Our colleagues of color have called us to recommit to our mission, to recapture its boldness, and to interrogate it through the lens of racial equity. They ask us to start by acknowledging that some of our patterns and practices and history have replicated and reinforced white supremacy and have called us to action in concrete ways that begin our anti-racist work on our own house. I am grateful that they had the commitment to and the trust in our mission and the respect for those of us who are white to begin our work by outlining areas of priority for dismantling and rebuilding.
I am proud that white faculty have endorsed their call to action. Now the work begins. Working with a group of the drafters of the letter, we have matched the anti-racist objectives in the letter with the committees in our governance process that correspond. I will build these objectives into the committee charges that I’ll send later this summer. As a first step, I will work with the Committee on Committees to begin redistributing work on the committees acknowledging the unseen labor that we’ve all recognized in this statement. Further, we will be working together to ensure that all relevant committees and organs of our institution have the necessary tools in place to ensure implementation of the goals we’ve signed onto.
Some of this work has been on our agenda for our long time. Some of this work is new. This has to be the year we find a way to do it.