Thread by @hongwon, I keep waiting for university/district/state education leaders to say something about the [...]

I keep waiting for university/district/state education leaders to say something about the demonstrations that occurred in our city and all over the country this week. I decided to say what I wish university leaders would, instead of just waiting around. [thread of imagination]

Dear Campus Community,
Yesterday, all over the country and in our own city, peaceful demonstrators against racist police violence were met by eruptions of the excessive force from police that they were protesting. I am writing to you all--and with extra love to our colleagues

and students of color--with a heavy heart but with hope for the future.

Thanks to the years of relationship-building, dialogues, and vigilance of our local Black Lives Matter chapter, the police in our city were relatively calm compared to their counterparts in other cities.

However, even in these conditions, police in militarized gear shot citizens at close range with rubber bullets, causing uncounted injuries. This, in addition to videos and coverage from cities around the country, has marked my mind and heart, as they have every time.

Because this is not the first time or the last that we have witnessed and taken part in such conflicts. In fact, our university has played a role--historically and today--in the ideological and systemic racism that fuels racialized police negligence, violence, and abuse.

In fact, our university's campus police have participated in racist and misogynistic negligence, violence, and abuse.

We have so much work to do, and I will be building a student and community-based listening tour to build change with transformative justice approaches.

But here's my plan in the immediate term:
- I will stay in clear, regular communication about campus calendars related to COVID-19, as anxiety compounded by anxiety is difficult for all of us.
- We have permanently allocated a minimum of 10 additional full-time counselors to

our university counseling center, given the size of our campus community and its increasing caseload, even before the pandemic.
- We are providing stipends to legal, medical, and mental health practitioners on our faculty/staff who are available for assistance in relation to

COVID and protests. This is in partnership with our university health system, legal clinics at the law school, the Dream Center, and more. People do not have to be affiliated with the University to get help.
- We are in tough economic times, which affects our institution's

financial resources and flexibility. However, I will do everything I can to prioritize and protect the diversity hiring and curricular program initiatives that we have built as a university.
- I am meeting with city and state leaders to advocate for resources for immediate

community needs as well as long-term reform that is designed with community members, particularly those who are immigrants, communities of color, impacted socioeconomically, disabled, and LGBTQIA.
- In light of the economic climate and uncertainty, I have asked for emergency

reallocation of funds from campus police and extracurricular programs (particularly athletics, which are in reduced activities at this time) as well as for corporate gifts to support all of these activities.

We have been particularly fraught with reforming our campus police

department in recent years. In addition, while the incidents of police violence and killings of Black and Brown citizens are relatively few for a city of our size, even one is too many, and they continue to occur. We stand by our community BLM and faith leaders who have been

building community-level change in our region for years to correct our long-standing silence and to learn from them about what can be done on our campus.

Valuable members of our community--students, faculty, and staff members of color, in particular--have been asking for these

and other institutional changes for many years. I am sorry it has taken me and my team so long to respond with multi-faceted, strategic, institution-wide changes. As a result, we have invested in many important diversity initiatives, though I know these have been slow to build

and are not always well sustained. I am learning from a new special advisor on how to strategically facilitate and sustain these transformations on campus while hopefully influencing our city and state.

I also commit to continuing to learn about how I & my family can do better,

to speaking out to my own friends and family, and to leading the cultural and interpersonal shifts that are required to make these changes real. They will take time. We will have disagreements about whether they are working and how to move forward. Many of you may not even think

they are warranted. I am nervous about leading this from my position of inexpertise and as a white educator [our campus has white leaders, as most do], but I know this is the just way forward, and I hope you will join me.

To that end, please respond to this form [I'd make an

online form translatable in multiple languages] if you are a campus community member and are connected to resources that will strengthen these ideas--skills, knowledge, course syllabi, community work, financial, or more that I have excluded. I know there is a great deal of

important work that you have done and I hope to become better informed about and through it. Nothing is too small or insignificant in these efforts for justice. We must work at multiple levels in the ways we can.

If you are in need of assistance (particularly legal, medical,

financial, mental health), or know people who are, please comment in that online form and my team will help me address these needs or make the right plans to do so.

I am serious when I say that my experience has been that we are individuals and a community of great generosity

and kindness. I am leaning on that as I hope you view me and our institution as resources you can lean on as well.

Please support these university-based projects and other initiatives for racial justice in the ways you can. Please stay home, particularly if you were at

demonstrations and in close proximity to others. I will be in touch and hope you will be too.

Keep protecting each other,
With love and solidarity,
Your university leaders

[I wish this weren't just imaginary. And I know it's an incomplete imagination. But I held back and

didn't get too fantastical b/c I'm a pragmatist--these things are hard, but do-able to do and say and be. Maybe next time I'll just imagine something totally different and outlandish, so that I can throw pragmatism and sanity to the wind.]

How are you comforting yourselves and each other? [end of thread, finally]

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