Scholar · Practitioner · Public Intellectual
M. Yvonne Taylor PhD
Naming what institutions do to the people most committed to their mission — and building what comes next.
Scholar · Practitioner · Public Intellectual
Naming what institutions do to the people most committed to their mission — and building what comes next.
Dr. M. Yvonne Taylor is a pracademic — a scholar-practitioner who moves between the rigor of peer-reviewed research and the urgency of executive leadership without losing anything in translation.
Her work centers on Freedom Dreaming as leadership praxis — the radical act of imagining and building institutions worthy of the people inside them, especially in moments of crisis and collapse.
She has led organizations, built coalitions, advocated with state legislators, and published in peer-reviewed journals — often in the same week. Her public voice has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, the Daily Beast, NPR, and PBS.
She is building a multimedia platform — course, podcast, writing — for academics and mission-driven professionals who want to lead, write, and build — without replicating the extractive conditions they've spent their careers naming.
During COVID, women in higher education — especially women of color in non-student-facing roles — became visible for the first time as essential. Then the Great Resignation happened, and they left. Dr. Taylor's dissertation examined the institutional structures that pushed them out: not individual burnout, but systemic extraction. The research became personal. She was one of them.
Individual sovereignty and collective capacity — built for the people inside institutions who are done waiting for permission.
Op-ed writing as resistance, strategy, and sovereignty. For academics finding their public voice outside the institution's reward structure — or building it before something goes wrong.
Join the Waitlist →An organizational literacy course for anyone inside a mission-driven institution who wants to see clearly and repair what has been broken. Not a leadership course — a collective capacity course.
Join the Interest List →Speaking & Keynotes · Freedom Dreaming Workshop
A four-stage arc naming what mission-driven institutions do to the people most committed to them — and what repair requires.
Mind of Texas podcast — on dissertation research examining why women knowledge workers, especially women of color, left higher education during the Great Resignation.
2025 season — Outsider Identity as Pathways to Innovation: on how marginalized perspectives become engines of institutional transformation.
Op-ed on Confederate monuments, education, and the politics of historical memory.
On Toni Morrison's legacy — and a series of essays on race, education, and the stories institutions tell about themselves.
A Substack for scholars, practitioners, and public intellectuals navigating a political moment that would prefer their silence. Essays, practitioner conversations, and dispatches from the work.
Read & SubscribeWhether you're interested in a keynote, want to learn about the courses, or just want to be in the conversation — reach out.