Enacting an Anti-Racist Agenda at Brooklyn College
Dear Brooklyn College community,
Uprisings against racial violence around the world have given us the opportunity for deep, personal and collective reflection on structural racism. Every type of industry, every cultural and political institution, faces a reckoning around how racism has marked its past and continues to taint its present. Higher education is no exception. We at Brooklyn College must address how racism has shaped our history and how it continues to infect our present.
I am moved by the experiences, concerns, and ideas that our students, staff, and faculty have shared––including those voiced by members of Black Faculty and Staff, Faculty of Color, Latino Faculty and Staff, and the Puerto Rican Alliance, among others. I hear the pain, anger, and frustration, as well as a sincere hope for real change. The work to address racism in all its forms is a priority at Brooklyn College, and we must do more.
I have engaged my presidential cabinet––the senior-most leadership at the College––in dialog to determine how we can turn this cry for racial justice into sustained change. It is time for us to move beyond “diversity and inclusion.” We must alter systems, policies, and practices to advance an anti-racist agenda. Inspired in part by the demands presented to us by multiple groups, we have developed a series of actions intended to take us forward. I am announcing the following:
1) Listening Sessions: We need to hear about racism from as many members of the Brooklyn College community as possible to enhance how we address it. Over the next six months, we will organize six Listening Sessions to provide a platform for everyone who wants to be heard. I will ask my leadership team to attend them. There, students, staff, and faculty will have an open opportunity to voice their concerns. There is strong precedent for the effectiveness of this work. In June, the campus community held a number of town halls, group dialogs, and listening sessions on police brutality and systemic racism in this country. Each session led to a fuller understanding of the issues and suggested changes for our campus. We can build on these successes to engage more students, staff, and faculty to share their perspectives and help us comprehend and tackle these issues more effectively.
2) Implementation Team for Racial Justice: As there are many issues to address and action items to execute, I have appointed Chief Diversity Officer Anthony Brown and Vice President for Student Affairs Ron Jackson to lead a special Implementation Team for Racial Justice on the campus. The Implementation Team will coordinate the collective development of a comprehensive plan on all issues and action items advanced to the administration. The Team will ensure coordination among many initiatives underway, so that we can maximize the impact of our campus-wide effort. The Implementation Team will also include two students, two staff members, and two faculty members to help set the agenda and guide the work.
3) Campus Safety: We will carefully review our Office of Campus and Community Safety Services and ensure that we prioritize those social service and counseling programs that facilitate peace on campus and help to prevent misconduct in the first place. I will designate one of our Town Halls to focus on these issues exclusively, where I hope we can hear from some of our own experts. Thereafter, I will ask the Implementation Team for Racial Justice to develop a plan of action.
4) Student Success: We are all proud of the great diversity in our student body. But we must identify and address the structural obstacles that Black students and students of color more generally face at the College. We need to create stronger systems of support for their academic and career success. We have recently raised funds to offer professional development to faculty in classes with the highest racial disparities in outcomes and the highest D/F/W rates. Going forward, I will also task the campus Strategic Enrollment Group of academic and administrative leaders to undertake a comprehensive analysis of the admissions, retention rates, and graduation rates of Black students and other students of color by program to identify racial disparities and develop plans to eliminate them. The Strategic Enrollment Group will pay special attention to the challenges faced by transfer students, who are disproportionately students of color.
5) Faculty Hiring: Although we are in a very challenging financial period brought on by the global pandemic and its consequent damage to state resources, we have to continue to address a disturbing reality: Our faculty is not representative of our diverse student body. We are going to reallocate funding toward faculty hiring and prioritize hires across disciplines that allow our faculty to represent the students we serve. Our students deserve to be inspired by professors with similar backgrounds and common experiences. I will task the Master Planning Committee of the Faculty Council with helping us to identify fiscal tradeoffs we can make to enhance our efforts to diversify the faculty across departments and schools.
6) Faculty Mentorship: As I recently indicated to the groups who wrote to me, I will appoint a faculty Diversity Mentorship Coordinator to enhance the professional development and retention of faculty of color in our ranks. I will task the Mentorship Coordinator with helping us revise policies on promotion and tenure to reflect hidden workload. We recently won a three-year National Science Foundation grant to address gender and racial disparities in promotion and tenure. We will use it to help us better measure service for promotion. Additionally, the Diversity Mentorship Coordinator will analyze the representation of Black faculty and faculty of color in each school and department at the College, which will include hiring, retention, and promotion.
7) Staff Mentorship: As I recently indicated to the groups who wrote to me, I will appoint a Staff Ombudsperson to enhance the professional development and retention of staff of color. Additionally, the Staff Ombudsperson will analyze the representation of Black staff and staff of color in each title and at each level at Brooklyn College, which will include hiring, retention, and promotion. The Ombudsperson will also gather feedback from staff and make recommendations for additional supportive measures.
8) Anti-Racist Pedagogy: We must enhance culturally relevant programs at the College and ensure that we deepen our anti-racist pedagogy. We will work to increase institutional support for the departments of Africana Studies and Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, but we cannot confine our efforts to those departments. Our efforts must be college-wide. This fall, the Provost’s office and the Center for Teaching and Learning will offer professional development for faculty to understand the experience of students of color in their classes, especially where there are racially disparate outcomes by course. This fall, we will ask department chairs to work with their faculty to identify and highlight culturally relevant programs and anti-racist pedagogy in their own curricular offerings. Over the course of the year, we will work with chairs to enhance these programs and pedagogies across the College.
The academic and administrative leaders at Brooklyn College will be working in each of their areas to move this agenda forward. We recognize that this will be an iterative process. In everything we do, we will seek to listen and understand more deeply how racial inequality expresses itself on campus. That deeper understanding will lead to revised plans and stronger equity solutions.
We must provide Black students, staff, and faculty with the conditions in which they will thrive at Brooklyn College. These are matters of urgency that require action. It will take sustained effort, and I am proud to partner with you to make lasting change. Let us remember: This is a transformative moment in the history of the College, whose importance we agree upon, and whose significance we must honor.
Sincerely,
Michelle J. Anderson
President
