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(05/07/20 9:57am)
We are living through one of the worst crises anyone can remember. The Covid-19 pandemic is taking a horrible toll on life, health and resources every day, and there seems to be no clear end in sight. Despite all its specificities, the current crisis is proving unoriginal in an important respect: it will affect us all unequally. While some claim that we are “all in the same boat,” the truth is that this pandemic is revealing and amplifying the structural inequities that have long existed. Even worse, if yesterday is the best predictor of tomorrow, the response will more likely exacerbate said inequities, as countries, states, towns and institutions will rush to adopt policies that undermine social resilience. These measures will no doubt include proposals to adopt strict austerity measures, justifying them around narratives of scarcity and shared sacrifice.
Middlebury College is already suffering many of the consequences of the current pandemic. Most students have already been sent back home. Administrators, faculty and staff are working remotely, doing their best to provide academic continuity to our students and develop their research, while planning all possible scenarios for an uncertain future. As the largest employer in Addison County, the college's economic health is inextricably linked to the wellbeing of a community that has grown anxious by the lack of clarity about employment continuity. Rumors of imminent across-the-board salary cuts, benefit reductions and furloughs — combined with the decision to reduce the salary of the Senior Leadership Group — have only exacerbated this unease.
While the economic crisis is a reality out of our control, our reaction to it and its outcomes are not. In the weeks and months ahead, we have the opportunity to anchor our decision-making processes around a clear set of principles aligned with our institutional mission. This should be, and will be, a work-in-progress, but as the Committee for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, we want to offer a few suggestions to guide this essential conversation.
We believe that a robust, deliberative process about our future must be:
Democratic. We must place value on the full inclusion of the voices of faculty, staff and students. The existing elected committees (and newly ad-hoc ones), the Staff Council and the Student Government Association can offer essential input as they carry valuable institutional knowledge. But they should be more than sounding boards: if their constituencies are asked to share the sacrifices and responsibilities, they should share decision-making power, too. Furthermore, we encourage the administration to remain neutral in the event that faculty and/or staff choose to unionize. Unions are better suited than committees and councils to represent workers in labor and contractual negotiations, and to elevate the voices of the least powerful amongst us.
Transparent. The decision-making process should be as open to our community as possible, through shared meeting minutes, virtual town halls and clear, frequent messaging from and to the administration and trustees, reducing the umbrella of confidentiality to its minimum legal expression. Transparency can improve accountability, enhance buy-in from the community in our decision-making process and increase opportunities for democratic interventions, when needed.
Solidaristic. We believe all efforts must be made to protect the most vulnerable among us from the harshest effects of the crisis. Our institution can commit to continuity of employment, wages and benefits, with special emphasis on our low-income staff and part-time non-tenured faculty; we must also protect academic programs, particularly the ones serving underrepresented communities; and finally, we must commit to student financial assistance and support, including issues of accessibility that might be exacerbated by the pandemic and distance learning. These priorities should be placed over considerations of temporary budget deficits, infrastructure development and endowment protection.
We don’t pretend to ignore the magnitude of the tasks at hand, nor the enormous difficulties of pursuing a more democratic, transparent and solidaristic reaction to this crisis. But we strongly believe that if we rise to the challenge, our institution will recover faster and we will become a stronger, more cohesive community. Our future is not set in stone, but it will be defined by our actions in the present. We have an opportunity to reflect on structures that have failed us in the past and focus on alternatives that better suit our needs. We must ensure not only our survival, but a chance to thrive for all of us.
Signed,
The Committee on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Erin Eggleston, Biology
Kemi Fuentes-George, Political Science
Laurel Jenkins, Dance
David Miranda Hardy, Film and Media Culture
Shawna Shapiro, Writing and Rhetoric, Linguistics
Daniel Silva, Luso-Hispanic Studies
Trinh Tran, Anthropology and Education Studies
Editor’s note: The above faculty members comprise the entirety of the Committee on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Learn more here.
(01/31/20 5:55pm)
Charles Murray came to prominence in 1994 by arguing in “The Bell Curve” that black people and Latinx people are genetically less intelligent than white people. He doubled down on these arguments and, for good measure, added more about women’s “innate” genetic differences from men in articles like “Deeper Into the Brain,” and books like “Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 BC to 1950.” He staged a cross burning as a senior in high school in 1960, at the height of the Civil Rights movement. At no point has Murray recanted or revised these arguments.
Thus, when we are told by a student group led by former governor Jim Douglas to “engage diligently and respectfully” with Murray’s “controversial ideas” that are “influential in mainstream politics” in order to “develop as thinkers,” we are left with more questions than answers. First, Murray’s ideas are sadly mainstream. The argument that people of color are genetically distinct from, and inferior to white people is several hundred years old, and Murray’s pseudoscience has existed in various forms long before “The Bell Curve” was published. In the 19th century, these arguments were justified by the pseudoscientific use of calipers, and though the methods have changed, the logic has not.
Second, we agree that Murray’s arguments, and the arguments upon which Murray has built are “influential.” But what is the influence they have had? The idea that people of color are genetically distinct and less intelligent than white people has been used to justify policies and practices that, among other things, promoted unequal medical treatment, justified slavery and kept places like Middlebury College all white at their founding. The idea that women are genetically distinct and less intelligent than men has been used to justify preventing women from gainful employment, barred women’s suffrage, and again, kept places like Middlebury College all male at their founding. If you believe Murray’s arguments, there are certain, unmistakable implications for how the world and places like Middlebury should be constructed. Jim Douglas and the College Republicans should be clear about this.
Third, as noted above, Murray’s fundamental argument is that people of color are genetically less intelligent than white people. In what way are people of color and/or women and/or their allies supposed to “engage diligently” with this? How are they supposed to “respectfully” debate the claim that they are inferior? The entire basis of this argument denies an equal footing to women and people of color.
Fourth, how, exactly, will this help us develop as “thinkers”? Murray’s claim that race is not socially constructed is just wrong. Around the same time that Murray published The Bell Curve, Ignatiev wrote “How the Irish Became White,” in which he pointed out that similar deterministic arguments about the difference between black and white people were in the past applied to the Irish, who were at one point described as “a missing link [between] the Gorilla and the Negro.” Currently, in the US, the Irish have been incorporated in the group of people now known as white. Did Irish people miraculously develop an entirely different genetic code between the 19th and mid 20th century? Of course not. Moreover, who is “genetically” black? Modern genetic research has shown that certain genomes tend to predominate in certain parts of Africa, and others elsewhere. However, some people who are coded black, and who live in the world as black, do not have these genomes. Further, some people who are coded white, and who live in the world as white, do. If a person has half genetic ancestry from Africa and half from Europe, are they black? What if they have a quarter of their genome from Africa? Or one eighth? If one-eighth African genes and seven-eights European genes are enough to call someone black, which genes in that one eighth must be present to make that distinction? From which part of Africa? Are aboriginal people in Australia black? They certainly get coded black. Those questions have been determined in the post-slavery era not scientifically, but politically. Murray’s genetic deterministic argument is silent on this, because he is not a geneticist. Inviting Murray to speak about genetics is like inviting a Flat Earth theorist to speak about geology, with the distinction that Murray’s arguments are directly harmful to people. In neither case is it clear how we actually advance knowledge and develop as “thinkers” by re-litigating already debunked theories.
Jim Douglas and the College Republicans are, of course, free to invite whomever they wish. However, they should be clear about why they are inviting certain people, and what the implications for these invitations are. We are also left wondering where they want to draw the line on speech that is non-intellectual and harmful. Surely, we cannot justify bringing a speaker just because they happen to be “prominent.” Both David Irving and, before he died in 2018, Robert Faurisson published extensively in respected journals and presses, and both were ardent Holocaust Deniers. Are they the sort of people whom we should invite to Middlebury, to “engage diligently and respectfully” with? Because using this criteria, we could certainly get there.
Signed,
The Committee on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
Kemi Fuentes-George, Political Science
Erin Eggleston, Biology
Chong-suk Han, Sociology
Laurel Jenkins, Dance
Daniel Silva, Luso-Hispanic Studies
Shawna Shapiro, Writing and Rhetoric
Trinh Tran, Sociology
Editor's Note: The above faculty members comprise the entirety of the Committee on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Learn more here.
(04/20/19 1:54am)
These past two weeks, a number of incidents both inside and outside the classroom have made clear that we as a campus have a great deal of work to do in achieving our ideal of inclusivity. We have witnessed the trivialization of acts of historical oppression and genocide, as well as the invitation of another speaker whose bigoted views and public statements are in direct conflict with our values and have caused great harm to our community and the future Middlebury we envision. These incidents are painful violations of the trust that students place in us to teach with integrity and respect. In the case of Jeff Byers, because he served on the Health Professions Committee, he was an institutional gatekeeper for students who major in STEM and who hope to pursue careers in medicine. He created an environment in which students understandably felt that an important gatekeeper trivialized institutionalized anti-Semitism and violent racism. In the case of Legutko’s visit to campus, students planning to protest the event --i.e. to exercise their rights to free speech-- were prevented from doing so, and are now the target of national media who are obscuring the real intentions and plans for a peaceful, non-disruptive protest. Situations like these threaten the academic and professional futures of many of our students. They work against our efforts to create a climate in which learning, growth, and community-building can take place.
As the primary faculty governance body tasked with addressing institutional and social diversity in the broadest sense, we--the Committee on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (CDEI)--view these incidents as symptomatic of what many students of historically marginalized groups have to endure on campus: that is, a faculty in which professors are too often unwilling to examine how their position insulates them from engaging with the kind of bigotry that students have to negotiate continually, both inside and outside the campus community. We refuse to take the easy route by dismissing these incidents as merely outliers. Rather, we advocate embracing a broader historical perspective, and we recognize these examples of current institutional practices and policies that systematically harm students of marginalized communities. Transforming Middlebury into a truly inclusive community means taking a hard, honest look at how our institution protects the status quo and reproduces mechanisms of marginalization by failing to address adequately a climate of alienation within our community.
As a committee, we advocate for concrete steps to strengthen Middlebury’s commitment to the ideals, practices, and policies through which we collectively seek diversity, equity, and inclusion. These include:
Greater transparency into the institutional processes and procedures used to both identify and sanction perpetrators of bias. Clarity about institutional decision-making is essential to building the community’s trust in how the college handles and responds to reported incidents of bias.
Increased efforts to diversify both the faculty and curricula as critical steps toward decolonizing spaces and interactions on campus.
Mandatory training for all faculty members to raise their awareness of bias in the classroom and to learn effective strategies to address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in their syllabi and pedagogy.
Creation of a long-term institutional infrastructure by which cultures of knowledge at Middlebury may shift toward self-reflection of disciplines and actions, critique of how these are complicit with existing systems of marginalization, and embedding mechanisms of equity and inclusion into all aspects of college life.
As a platform for faculty voices and concerns, this committee believes it is imperative that the college actively works to rebuild the trust of our students. All faculty should be committed to improving our classroom environments, so that they better reflect Middlebury’s stated core values and commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. By taking the above steps, we will be demonstrating to our students that their voices actually matter and that their existence at Middlebury is both valued and valid.
The Committee on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion:
Kemi Fuentes-George, Associate Professor of Political Science
Chong-suk Han, Associate Professor of Sociology
Laurel Jenkins, Assistant Professor of Dance
Shawna Shapiro, Director of Writing and Rhetoric Program, Associate Professor Writing and Linguistics
Daniel Silva, Assistant Professor of Luso-Hispanic Studies
Trinh Tran, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Editor's Note: The above faculty members comprise the entirety of the Committee on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Learn more here.