This mindset allowed for shifting from worrying about what people thought of us, the new federal restrictions, and our budgets and enrollment, to asking and answering who we were, how the world was at present, and what it was moving toward, and how we matched both would yield the solution organically. Instead of fitting a square peg into a round hole, we developed the peg and the hole simultaneously by being courageous, by questioning deeply, by risking everything.

Cuba, APA, and the current socio-political climate affecting Albizu all have similarities. All pose challenges that, on the surface, appear destructive of the self and institutions, as well as insurmountable. The bottom line: Were our minds and our institution going to be subjugated, and were our minds going to be colonized by powers and ideas that do not represent the best that our societies, colleges, and universities have stood for more than a thousand years? Similarly, the scenarios described all present opportunities unlikely to be realized under the status quo. In each of these circumstances described, change occurred only after periods of deep questioning, extreme self-doubt, bouts of depression, and a sense of learned helplessness and despair. Change occurred only through thorough analysis, acceptance of core beliefs, reframing challenges as opportunities, and nightmares and sleepless nights transforming into dreams and radical positivity.

How did Albizu and its board of trustees and leadership make this paradigm shift?

Core beliefs. Many members of the board and leadership read Albizu’s biography, and all of us reviewed his life and goals for a university in the “new” world. We intensely debated who we really had been, who we were currently, and, maybe most importantly, who we should be. And despite having a long-standing appreciation of the university’s history, vision, and mission, that debate calibrated and clarified who we were and where we should be going.

Reframing. Albizu was founded in San Juan, Puerto Rico, during the 1960s, not only a time of change, but also seriously different from the 2020s; or was it? Statistical presentations of demographics, analyses of the nation’s psychological state, and descriptions of who our students and the marketplace were, or should be, took much of our energy and breath, but eventually led to a forward-facing yet historically connected and sustainable as well as robust strategic plan.

Dreams and radical positivity. Instead of worrying about budgets, enrollments, executive orders, and Department of Education interpretations, we set aside Rorschach interpretations of impossible data. Instead, we turned our attention to an organic understanding of our students, communities, psychological appreciation, and potential questions, solutions, and landscapes. With that recalibration, a mindset and a strategic plan emerged, full of dreams and radical positivity.

The following steps after the recalibration were for a similarly deep study by the executive leadership of the university and, in turn, the development of a practical, documentable, and sustainable plan of action ranging from KPIs to budgets, together with policies and procedures that were developed with the integration and input from the students, staff, and faculty.

Our goal was to reinvent a university whose history was based on cultural sensitivity and social justice, dedicated to the understanding and eradication of behavioral health problems of historically disenfranchised individuals, especially Spanish-speaking ones, during a socio-historical-political culture that has been fast-paced, problematic, and discriminatory of those not in a position of power and privilege. Our small and special university has begun waging a war against a modern version of colonializing minds.

We are not only sustaining the original dreams of Carlos Albizu but also evolving them to help shape and resolve the national discourse on the mind and mental health, not just for our country, but also for our hemisphere and possibly the world.

Antonio E. Puente, PhD, is immediate past chair (2023–2025) of the Carlos Albizu University Board of Trustees and professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.