Increased Support for and Autonomy of the CSRPC
The Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture has the potential to become an even more vital part of the University of Chicago community, its neighbors and the city at large, as well as the national and international community of scholars engaged in scholarship and artistic practices related to race.
As it stands however, the CSRPC’s potential and that of the undergraduates, graduates, visiting fellows, artists-in-residence, staff and faculty affiliates are paralyzed by its meager resources but most of all by the ways that the University’s leaders discount the importance of studying race critically as an essential component of social inquiry and humanistic knowledge. For us to do our work and support the CSRPC’s potential, we demand the following:
The CSRPC must be fully independent in all its decision-making processes but especially vis-à-vis the hiring of staff. Personnel decisions concerning the Center, up to and including the position of faculty director and executive director, will be entirely controlled by faculty affiliates who do not hold administrative positions.
It is crucial for the effective functioning of the CSRPC that colleagues who hold staff rather than faculty positions have the full freedom of speech and engagement that is afforded the faculty.
The budget should be increased to a minimum annual budget of $2 million. We should reach this minimum in a 3-year period. A proper budget would:
a) secure the staff and operating budgets;
b) sponsor community and activists fellows’ programs;
c) provide financial support for the pursuing of the Mellon projects;
d) provide resources to build a race core for undergraduates;
e) support students, faculty and staff in their research, mentorship and teaching endeavors
Process towards the Formation of Department of Critical Race Studies
Alongside an adequately funded and autonomous Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, effective teaching and research on race at the University of Chicago requires a Department of Critical Race Studies. It is, in fact, extraordinary that we should have to articulate this as a demand in 2020. The University of Chicago stands alone among our peer institutions in lacking a Department through which scholars working centrally on race may be hired and students systematically trained. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, UC Berkeley, Northwestern, and UCLA all have Departments of African American Studies. Brown and Penn have Departments of Africana Studies while Columbia’s is entitled African American and African Diaspora Studies. Previous University of Chicago Provosts have actively discouraged the formation of such a Department here. This absence is particularly egregious in a university that prides itself on continuously questioning and challenging knowledge formations and their institutional groundings.
Faculty affiliates will produce a proposal for a department that we will submit to the Council of the University Senate during the 2020-2021 academic year. In the interim we call on the University to support the process of departmentalization by:
Funding an External Advisory Council composed of faculty at peer institutions that will provide advice on best practices as faculty affiliates put together a proposal. Faculty affiliates will select members of the Council, which will commence work in January 2021.
A commitment to four full lines in the new Department, including at least two full professors, the option of half-lines for existing faculty seeking affiliation with the new Department and their home Department that would not count against the full lines in the Department. We also call for 2 staff positions and a space allocation for the new department. The lines and half-lines, space and funding for staff positions will be released upon approval of the departmentalization proposal by faculty affiliates and the Council of the University Senate.
Faculty Governance of Diversity and Inclusion
At present, the formal leadership of university diversity and inclusion efforts is carried out by the Office of the Provost under the auspices of the Vice Provost for Academic Leadership, Advancement and Diversity. This model of executive governance is incompatible with the stated objectives of a diverse and equitable campus and supporting community health, education, and economic opportunities for residents of the South Side. No individual should be appointed as the mouthpiece of the Provostial Office of Diversity and Inclusion or be empowered to make unilateral decisions on its behalf.
In accordance with said objectives, we demand the following:
The incorporation of “equity” as an explicitly stated objective alongside Diversity and Inclusion. Diversity, on its own, has become an empty slogan, one that emphasizes cosmetic changes, leaving uninterrogated the unequal structures of power that persist well after there are “black [and brown] faces in the mirror.” The incorporation of equity is no mere change of slogan. Instead, it will require that each body committed to diversity at the university employ an equity analysis that shapes their agenda and informs their goals.
The formation of a permanent Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Advisory Council composed of faculty, staff and students that is empowered to develop, fund, and implement university policies and initiatives on issues of equity, inclusion, and racial justice. Members of the Council will be elected by faculty, staff and students respectively. Two seats of this Council will be reserved to the CSRPC and the future Department of Critical Race Studies. This body should be put in place by January 2021.
3. The position of Vice Provost for Academic Leadership, Advancement and Diversity will be restructured such that the role of VP for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is distinct from the role of VP for Academic Leadership and Advancement. The person who holds the role of VP for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion will have served at least one year on the Council and will be elected from among the members of the Council. This structure will be put in place when the term of the current VP for Faculty Development and Diversity ends. In the interim, the current VP for Faculty Development and Diversity will interface with the elected body of the Diversity Advisory Council.
University Policing
The University of Chicago, like most universities across the country and the nation as a whole, has expanded the scope and resources for policing over the last five decades. But for students of color and black residents on the South Side, the expansive jurisdiction and policing powers of the UCPD do not enhance their safety. This was made painfully clear when the UCPD shot Charles Soji Thomas, a senior student of color in Spring 2018.
The logic of policing and punishment also informs the University’s new disciplinary processes for addressing instances of protest and civil disobedience. Though the University lauds itself as a defender of free speech, its punitive approach to student protest undermines the rights of assembly.
Advocating for the safety and livelihoods of students, staff, faculty, and community members, we stand with UChicago United, the #CareNotCops campaign, Reparations at UChicago Working Group (RAUC), and the Library Activist Network at UChicago.
As a first step toward rethinking safety beyond policing, we call on the University to honor the demand of #CareNotCops for a public meeting between student representatives and the Provost.
We call for an immediate release of the UCPD and all other safety and security budgets from the past 20 years and every year in perpetuity.
Release a plan for disarming and gradual defunding of UCPD in conversation with #CareNotCops and on the model of divesting from police to invest in grassroots community-driven projects in the southside.
Reparations at UChicago
“Like so many other venerable American institutions, the University of Chicago is built on slavery.” So opens “A Case for Reparations at the University of Chicago” a working paper authored by Caine Jordan, Guy Emerson Mount, and Kai Parker of the Reparations at UChicago Working Group (RAUC). As the authors document empirically and convincingly, the founding of the University of Chicago is indelibly linked to the fortune of slaveholder Stephen A. Douglas as its earliest benefactor.
While a recent university press release insists that Douglas “had no connection to the University of Chicago that was founded in 1890 as a new institution with a distinct mission” after his death in 1861, there is no question that his fortune permitted the Hyde Park campus to retain the institutional mores, donor networks, faculty base, and library holdings from the Old University of Chicago. As John Boyer concludes in The University of Chicago: A History, “there was indeed no break, if one saw the University through a Burkean spectrum of transgenerational partnerships.”
But we need not go back to slavery and the nineteenth century to identify the ways the university has directly participated in and benefited from racial domination. The University’s active role in maintaining and supporting racial restrictive covenants and urban renewal policies that kept out Black residents in the 20th century must also be acknowledged. Moreover, the institution’s current unwillingness to support the Community Benefits Agreement protecting neighborhoods surrounding the Obama Presidential Center as well as the potential harms that inviting students back to campus this fall poses to the greater South Side speak to its more recent and ongoing history of injurious practices towards local communities.
We demand:
An immediate acknowledgement of the University of Chicago’s debt to the enslaved people who toiled on the Douglas plantations in Lawrence County and Washington County, Mississippi.
The establishment of a truth and justice committee to further investigate and determine appropriate reparations for the University’s connections to slavery, Jim Crow, and other ongoing forms of racial exploitation, exclusion, and discrimination. Said committee should be directed by community organizations from the South Side of Chicago. Its members would be selected by CSRPC in collaboration with allied organizations and institutions on and off campus. This committee would be named by October 1, 2020.
Labor and Publicity Withdrawal
Until these demands are met, faculty associates of the Center for Race, Politics, and Culture and allies will refuse to:
Participate in any new faculty searches approved beginning AY 2020-2021.
Participate in any Departmental, Divisional, or University committee whose nominal mission is related to Diversity and Inclusion.
Allow the University to use our accomplishments to promote the University; these “celebrations” of individual recognition provide camouflage for a long-standing practice, if not policy, of neglect and derision of people of color and scholarship and teaching on race. We will not cooperate with the University’s Press office, nor be highlighted on the University’s web-page. We will communicate with the University’s News office and Divisional Public Relations staff that we are withdrawing from such exposure.
Without movement on our demands, we will discourage colleagues elsewhere from accepting invitations to participate in talks, conferences, or symposia hosted by the University of Chicago until the University takes meaningful action to address its inequitable structures, and request that those committing to this action sign this letter in solidarity.
