Center for Mason Legacies co-founder Wendi Manuel-Scott is co-author of a Harvard Educational Review article published this month. In "Martin Luther King Jr.’s Call for Creative Maladjustment Has Much to Offer Educators in the Modern Battleground," Manuel-Scott and fellow George Mason University faculty member Lauren B. Cattaneo call on justice-oriented academics to question disciplinary norms in accordance with King's 1967 challenge to a convention of social scientists.
"In King’s interpretation, maladjustment is the refusal to accept injustice despite tremendous pressure to conform," write Cattaneo, an associate professor of clinical psychology, and Manuel-Scott, a professor of integrative studies and history. "[C]reativity," they continue, "is channeling that refusal into action."
Their article, in H.E.R. 95, no. 1 (spring 2025), explains King's play on the psychiatric term "maladjustment" (today more commonly called "maladaptation"). Rather than a damning label, he proposes it as an essential condition for social justice and a necessary commitment for academics. Exploring King's call to pair it with creativity, the authors review ideas on radical imagination and obstacles to transformational change. Lastly, they examine "generative collectives" as a necessary vehicle toward King's goal.
King saw maladjustment as a refusal to accept unjust and unequal conditions. "We must never adjust ourselves to racial discrimination and racial segregation," the authors quote him saying to his 1967 American Psychological Association audience. "We must never adjust ourselves to religious bigotry. We must never adjust ourselves to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few."
Academics, they posit now, should likewise commit to questioning the reality of their institutions and fields and empower students to do the same. "King was zeroing in on not just what might motivate people to move toward combating oppression. He was highlighting the forces that turn people away from even taking note of what is wrong," they write.
To show how disciplinary norms too often conform to existing power structures, Cattaneo and Manuel-Scott cite an example from the same field, mental health, that King addressed: In 1968, psychiatrists broadened the diagnostic definition of schizophrenia to include "aggressiveness" and blaming one’s problems on others—"symptoms" that aligned neatly with behaviors common to those years' heated civil rights protests and dissent. Not surprisingly, diagnoses of schizophrenia among Black men surged. ("Published papers explicitly argued that it was the protests that were causing the epidemic," the authors note.) As an illustration of the "creativity" King simultaneously advised, the authors point to a concurrent event—lunch counter sit-ins that, by starkly "dramatizing" segregation's impact, brought "a daily dehumanizing practice that had long been tolerated into the public eye."
The authors advise resistance to the ongoing pressure for cooptation that can come from even universities and institutions professing commitment to equity narratives. In their own case, they write, "We have received accolades for our justice-oriented work at the same time as we have watched that work be dismantled, sidelined, or defunded." They also point to disappointingly limited progress to date by this university and others toward goals of "racial reckoning" and reconciling historic ties to slavery. At the academic level, they caution against dogmatic commitment to any (even seemingly "disruptive") fields of study, noting for example that "women’s and gender studies, which began by questioning ... the traditional canon and center of study, can be institutionalized to the extent that they no longer disrupt."
The article celebrates "educator collectives" that "intentionally reject convention" as a way to carry out King's injunction, but also note the challenge of maintaining such "collective spaces of refusal" in the face of the neoliberal academy's emphasis on "quantifiable productivity." Critical and inclusive pedagogy, they note, and acquainting students with the intellectual lineage of justice-minded analysis and critiques, helps them form their own generative spaces and extend maladjustment across their curricula. The writers cite the educator-activism of Ella Baker, who fostered formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and historian Howard Zinn, among others. They close with a call for "intention and energy" to pursue that "freedom agenda" in institutions today.
April 08, 2025