Alumni Spotlight – Peyton White
Reflections from a College Scholar: Peyton White (’20)
Most students from rural Bledsoe County are not exactly groomed for lofty academic careers. As I, a first generation, low-income student, prepare for my first semester of graduate school at Harvard Divinity School, I want to reflect on my time at UT and the way the College Scholars Program allowed me to grow. Having joined the Army
to pay for school, I came to the university with what I thought was a critical worldview. I knew I was interested in human interaction. Language, religion, and sociology were developed interests for sure, but how to apply them in a cogent and useful way remained unclear. Since scholarship and the military had to intersect into a common outcome, military chaplaincy became my stated purpose in education.
In the spring of my sophomore year, I decided to apply for College Scholars to allow more time for what I considered preparatory courses in religion while still maintaining
what the military valued in linguistics. My program,
“Sociolinguistics of Religion,” was the result. However, the program changed. The freedom College Scholars provided for my course selection and time allocation allowed me to hone an undeveloped passion for justice in the context of religion. I became enamored with social movements based in liberation. Critical race theory gave me tools for describing and articulating racial injustices I had long witnessed at home and in school. In all, my worldview was blown wide open because of the privilege of being able to continually focus and refocus across the university and disciplines. The goal of chaplaincy began to take less precedence as academia asserted itself as my ministry.
My College Scholars Program experience taught me
an important lesson on the nature of what it means to study. Rather than enduring a prescribed set of courses
for accreditation, I was encouraged to seek out useful connections across fields and places. Developing a personal praxis for the synthesis of American religion allowed me to begin the process of making unique contributions to my field in my undergraduate program. However, and perhaps more important, through College Scholars, I gained a deep respect for understanding study as a way of “togethering.” Bringing fields together, bringing people together to talk and ponder unfettered was my great joy in our truly remarkable program. College Scholars was precisely where I needed to be and I look forward to continuing the conversations started during my time at UT Knoxville at Harvard and beyond.