5 minute read
LOVE OF LEARNING
LOVE OF LEARNING
NGONIDZASHE MUNEMO ’00
From his earliest days, what mattered most to Ngonidzashe (Ngoni) Munemo ’00 was education. Born in Harare, Zimbabwe, Munemo was raised by his grandparents, both of whom were teachers. He was in the first generation of students to start elementary school after the country gained independence in 1980. He later went to UWC Atlantic, an international school in Wales, for high school, and then enrolled in the University of Zimbabwe as a politics and public administration major. As a junior, Munemo was in the first cohort of Zimbabwean students invited to participate in a yearlong exchange program at Bard under the Program in International Education (PIE). Over the course of that year, he says, he “worked with incredible faculty mentors such as Chinua Achebe, Sanjib Baruah, and, perhaps most influentially, Omar Encarnación and the late David Kettler, who I credit with instilling in me a love of comparative politics.” Munemo also played intramural rugby, which he says gave him a community of students from across the world.
Shortly after his return to Zimbabwe, the university was shut down in response to student boycotts and demonstrations. All 10,000 students were expelled and the authorities declared that anyone wishing to come back would have to reapply. After working for six months, Munemo chose to return to Bard to finish his degree and to be with his fiancé, Julia McKenzie Wolk ’97. She is now his wife; author of The Book Keeper: A Memoir of Race, Love, and Legacy (Swallow Press, 2020) and a forthcoming book of essays, Dispatches from Whitopia: Essays on Race, Mental Health, and Motherhood in a White American Town; and director of the Williams College Writing Center.
Returning to Bard as a senior meant he had the opportunity to take yet more classes, from anthropology with Michèle Dominy and sociology with Sarah Willie to film with Adolfas Mekas. “But perhaps the most meaningful experience of my time at Bard was the mentorship of David Kettler,” says Munemo of his adviser for his Senior Project, which looked at colonial schooling and African political education in Southern Rhodesia between 1890 and 1979. “David pushed me on the importance of argument and evidence in my writing, and wrote on more than one of my draft chapters, ‘this is a nice story but what’s the argument?’” The experience taught Munemo how to write, and showed him that he wanted to continue in academia, specifically at a liberal arts college.
I became an administrator out of a commitment to supporting underrepresented students and a belief in the transformative power of education.
To get there, he headed to Columbia University, where he earned a master’s (2001), MPhil (2003) and PhD (2008). His dissertation focused on drought and famine relief, and that led to the publication of his first book, Domestic Politics and Drought Relief in Africa: Explaining Choices (FirstForumPress, 2012), an in-depth and nuanced look at drought-relief interventions in three politically diverse African nations. Munemo argues that the varied responses to similar crises are not based on differing technical capacities, but rather to the specific political conditions in each country and the ways those political realities guide incumbents in their policy choices.
His first full-time academic position, in 2006, was as visiting instructor at the College of William and Mary; a year later he joined the Williams College faculty as assistant professor of political science, and six years after that he was promoted to associate professor. In 2019, Munemo was made full professor. “Teaching at Williams felt like a chance to pay it forward,” Munemo says. “I was able to engage with students in ways similar to my experience at Bard.” He says Williams is a place where scholarship and teaching reinforced one another, adding that “the questions I was pursuing in my research fed the kinds of classes I taught and the conversations I had with students.” After serving as chair of Williams’s global studies program, he spent four years as dean for institutional diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as a short stint as interim vice president for institutional diversity. Like Bard, he says, Williams is a place where great mentorship is critical, and it was his academic home for 15 years.
He now helps instill that sense of home in faculty members at Hamilton College, where Munemo was named vice president for academic affairs, dean of faculty, and professor of government in May of 2022. As the institution’s chief academic officer and the primary voice of its faculty, he has been at the forefront of establishing a Native and Indigenous studies program and begun an examination, with the faculty, of the curriculum. “When I started at Williams I never intended to become an administrator,” Munemo says. “I came to it out of a commitment to supporting underrepresented students and a belief in the transformative power of education. Through that work came a recognition that I could be part of change at a scale larger than what is possible as a faculty member.”
When asked why the change he wants to make is within the liberal arts context, Munemo mentions comments he made to the incoming class at Hamilton last fall: “I told them that while political science was my main interest when I was their age, taking courses outside of that discipline helped me to ask better questions inside of it.” And what is education if not the asking of better questions?
alums.bard.edu
