DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

October 30, 2020

Dear Haverford community:

On Monday, October 26 another Black person, Walter Wallace, Jr., was shot and killed by the police – this time in the city of Philadelphia. As anthropology faculty—one of the only BIPOC majority departments at Haverford College—we are deeply saddened by the loss of another Black life, outraged by the ongoing institutionalized violence against Black Americans, and greatly disappointed by the response of our own administration to this tragic event. As has often been the case, it is Black students and other students of color (particularly Women of Color House, Black Students Refusing Further Inaction, and Black Student League) who are courageously leading the way, in this case a strike action by the student body. We strongly support, and are in full agreement with, the principles and demands of this student initiative. Much like the Open Letter to the Bi-Co from Black students, we see the strike statement as an extraordinary act of love. While these statements are rooted in anger and pain, the caring labor it takes to articulate clear pathways forward speaks to BIPOC students’ belief that Haverford has the capacity to do better and work towards redressing institutional racism, anti-Blackness and white supremacy on our campus. As anthropologists grappling with the coloniality of our own discipline, we understand the work it takes to address deeply engrained cultures of white supremacy and settler-colonialism. This will not be an easy or quick path, but at this moment in history, we believe Haverford has a critical role to play in shifting institutional structures and cultures towards racial justice, work which begins with the steps our students have outlined. To our students, during this difficult time of pain, rage and confusion we wish to express that you are not alone. For those of us who are BIPOC faculty, we too are not spared from the aftermath of police violence and how it plays out in our lives. As faculty in the Department of Anthropology, we declare our solidarity with you, extend our support for you in taking actions demanded by the ethics of our profession, and commit ourselves to joining you in this strike.

We call on other departments to do the same.

• All classes (synchronous and asynchronous) will be cancelled until further notice

• Students participating in the strike will not be subjected to any grade or attendance penalties

• We remain available to meet with students who are interested in continuing work on their theses; we likewise support those who decide to suspend thesis work until the end of the strike

• If the strike ends and classes resume in the coming weeks, each professor will touch base in class and consult with students about how to continue forward and finish the remainder of the semester

• We will be postponing upcoming events planned with the college

• We will be holding a town hall on Monday, November 2nd at 11:00 a.m. EST to create space in the coming week for BIPOC and First Gen anthropology students who would like to reflect, talk together, and strategize

• We will send the student demand letter and mutual aid links to our networks and organize within the department and College to respond and engage BIPOC student demands

• We encourage members of the anthropology community to support students through the mutual aid mechanism: Venmo @hcstrikefund Learn more on Instagram @bicomutualaid

• If there are specific organizing endeavors on which we can collaborate, please let us know We also want to emphasize that we are all available to you both as a community and as individuals should you have a need to talk.

Please take good care of yourselves and each other and know that we are committed to you and the struggle against racism, anti-Blackness, and white supremacy.

Resolutely, Haverford College Department of Anthropology

Juli Grigsby

Elena Guzman

Emily Hong

Joshua Moses

Zolani Ngwane

Zainab Saleh

Anna West

Brie Gettleson

11/05/20

Dear Students of EALC, Chinese Language Program, and Japanese Language Program,

As a unified body, the faculty in the BiCo Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures are

horrified, sickened, and dismayed at the continuing incidents of police murder of Black people

in the streets of America. We also recognize the legacy of oppression and injustice that has

characterized and supported institutions of higher learning. We have heard the pain and anger of BIPOC and FGLI students calling for immediate change and for no more business as usual.

We are standing in witness and support these efforts towards disruption and reform.

The academic strike organized by the Women of Color House, the Black Students Refusing

Further Inaction, the Black Student League, and others has been occasioned by events related to the murder of Walter Wallace Jr., another in the long list of Black and Brown people killed by

police. The strike also marks the culmination of many years of dissatisfaction by present and

past students with the response of the two colleges to widespread and systemic racism and

inequity that is endemic in our society and also present in our own institutions, curricula, and

classrooms.

It is important that you know that every one of us on the EALC faculty is deeply committed to

your success and learning and we deeply value each of your contributions. We also recognize

that some students will choose not to participate and we will also hold space for them in various

forms. For all students, we will endeavor in every way we can to foster their education, their

success, and their sense of safety and belonging.

Here are some of the ways we intend to do so:

- we will continue to expand content that represents diverse and non-white points of view and

promote anti-racism in our curriculum and department-hosted events

- we will circulate information about and encourage donations to support the striking students

through the organizations identified by @bicomutualaid

- we have already and will continue to directly appeal to the two administrations to encourage

them to participate in meaningful engagement with the leaders of the student action. We have

and will continue to express the extremely disruptive impact the strike has had on our program,

and the hope that the administrations can act swiftly to meet the demands, resolving the matter

and bringing the strike to a close so that our students can return to learning

- we offer assurance that students will not be penalized for classes or assignments missed

during the period of the strike

Sincerely,

The BiCo Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures

Yuka Usami Casey

Hank Glassman (Haverford chair)

Shizhe Huang

Yonglin Jiang

Minako Kobayashi

Shiamin Kwa (Bryn Mawr chair)

Ying Liu

Tetsuya Satō

Erin Schoneveld

Kimiko Suzuki

Lan Yang

Changchun Zhang

Dear Students in the Education Program,

We hope you are finding ways to care for yourself and one another at this time.

To follow up on messages we sent to all students enrolled in education courses, we write in solidarity with the strike organized by Black Students Refusing Further Inaction, the Women of Color House, and the Black Student League at Haverford College, and also the strike organized by The Core Bryn Mawr Strike Collective in collaboration

with Sisterhood, BACaSO, Mujeres*, Zami+, and Mawrters for Immigrant Justice. As the faculty and staff in the Education Program, we affirm the strikes’ action toward and support of equity and justice, and we celebrate your work and the importance of Education to this struggle.

The strikes insist that we step back from the institutional structures and practices that support, whether deliberately or unwittingly, the perpetuation of white supremacy, racism, and anti-Black violence structured into this country and our institutions. The strike’s demands echo and expand upon the Open Letter sent by Black students in the

summer of 2020 and the repeated protests and calls for change by students of color at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges over decades and generations—including by many Education Program alum. The murder by police of Walter Wallace Jr. follows on the murders of

George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and all of the BIPOC individuals killed by police, and is intolerable. We affirm the strikes’ insistence that we change the institutional structures and practices that tolerate these horrors.

While the Education Program has always been committed to and engaged in equity work, we know that this work must be ongoing. We commit to continue to intensify our anti-racist, decolonizing, and liberatory efforts in order both to redress the harms done by the violence of white supremacy culture, anti-Blackness, and institutional racism and to create equitable and just educational structures, institutions, cultures, and practices.

As the HC strike leaders’ response to the letter Haverford President Wendy Raymond sent on November 2 indicates, the strike continues, and The Core Bryn Mawr Strike Collective in collaboration with Sisterhood, BACaSO, Mujeres*, Zami+, and Mawrters for Immigrant Justice have articulated their demands. We offer the following outline of where we stand as a program:

• All education classes remain cancelled until further notice.

• As we indicated in our previous messages, there will be no penalties to students, faculty, or staff for participating in or supporting the strike.

• We will continue to hold open space for reflection, discussion, and strategizing for any of you who wish to join, but there is no expectation that you do so or penalty if you do not.

If the strikes end and classes resume in the coming weeks, each professor will consult with students regarding how to complete the semester in a way that honors the work of the strike, that

• addresses the work of the particular course, and that does not overburden students, faculty, or staff.

We want to reiterate that we are available to talk with any of you who wants to reach out. We do not assume that everyone is in the same place or needs the same thing right now, and we can offer our best support and camaraderie if we hear from you about where you are.

With care and commitment,

Alice Lesnick

Alison Cook-Sather

Chanelle Wilson

Debbie Flaks

Kelly Zuckerman

Margo Schall

Mercedes Davis

November 2, 2020

Dear Haverford community,

Last Monday, October 26th, Walter Wallace Jr., a Black man who was a son, husband, father, and friend, was murdered by the Philadelphia Police Department. We join the community in mourning this tragic loss of another Black life, in an act of state-sponsored violence, ableism, and antiBlackness.

We recognize the leadership of Black students and students of color, particularly the Black Students Refusing Further Inaction, Women of Color House, and Black Students League, in their fair and honest critiques of the College. We wholeheartedly agree with the calls to action expressed and the urgent need for change. As Environmental Studies faculty, we will learn from the leadership that our students are demonstrating. We acknowledge that we have fallen short and commit to reflection, conversation, and—most importantly—movement from words to actions. The foundations of dominant environmental thought and disciplinary fields have historically supported, directly and indirectly, forces of racism, colonialism, dispossession, and appropriation. Environmental Studies must reckon with and upend this legacy and the resulting harms, exclusions, and erasures. We commit to further combating environmental injustice and advocating for environmental justice, antiracism, and decolonization inside and outside the classroom as well as through our departmental policies and procedures.

We will use our position within the academy toward systemic transformative change, calling on Haverford to live up to its stated commitments to racial justice and to oppose injustice, in all of its forms. As a department, we commit to dismantling these structures in our classrooms and across the Bi-Co. Environmental Studies faculty are deepening our conversations about classroom and campus climate, representation within the department, resources and support systems, and transformative justice in our region. We declare our solidarity with the strike and support for the student demands, and we extend our support for these efforts, affirm students’ right to protest injustice—of any form, on or off campus—and offer the following concrete actions that we, as a faculty body, will take immediately.

We are canceling all Environmental Studies classes for this week (November 1–November 7, 2020) and until further notice. Faculty members are available to students for conversations, questions, and answers during those scheduled class periods, but instruction will not take place.

Students in ENVS courses will not be penalized, academically or otherwise, for participating in strike or protest actions. Deadlines and syllabi will be adjusted to accommodate students enrolled in our courses.

The ENVS department will put its collective weight behind the striking students’ demands that require faculty action and can be achieved through faculty agency, and we will use our position to demand broader institutional change on other items. We will develop clear departmental procedures to support students, including, but not limited to, improving accessibility for disabled, LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, and FGLI students within our courses and establishing mechanisms of accountability.

Finally, we look forward to continued reflection and dialogue with ENVS students—whether they are majors, minors, or members of CER—through the first week of November and beyond.

In solidarity, Bi-College Department of Environmental Studies

Don Barber

Carla M. Dhillon

Elisabeth Evans

Sara J. Grossman

Carol Hager

Joshua Moses

Helen K. White

Jonathan Wilson

Talia Young

November 6th, 2020

Dear Haverford Biologists,

We are in a difficult time when we are challenged by a global pandemic; daily reminders of brutal anti-Black violence, systemic racism; a country divided by ideologies; and campus structures with baked-in systemic inequity. However, this moment also presents us with a golden opportunity. The Strike, organized by Women of Color House, Black Students Refusing Further Inaction and the Black Student League, has sharpened focus on how we, as a Department, have repeatedly failed Black students and students of color. This failure has extended throughout the history of the Biology Department and continues today. While we have been individually working toward inclusion, support, and anti-racism, we acknowledge that our progress has been far too slow for what our students need and deserve. These are hard and humbling conversations to have, and the student Strike has brought this to the forefront. Thank you for creating an environment that compels us to do this necessary work in a more expedient manner.

To that end, the Biology Department faculty has concluded that it is essential that we move quickly to restructure our curriculum with inclusion, equity, and support as the core principles. Given the urgency, and the time and energy required to fulfill this goal, we are canceling all Biology classes for the remainder of the semester. This is a drastic and disruptive action, but we cannot in good conscience proceed as usual. We need your help for our work to be successful in creating an antiracist, inclusive department, recentered with voices that are traditionally marginalized. In fact, we can only succeed if you join us in being agents of change as we work toward these common goals.

We are immediately forming a working group with you, our students, to incorporate your ideas and input on how to reshape our curriculum, start to finish. We begin next week by framing the critical issues in biology education with the sophomores, juniors and seniors. We will also include external experts in DEI in STEM Education to ensure that we are proceeding with efficiency, effectiveness, and unbiased advice. We are starting a process, with students at the center, that we trust will lead to lasting changes and a continuing evolution of an inclusion- focused curriculum. This is work that should never be considered complete. What the Strike has allowed us to do is catalyze our curricular redevelopment and reimagining, which was long overdue, with our full attention this semester in the hopes that our collective action will lead to lasting change in the Department. This objective is deserving of our full focus and deepest commitment for the remainder of this semester and will provide a platform for ongoing efforts to recreate our curriculum.

Through discussion with the Biology Student Group, we have already identified some key areas for work:

1. Redesigning the entry to Biology to foster belonging and accessibility. A necessary feature will be to design a new 100-level, semester-long course that actively welcomes first-year students into Biology, especially those who have been historically marginalized or under-resourced.

2. Modifying the Bio200/201 class and lab to appropriately recognize the work and time invested by students. We must remove the gatekeeping role of this course as a barrier to majoring in Biology. A key goal will be to prevent the disproportionate loss of BIPOC and FGLI students who turn away from biology due to these courses.

3. Addressing equity and transparency in research opportunities. This includes both academic year and summer experiences at Haverford and other institutions.

4. Incorporating active anti-racism throughout our curriculum. This includes reframing how we contextualize science history and increasing the visibility of BIPOC scientists and their contributions to the field in all courses.

5. Creating meaningful structural changes to enhance mentorship and advocacy within our Departmental community. This includes clearer student/faculty communication, career development opportunities, and mechanisms for Departmental accountability.

Students of color have brought us to these realizations, but addressing these issues will benefit all our majors including LGBTQIA+ students, FGLI students, students with disabilities, and other minoritized groups. In biology, a diverse community is a healthy community. Your diverse voices are critical in this process to ensure success.

We are empowering you to participate in this effort. We also want to support students who need course credits for eligibility for visas and Federal loans and we will ensure that there will be options to cover this requirement. We have made a request to the Administration for us to offer a seminar (P/F) tentatively called “Crafting an Inclusive Biology Curriculum” to replace cancelled Biology course credit as needed. We understand that some of you are not participating in classes at this time, but it is key that all students are recognized for this community work. For those joining us outside of a course credit structure, we will ensure an appropriate mechanism for recognizing your time and effort. We hope that students will participate in this work even if course credit is not needed or wanted.

Thank you for creating time for us to do this necessary work. The student Strike has honestly been a gift in this time of anxiety, a pandemic, and the ongoing injustice against BIPOC people in the world, the United States, the Philadelphia area, and on our campus. Thank you. It has allowed us to 1) acknowledge our commitment to radically changing the status quo, in order to maximize the success of every BIPOC, FGLI, and systemically marginalized student and 2) conclude that working on this commitment and simultaneously teaching classes has been too slow to be useful to students. Please join us in the next step by attending one of several planned town hall question sessions next week (links to be sent soon).

As faculty of the Biology Department, we commit to restoring trust with the students we have marginalized, improving our curriculum to be more fully inclusive, equitable, and supportive. This is a moment to move the Biology major, Haverford College, and the field of Biology forward — by coming together to design the tools and methods for creating future scientists rooted in inclusivity and antiracism.

Sincerely,

Your Biology Department Faculty

Amy Cooke, Assistant Professor of Biology Rob Fairman, Professor of Biology

Amanda Glazier, Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology Rachel Hoang, Associate Professor of Biology

Seol Hee Im, Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology Roshan Jain, Assistant Professor of Biology

Karl Johnson, Professor of Biology Shirley Lang, Lab Instructor

Jay Lunden, Visiting Professor of Biology Eric Miller, Assistant Professor of Biology

Kristen Whalen, Assistant Professor of Biology

Oct. 30:

Dear Chemistry students:

Thank you for all of your outreach to us during the last two days. The Chemistry department strongly supports each of you in all of your roles at Haverford: as individuals in our classes and budding scientists, as members of our College community, and as activists committed to change in our community, our institution, and beyond. And we support you collectively as you work together to effect change. We acknowledge the disparate impact of many parts of our community, institutional activities, and academic program on our BIPOC and FGLI students and we especially convey our appreciation, support, and solidarity with you.

As the current situation evolves, we resolve to continue to be in close contact with all of you, to provide support and community so that you know that we are engaged and interested in both the strike and your individual and collective well-being. This will take many forms, including continuing office/student hours for specific instructors and discussions at many scales (including in research groups and class groups of varying sizes). We are here to support and engage with you in the ways that are most meaningful to you. Please reach out to any of us, at any point, as the strike and the next days unfold. And also please feel free, as always, to use our anonymous department online feedback box to provide any input that you have for us collectively or individually.

Regarding the student strike, here are some actions that the Chemistry department takes together, in response to and in solidarity with our students and our Chemistry Student Group.

All Chemistry classes will be cancelled through and including Tuesday Nov. 3 (Election Day). Instructors will reach out to their students and continue to hold discussion and office hours to provide support and engagement, and to be available for individual student consultation as needed. We will continue to evaluate what our support looks like as the strike continues.

There will be no class or academic penalties for students who participate in strike activities, and we will make necessary adjustments to course syllabi and scheduled assessments.

Chemistry research labs are closed, and research groups/students will have ongoing conversations and connections with their PIs for purposes of conversation and mutual support.

We reaffirm our anti-racism commitments from earlier this year and ask that you continue to work with us towards enacting these commitments.

While the pandemic has spread us out physically, we will continue to meet regularly as a group in our department to share information, ideas, and support between each other, so that we are best equipped to support our students and their goals.

We look forward to being in close touch and partnership with you in the coming days. Thank you for your insight, your encouragement and support for us, and your strong actions towards fundamental change.

The Chemistry Department faculty and staff

Nov. 3

Dear Chemistry students:

I am writing to update you on our response to the strike, and to repeat and reinforce our messages of solidarity, with the strike and its goals of making serious anti-racist changes to our College and community, and of support for all of our students.

All Chemistry classes and department activities are cancelled, and all research labs are closed through Friday, Nov. 6 unless the strike ends before that date. We remain available for individual meetings and will continue to hold office hours and make ourselves available in ways that best support our students. Please let us know what support you need during this time of local and national uncertainty and less academic structure. And please do your best to take care of yourselves, each other, and the broader relationships that we all have together. We are here to support and engage with you.

If you have concerns, questions, or suggestions, please contact any of us (including your instructors or other faculty) or use our anonymous department feedback dropbox.

The Chemistry department faculty and staff

Nov. 6:

Thank you for your patience and continued engagement with us, with the strike, and with each other in our community during this time of crisis, uncertainty, and shared growth. I am writing to let you know how the Department of Chemistry intends to proceed from here.

1. Scheduled classes are cancelled for the duration of the strike, in strong support of the goal of becoming a more inclusive institution, towards which satisfaction of the strike’s demands would provide an incremental step. We are working actively with other faculty and the administration to enable that step as soon as possible.

2. We will continue to engage with all of you, starting with town hall meetings for 100-level students, 200-level students, and majors&minors on Monday Nov. 9 (regardless of the status of the strike on Monday) and with sessions on following dates as needed. Please watch for invitations from your instructors to Monday’s meetings: each of these town halls will include multiple faculty. We strongly, strongly encourage all of you to attend because we want and need to hear from all of you during a disorienting and polarizing moment. (You are welcome to mute video and use a pseudonym if that enables and supports your participation.)

3. When/if the strike does conclude, we will not “return to normal” in our academic program. This means the following things in the short term:

   1. We will work with the College to provide both pass/fail and graded options for completing this semester’s courses, which will all involve flexible course content, clear and revised rubrics for transparent assessment, and a variety of options for engagement that can best support all of our students.

   2. We will continue ongoing work, as a department and in engagement with CSG and other students, to adjust our curriculum to provide greater accessibility and flexibility to all students to our courses and our major.

4. Regardless of strike status, and going forward into the future, we will continue to engage with our entire community in our ongoing antiracism commitments as enunciated earlier this year.

As always you are welcome to use our anonymous feedback form or contact any of us directly. We are looking forward to seeing all of you on Monday.

With continuing support for all of you

Casey Londergan

And the Chemistry department faculty and staff

Nov. 7:

Dear students:

Thank you for your responses to the Chemistry department’s general email of yesterday afternoon, which we very much appreciate. We look forward to talking to you all more at our town halls on Monday, when I think that we will be able to offer each of you some more granular clarity about how our courses will look for the remainder of the semester. Please bring your questions on Monday!

I would like to clarify and add more context to my comment that “we will not ‘return to normal’ “ when the strike is over.

Our intention is not to end any of our classes, and we commit to making it possible for students to receive full credit and grades in all our classes in a variety of ways while taking into account the extraordinary nature of this semester. Even before we started this semester, in the midst of a global pandemic, we knew that it would not be “normal” and this led to the adjustment of teaching modalities and some course structures, as well as syllabi. With the additional time that we have lost due to the strike, many of our courses will now end in ways that won’t exactly match the original syllabi at the beginning of the semester. And we will not add extra assignments or content, beyond what we had originally planned, to the remote learning period at the end of the semester. But this is ok for several reasons. We can adjust subsequent courses to include or account for specific material that may not be covered this semester, and we are already planning to do so. Our 100- and 200-level courses already cover material that is different from the traditional “gen chem” and “organic” courses at other colleges and universities, and this innovative structure provides flexibility in satisfying prerequisites for other programs and pre-health requirements. We have strongly prioritized research space and support for independent research in our facilities in the fall semester, and we will continue to do so for the spring semester to maximize research lab time for our senior thesis students. Incremental adjustments to courses taught this semester will not harm students’ academic programs or progress towards graduation.

We have heard unanimous support from you for the strike’s broader ideals and goals and this clearly indicates that “returning to normal” is no longer possible nor desirable. Our shared aspiration is to make the Chemistry department, and the College, more inclusive, accessible, and antiracist. We look forward to continued engagement with you to successfully realize this ambition.

We, and I, look forward to seeing and hearing from you all on Monday. Please continue to be in touch!

Casey Londergan

As members of the Department of Classics we write to express our outrage at the killing of Walter Wallace Jr., our condemnation of institutionalized violence against Black communities and individuals, and our continuing commitment to anti-racist action

In keeping with this commitment, we support the strike organized by the Women of Color House, the Black Students Refusing Further Inaction, the Black Students’ League, and others; we acknowledge the importance of their goals, and we express our respect for the careful thought, hard work, and resolve that have gone into this action.

In keeping with our support:

We have suspended classes from the start of the strike and will continue to do so through Friday November 6; all ongoing assignments and deadlines are also suspended. Students in our courses can expect a further update from the department as well as their individual professors by Sunday 11/8.

• Students participating in the strike will at no point suffer any penalties.

• When classes are resumed, we will seek flexible and creative ways of reworking our syllabi and modifying our expectations in order to complete the semester in a satisfactory way.

• Individual faculty members will be available to meet with students to address questions or concerns, as well as to discuss their views of the ongoing situation and the Department’s decisions.

• Individual members of the department have donated to the Strike Fund and the Nest and are committed to continuing this support as we are able in order to provide material assistance to striking students.

For our larger action plan see: http://classics.sites.haverford.edu/equity/

Sincerely,

Matthew Farmer

Bret Mulligan

Deborah Roberts

Ava Shirazi

Hannah Silverblank

Dear Economics student,

We want to thank so many of you who came to our town halls this last Wednesday. We believe that they were a productive beginning of discussions about making the department a more welcoming and accessible community for all students, in particular BIPOC, FGLI, LGBQT+ and other marginalized students. At that meeting, we promised to send you the Economics Diversity Agenda which we had drafted before the town halls and which has been updated with some of your suggestions. As a draft, it is truly a living document which we hope will be constantly revised and improved through faculty and student input. Please feel free to respond and comment on the agenda by emailing us directly or, as promised at the town halls, through this anonymous feedback form here that we created for these purposes. It will remain active indefinitely.

In order to get the work of the agenda started, we will be scheduling a meeting with students next week. More information about this meeting will follow in a future email.

Wishing you peace and justice,

The Economics Department Faculty

November 5, 2020

Draft: To be revised in consultation with economics department students

Economics Department Diversity and Inclusion Agenda

· Created this summer in response to the June 2020 BSRFI Open Letter to the Bi-College Community and to President Wendy Raymond's communications about DEI.

· Two designated faculty members of the econ department will be appointed each year to lead the agenda and to guide the formulation and implementation of policy: this year Anne Preston and Richard Ball fill these roles.

· The department would like to add at least two student liaisons, perhaps a student committee, to inform the agenda. We seek student input on what the form should take, and those individuals who choose to participate will be paid either a stipend or an hourly rate similar to TAs.

· Primary functions (as conceived of now—we welcome other ideas):

o Initiate discussions on a regularly (monthly) recurring basis among econ faculty and econ students, about how our classes, curriculum, and department as a whole are serving, or failing to serve, marginalized students. Particular topics include:

§ Course content and organization of 104/105

· Incorporation of material of high interest to BIPOC, FGLI and other marginalized students

· TA sessions; learning communities

· Assignments

§ Core course content and examples of high interest to marginalized students

§ New electives of high interest to marginalized students

§ Pedagogical strategies that create space in which students with a range of learning styles can succeed. Consider bringing in an expert speaker/consultant as part of the department's ongoing participation in the teaching and learning initiative (TLI).

§ A new set of questions that can be included in course evaluations to elicit feedback on the experiences of marginalized students.

§ An end of the year semester survey of majors and minors to evaluate their overall experience with the economics department, both in class and out of class, the results of which will be discussed in the monthly meetings.

§ Increased diversity among TAs and RAs hired by economics faculty

§ Formal training for our TAs including training on diversity issues

§ Seminars organized by the economics department that:

· Are given by a diverse set of speakers

· Have topics that are of interest to a diverse student body

§ Guidance on hiring visitors or new tenure track faculty

§ A data base to keep track of all the above over time so that we can assess how much progress is being made

o Actions related to outreach and information:

§ Support and implement micro-aggression/anti-racism training/discussions for faculty and students

§ Create a platform where students can anonymously submit questions or concerns related to the climate for marginalized students in the economics department or report incidents

§ Maintain a web page and list-serve to publicize opportunities available to marginalized students: summer and post-graduation internships and jobs; grad school; training programs; programs offered by the American Economic Association; other local and national events that advocate for and promote the success of marginalized students in economics

§ Contact HC economics alumni to request that they send us information about internship/job/training/etc. opportunities for marginalized students, and share this information via web page and list-serve.

§ Establish a BIPOC alumni speaker series (one per semester) where BIPOC graduates come back to campus to discuss their careers as an economics alum (or whatever they feel is most worthwhile) and interact socially with students.

§ Establish robust lines of communication with marginalized students in the economics department (e.g., through liaisons or a student committee or monthly meetings as described above).

§ Create a voluntary paid mentoring program where senior economics students mentor first years and sophomores interested in joining the major with the intention of making sure all BIPOC and FGLI students have a mentor and have the opportunity to become a mentor.

§ Reach out to marginalized students in their first and second years to give information about the economics major, minor, and math/econ concentration, with the goal of making economics accessible to them and of discovering where they face obstacles or discouragement in the economics program. This would include mini workshop opportunities in job interview training/tips, public speaking, job search strategies, and other practical extracurricular skills that contribute to both academic and professional success.

§ Send information about the economics department to incoming first year students from marginalized groups as they prepare to enter Haverford, to provide information about taking economics courses and majoring/minoring/concentrating in economics

• • • Survey all students having taken Econ 104/105 each year, collecting demographic information and asking why each student enrolled in the course, whether, and if so why, they will take further courses, in the hopes of identifying and understanding issues of retention of BIPOC & FGLI students and possibly formulating policy to increase retention.

§ Create a data base to keep track of all the above over time so that we can assess how much progress is being made

Many of the ideas presented here were stimulated by information from the American Economic Association about promoting diversity, equity and inclusion in the economics profession, available at https://www.aeaweb.org/resources/best-practices.

November 6, 2020

To the Haverford Community:

In July of this year, we wrote to our students and the community to express our support for the demands articulated in the BSRFI’s Open Letter, and to outline our plans as a department for disrupting the everyday and spectacular operations of white supremacy as it structures life at Haverford College. Then as now, we honor the extraordinary work and visionary leadership of student organizers, including the Women of Color House, Black Students Refusing Further Inaction, the Black Students League, and other networks of BIPOC students and their allies at Haverford. Then as now, we condemn white supremacy’s routine violence, the most immediate instance of which was the murder of Walter Wallace, Jr., on October 20th, 2020 in the midst of a mental health crisis and as his mother and neighbors attempted to intervene. We join our students and the broader community in grief and rage, and in profound disappointment with the administration’s response to this event.

We stand with our BIPOC students, and we support the transformative and ground-shifting work of the strike. We recognize the strike as a response to these immediate events and as an action informed by decades of creative organizing, advocating, and community-building. We also recognize that we have significant work to do to redress the reverberating effects of institutionalized racism in our respective fields and in our department.

At the prompting of current English majors and recent alums, we write now to reaffirm the commitments of our July letter (attached), and add to those commitments the following timeline of actions:

Immediately We will cancel all classes and programming until further notice. We will

remain available to our students for listening sessions, including for

seniors who wish to continue work on their theses.

We assert that students participating in the strike will not face any grading penalties, and we support seniors who wish to pause work on their theses for the duration of the strike.

Individually we will participate in teach-ins, contribute to mutual aid and strike funds, and amplify the demands of the strike organizers on various platforms.

December 2020 In collaboration with students we will create an English department

student advisory council, with members elected by students and with

BIPOC leadership and representation. The council will serve as a

support system for our majors, and will work closely with faculty on

hiring, curricular development, programming, channels for student

feedback, and other departmental issues. Council members will be compensated for their work.

February 2021 In collaboration with the student advisory council, we will develop

specific lines of support for BIPOC and FGLI students, including but not limited to research, travel, and programming funding.

June 2021 In collaboration with the student advisory council, we will assess our

departmental requirements and introduce new requirement(s) that center fields such as African-American and African diasporic literature, Latinx, Asian-American, Native American, and LGBTQ literature as essential for competence in the major.

Annually We will apply for a tenure-track line in fields historically and currently

under-represented in our department, including Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian-American studies. As a department and individually, we will advocate for additional hires and resources for the Africana Studies program.

Each year, we will conduct a departmental self-study centered on anti-racist readings, to include discussion of our teaching and mentoring practices as well as collaborative efforts to support the success of BIPOC and FGLI students.

In direct response to this courageous student action, we work with renewed vigor and clarity toward a relatively new goal for this nearly 200 year-old college, that of creating a more genuinely ethical anti-racist institution where BIPOC and FGLI students can thrive. As a department, we acknowledge their work in moving us to act substantively on issues we have been discussing for a long time.

With genuine gratitude from the tenured members of the department,

Lindsay Reckson

Rajeswari Mohan

Christina Zwarg

Gustavus Stadler

Asali Solomon

Maud McInerney

Debora Sherman

Laura McGrane

Dear Students of Mathematics and Statistics,

We hope that this message finds you safe and well. We write, as a department, in pain and sadness in response to the horrific murder of Walter Wallace Jr., a Black man, by two police officers in West Philadelphia this past Monday. We also write in response to the academic strike organized by the Women of Color House, the Black Students Refusing Further Inaction, the Black Student League, and others.

The faculty members of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics support the goals of the strike and students’ actions to further those goals. Concretely, we have committed to the following actions:

• We have postponed deadlines for the senior thesis and will revisit the new provisional deadlines and the nature of the assignments as events warrant.

• We will provide flexibility for deadlines and participation in our classes. This flexibility will take a variety of forms, depending on the class.

• We will pool donations as a department to give to the Haverford Strike Fund or other such funds as directed by the student strikers.

• For those of you who may not have seen our commitments towards an anti-racist pedagogy stemming from the uprisings following the murder of George Floyd, we have attached a letter that we sent to students in the Haverford Mathematics and Statistics community this summer. We attach this document both to recommit to the actions contained therein and as a means to help hold ourselves accountable for taking those actions.

In addition, each of us has our own evolving perspectives on how to respond to this moment. We share some of these perspectives below. Note that we have not requested or expected such statements from junior and contingent faculty, nor faculty currently on leave, though some have volunteered. The statements are in alphabetical order by last name.

Sincerely,

The Department of Mathematics and Statistics

(message sent June 19, 2020) -----

Dear Students of Mathematics and Statistics,

In spite of mathematics being honed and practiced by every culture throughout human history, mathematics as a professional field is dominated by white people. If you are white, as the majority of our department is, you didn’t create this reality, nor is it unique to mathematics. It is a reality that has been shaped over the last several centuries by colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy. White mathematicians continue to benefit from this reality in a variety of ways, including by the presumption by others that they “fit” into mathematics, whereas those of us who are nonwhite are often presumed not to be naturally talented or even interested in mathematics. This presumption of “not belonging” can be alienating and incredibly discouraging for nonwhite mathematicians. On the other hand, the presumption of “belonging” lives so persistently with white mathematicians that often they don’t see that it’s there. As teachers who chose to come to Haverford because we wanted to educate *all* Haverford students in the beauty and power of mathematics, it is especially pressing that we address these inequities.

Over the past two weeks, black people in the United States and all around the world have spoken loudly and bravely about a different but not unrelated advantage that white Americans have: the freedom from fear of police violence. This is far from a new message, but this month’s expression of it has been especially powerful. The fact that many students that we teach live with a baseline fear for their own physical safety has a profound impact on achieving the liberal arts mission of “educating the whole student”. Especially for an institution like Haverford, whose mission points to education in service of the needs of the world, we must not respond to this moment by continuing business as usual.

Today is June 19^th, the national holiday known as Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of chattel slavery in this country. Chattel slavery was abolished in most of the South by the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, but it was not fully enforceable until the end of the Civil War. The timing of Juneteenth derives from the arrival on June 19, 1865 of Union forces in Galveston, Texas to announce the freedom of all enslaved peoples. Juneteenth is a day of joy and celebration, but for predominantly white institutions it should simultaneously be a day of self-reflection and rededication to the ongoing fight for racial justice.

To this end, we, the faculty in the Haverford Department of Mathematics and Statistics, write to you, all students who have taken a course in our department in the past academic year, today to share some of our thoughts on how we plan to meet this moment. We will describe some ideas specifically related to policing and police violence, and the connection of mathematics to it, as well as some broader ideas about addressing inequities and the lack of inclusiveness in mathematics and around the world. We invite you to consider our ideas, and to collaborate with us by telling us how they might be improved and expanded.

In 2018, the Honor Code was not ratified during the annual spring student plenary. As we understand it, the primary impetus for this failure was a grass-roots uprising by students of color who were exhausted by the fact that they routinely shared a disproportionate burden to confront students, faculty, and staff regarding violations of both the social and academic Honor Codes. Around the same time, a group of math majors of color and several close allies initiated a conversation directly with faculty in our department about how the issues of race and identity more generally impact students in our math community. We listened carefully to the campus-wide dialogue which eventually helped to reshape the existing Code, in addition to collaborating with the resulting Mathematics Inclusivity & Diversity (MID) student committee. Spurred by that moment in Haverford’s history, we committed to making the mathematics community at Haverford more inclusive to students of color and other students historically underrepresented in mathematics. Some efforts we have made in the last two years include:

• We have formalized MID as a perpetual department subcommittee of students elected by their peers to engage in collaborative dialogue about current initiatives, new ideas, or concerns related to inclusivity. These efforts are fostered and propagated by the structural and financial support of the department. Many of MID’s initiatives, like their formation, have been student-driven, but we have been in regular dialogue with them, and collaborated directly on some projects that we especially value. Examples include MID-run seminars for Math 215 students on identity in mathematics courses and cultivating inclusive mathematics practice, and an evening seminar in the Fall of 2019 dedicated to algorithms in policing, co-organized by MID and a faculty advisor.

• In 2019, the department and several student consultants participated in a year-long seminar dedicated to best practices for inclusive pedagogy, funded by the Cantor family and the Teaching & Learning Institute (TLI). The seminar provided crucial time and space for us to explore some of the mathematical education literature about equity and inclusion, and to think intentionally about equitable mathematics teaching in a way that continues to permeate every department discussion. The department is in the process of implementing best practices that promote inclusivity and improve outcomes for students historically underrepresented in mathematics, as well as disseminating our findings to other departments in the sciences and quantitative social sciences.

We recognize that much of the work mentioned above does not speak directly to the current moment, in which we are called to think---both as individuals and professional mathematicians---about how we can contribute to a culture of anti-racism, especially as it applies to the ongoing and rampant police brutality against black people. Although we acknowledge that these are only small initial steps, we also want to highlight several newer efforts to which the department has committed, specifically in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade and the resulting uprising.

• We are pooling our individual resources through PayPal to make a charitable department donation to Mathematically Gifted and Black. As described at the included link, “one hundred percent of these donations will go towards supporting predoctoral mathematicians to pursue career goals related to the mathematical sciences.”

• Each day in February, Mathematically Gifted and Black highlights a black mathematician on social media. We will incorporate these highlights into our classes during that time. We recognize the importance of representation, and we want to cultivate an environment in which black and brown mathematicians can see themselves as invaluable members of our community, and in which they can feel the same presumed sense of belonging enjoyed by our white peers and colleagues.

• In 2020-21, our department will become a member of the National Association of Mathematicians, whose mission is “promoting excellence in the mathematical sciences and promoting the mathematical development of all underrepresented minorities.”

• We have a renewed focus on issues of equity in our weekly department meetings in Summer 2020 to plan for our COVID-era pedagogy and curriculum. We know from public health data that COVID afflicts communities of color disproportionately. Analogously, student feedback from Spring 2020 tells us that COVID-era instruction also brings new risks of inequity in how our students experience our courses. Equity and inclusion are at the forefront of every departmental discussion this summer about the 2020-21 academic year, whether it be about class-size, mode of instruction, material covered, or out-of-class support.

• Each summer, the entering first-year class reads one book together over the summer, in part to provide common material for engaging in meaningful and respectful academic dialogues throughout Customs Week, in addition to providing a springboard for related norm-setting discussions. We will participate in the planned 2020 “Common Read” for the incoming first-year class, which will be focused on anti-racism, and we will discuss this reading together as a department.

• In 2020-21, we will organize a co-curricular seminar (possibly available for course credit) on the ethical use and study of mathematics, with a lens towards anti-racism. Because of the nature of its objects of study, it can be tempting to think of math as “pure” and/or isolated from the world, but of course, math is created by people whose identities impact their mathematical pursuits, and mathematical skills can be deployed in the world in ways that could have negative effects. We aim to use this co-curricular seminar to begin our process of better understanding these issues and building more intentional discussion of them into the mathematical education through which we guide our students.

As a means of both deepening and broadening these commitments, we invite you to respond to any of what we have written here, either by reaching out to any of us, or by working with or through MID (note that the members of MID can be reached via email at hc-mid@haverford.edu, and MID has generously expressed their willingness to pass anonymous comments to the faculty). Both now and in the future, we hope you will alert us to any concerns you have about how we address, or fail to address, these issues. We appreciate the thoughtful and insistent questioning of the status quo that we have seen both at Haverford and in our country recently, and we value the voices of those who step forward to tell us where we are falling short.

We know that what we have described here in this letter are only first steps. We know there is much more to do and that genuine allyship has no expiration date: it is constantly practiced. We write today specifically to signal our support for our students of color, and our commitment to thinking deeply about these issues and how we can employ our professional positions to contribute to meaningful change.

Sincerely,

Tarik, Lynne, Charlie, Rebecca, David, Rob, Weiwen, Liz, Josh, Jeff

Dear Philosophers,

As you may infer from individual faculty responses to the strike, all of us in the Department of Philosophy support all students who have made the decision to strike. We deplore the systemic racism in the College. And we recognize and respect the leadership shown by Women of Color House, Black Students Refusing Further Inaction, Black Student League, and other BIPOC students in calling this strike. We affirm that students in our classes who stand in solidarity with the strikers will not be penalized for their actions. In addition, all possible accommodations will be made to assist students in completing required work. Senior faculty in the department are also committed to protecting vulnerable departmental faculty from professional penalty for their actions in connection with the strike.

We look forward to working together with you to make the College, and most immediately the Department of Philosophy, an accessible and inclusive environment for all students. We are grateful for your invitation to begin this conversation in which we are also deeply invested. Your letter occasioned many hours of thoughtful and productive discussion among us. As a first step, we hope to convene a meeting with philosophy students in the very near future and will be in touch with you soon.

Sincerely,

Ashok Gangadean

Danielle Macbeth

Jerry Miller

Joel Yurdin

Qrescent Mali Mason

Benjamin Berger

Email from Saturday, November 7, 2020

Dear physics and astronomy students,

We continue to support each of you in your individual responses to the strike. We care about you and want to support BIPOC and FLGI lives, your mental well-being, your academic career here at Haverford, and your future career, as well as to empower you to engage in meaningful and lifelong citizenship. However, although we will continue to give extensions and be flexible in other ways where possible, we will not be cancelling classes without providing equivalent content, because of serious accreditation concerns (and consequences to all of us as a result, including and especially our equity agenda).

We are faced with a choice between cancelling classes and assignments and remaining an accredited institution. If the institution accreditation, international students and employees would lose their visas. Students would lose the Federal Grants that support them being here, and our degrees might not meet the requirements for transferring college or for post-graduate programs like graduate schools, medical schools and law schools, nor would many employers recognize them. We would also lose grants that we are using to do the anti-racist work described in the letter linked below.

We support demands that Haverford practice anti-racism. We hope you have read about new and established anti-racist work we plan to do. No matter what happens with the strike you have our commitment that we will keep working to sustain and expand our efforts towards anti-racism. We welcome the opportunity to expand this agenda (attached) collaboratively and we invite you to dialogue. Stay tuned for an upcoming meeting between department students and faculty. No matter what happens we want to come together as a department to continue to do this work together.

Finally, as always, we invite you to talk to any of us one-on-one.

Best regards,

Andrea, Dan, Dave, Karen, Natalia, Paul, Saki, Suzanne, Ted, and Walter

Dear students,

We are horrified by the widespread police brutality against Black lives and other systemic anti-Black racism in our society. We stand united against the injustices both outside and within our own community that have motivated the academic strike organized by the Women of Color House, the Black Students Refusing Further Inaction, the Black Student League, and others.

We spent the summer and fall focusing on beginning to take anti-racist action, not just producing a document. If you want a longer statement of our response to racism, here is a link to a much longer letter we composed over many months. This is a work in progress, with many specific actions to follow imminently.

Motivated by the strike we have been meeting with groups of students including BIPOC in our department to work to understand their requests and how we can support them. Individuals are adjusting their class schedules in support, including moving deadlines, removing content, allowing flexibility.

We stand with you in demanding more resources for BIPOC, FGLI, and queer and trans BIPOC, and disabled students. In this context, we are concerned about reports that students feel using CAPS and other campus resources (including meeting with us faculty) might be considered crossing the strike line, when many students are struggling with deep concerns about events on and off campus, often while negotiating mental health issues. We think it’s especially important to encourage all students to use these resources right now.

However, we also think it is essential that students be able to openly question aspects of the strike while being respected. In our campus community, we highly value the process of constructive criticism. Protest and dissent by their nature must allow for the free interchange of ideas and the open discussion of diverse viewpoints. Listening to alternative viewpoints is one of the fundamental values of diversity and inclusion.

We face enormous challenges in the days ahead. We will need to come together as a community and as a society to face them. We seek to engage with you on these issues in unity.

Best regards,

Suzanne Amador Kane

Karen Masters

Ted Brzinski

Walter Smith

Andrea Lommen

David V. Stark

Paul Thorman

Dan Grin

Natalia Lewandowska

Saki Khan

Letter in Response to Open Letter from Students, Summer 2020, sent Monday 26th October 2020.

Dear Students,

We the undersigned, members of the Physics and Astronomy Department at Haverford College, write to thank you for your passionate, impactful letter this summer, justly demanding action to dismantle the racism present at Haverford, in the BiCo, and the larger spheres of community and power we are situated in. On the national stage, the past year has seen the continuation of violence and devaluation of Black lives, including the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and the recent shooting of Jacob Blake, compounding the needless deaths of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Atatiana Jefferson, Aura Rosser, Botham Jean, Philando Castile, and countless others in years before. This happens on the backdrop of a society built on the material plunder and deep misery of chattel slavery, Jim Crow segregation, thousands of lynchings, redlining, and white supremacy.

In the midst of a pandemic that has laid bare communal disinvestment, a tattered social fabric, and the daily reality of racism, we affirm wholeheartedly that Black Lives Matter!

We are committed to engaging with & improving from your feedback, beginning with this response letter, in parallel with concrete actions. As a mere letter, this reply cannot rectify the deep injustices you describe. We do hope, however, that it communicates transparently our own recognition of the work we have to do to dismantle structural racism locally, outlines ongoing and future efforts, and engages you in continued dialogue that helps to hold us accountable.

We recognize that our department must actively work to identify and dismantle systematic racism, both within our own academic community and in the larger world. Individuals can have unconscious biases, or exist within racist structures that can lead them to perform racist actions. Curricula and syllabi can reinforce or allow racist structures to persist, notwithstanding good intentions. We, the undersigned, commit to work every day to take anti-racist action, critically examining our own biases, (re)-examining these practices to help dismantle systemic racism, and engaging in trainings/changed practices as needed. In what follows we describe some of the actions we have already taken and are committed to expanding or continuing.

Cultural Norms and Code of Conduct

Largely at the urging of you, our students, we have begun a new effort to examine all the practices and cultural norms in our department, among faculty and students, in order to become anti-racist.

• We have looked carefully at how we could change our spaces (e.g. the department student lounge) to be more welcoming and inclusive, and pre-pandemic had begun to use the space to host events targeted at students from under-represented groups.

• Last year we instituted TA training focused on inclusive practices in our office hours/recitations/clinics, in collaboration with Brian Cuzzolina, director of the OAR and Assistant Dean for Student Academic Success and Persistence.

• We have incorporated information specific to diversity and inclusion into our advising materials for summer job opportunities off-campus and for graduate and professional schools

• We are in the process of creating a department website for sharing professional society and support resources, including those specific to Black, Latinx, and LGTBQ+ students.

• We have adapted the American Physical Society Code of Conduct for our department Slack channels and courses to make it clear that professional and ethical conduct in the classroom and shared spaces needs to ensure an inclusive and supportive environment for all especially underrepresented students. We commit to working with our students to formulate a code of conduct for our student spaces (real and/or virtual), building upon the policies we have developed in the last year in our syllabi and classrooms.

Bystander Training

We plan for physics and astronomy faculty, student TAs, and anyone in a student-facing position to participate in bystander training. We currently are working with the College to identify an appropriate set of trainers. This is one of the few interventions known to help reduce the level of micro-aggressions afflicting department cultures. We recognize the pernicious role of micro-aggressions in othering Black, LatinX, and other under-represented minority students in ways that make it hard for them to feel welcomed or invested in.

Student Diversity

We are all committed to understand how people find a home in our department. We recognize that in your letter, the Department of Physics and Astronomy was specifically called out. We would not only like the diversity of our majors to at least equal that of the student body as a whole, but for our programs to attract diverse students to the college. Even before your letter, we knew we had much work to do in order to reach this goal. Some specific examples of our ongoing efforts are:

• We have been working to identify factors driving this underrepresentation, and changes we can make, both in the relevant courses and how we engage with students to encourage them to join and continue in the physics and astronomy programs.

• We are looking at what our department, first year advisors, UCAs and other students say to first-year students about Physics and Astronomy as they enter the college, how we say it, what happens to students in and out of the classroom, and how we support them in continuing with the physics curriculum.

• We are working with the College to understand possible roadblocks that might prevent students from even taking a first physics course, and to identify what we need to do to make sure they take our courses and thrive.

• We are using an upcoming external review of our programs to think through how our curriculum as a whole can offer additional support and how we can provide more entry points for students (the latter has been shown to improve representation of under-represented students in programs at other institutions).

Faculty Diversity

We recognize that the faculty in our department lack racial diversity, and that in particular we have no Black faculty. We continue to seek opportunities to increase the representation of BIPOC scholars in our department. We plan to use our upcoming external review to explore ways to argue for additional staffing within our department. As opportunities become available, we commit to work towards the hiring, supporting, and retaining of Black faculty and faculty of color, and to including BIPOC students as collaborators in our hiring practices. As evidence of our commitment in this area, in recent hiring rounds, members of our department have led successful search committees which have increased the number of BIPOC faculty in other STEM departments.

Personal Learning and Growth

As individuals, we are all pursuing various pathways for understanding our own responsibility and how we can contribute to anti-racism. None of us want (or deserve) a medal for any of this--we just want to be transparent about our thought processes and active efforts. Here are some of the activities various of us have engaged in:

• Outside of working hours, we have engaged in activism this summer to affirm that Black Lives Matter. We participated in the Academics Strike for Black Lives on June 10, 2020, shutting down our research programs to spend the day engaged in anti-racist actions of various kinds.

• We have participated in the Academics for Black Lives (A4BL) conference this summer, in which we acknowledged that racism goes far beyond the intellectual understanding that skin color doesn’t reflect intelligence, ability, or promise. Rather, A4BL taught us that racism exists and harms even when individuals are well-meaning and embrace equity at an intellectual level. We have to work to diagnose racism where it exists and prevent/undo its harms.

• We worked through readings that helped us consider our responsibility for white supremacy (such as Me and White Supremacy by Layla Saad, and My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem and How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibram Kendi.)

We think that the pandemic makes it even more important to concentrate on being anti-racist, because the issues that we had before are now exacerbated. Access to faculty, the student community, and departmental resources all have been disrupted. We are working to restore this access with equity as a core consideration. We recognize our responsibility to create a community which is welcoming and supportive of Black students and students from other under-represented groups. That challenge is heightened as the pandemic fundamentally disrupts the sense of what community means. The study of Physics and Astronomy is and should be a communal effort, but the community can only be effective if it nurtures the ability and confidence of individuals to participate. For all these reasons and more, the pandemic is elevating our attention to becoming an anti-racist department.

This letter is not intended to “solve” the issues you highlighted, but rather to tell you that we hear you, and to invite you to dialog. We are working hard to address racism in our organization, but recognize that our response will suffer from blind-spots and our own stake in the status quo. Thank you for holding us accountable to just expectations, and for expecting us to rise to the challenge.

Best regards,

Andrea Lommen

Karen Masters

Ted Brzinski

Suzanne Amador Kane

Daniel Grin

Saki Khan

Paul Thorman

Walter Smith

David Stark

Dear Haverford Community:

We, as faculty members of the Haverford College Political Science Department, write to support and honor the work of students who have joined together to demand change at Haverford and beyond. We recognize the work of Black students and other students of color (particularly Women of Color House, Black Students Refusing Further Inaction, and Black Student League) who have led the student body in a strike against the persistent institutional marginalization experienced by Black, indigenous, people of color, first generation, and low-income students. We also recognize their creative labors of envisioning how the college might be better and what might be done to make it so. This is not the first time that such demands for change have been made at the College. The College has a long history of “hearing” grievances about institutional bias without instigating meaningful reforms and of declaring commitments to change without delivering on promises. The student strike makes clear that merely paying lip service to equity for all members of the College’s diverse community (including along lines of race, class, gender identity, and ability) should not and will not suffice.

Student demands for social justice and equity force our department and the College to be self-reflective and, importantly, to take concrete action in order to address the myriad of ways that we have failed our students and this community.

We are not interested in making a statement of solidarity that is not backed with serious commitments to change. Indeed, we believe that declarations of solidarity are hurtful when they are not accompanied by action and when they are only made when it is easy. Solidarity requires action, even when it is hard to do so. As a department, we accept this challenge.

We, as a department, commit ourselves to the principles of anti-racism and freedom of expression; to creating an environment conducive to learning for all students; and to de-centering and provincializing perspectives that have long been hegemonic in this country and in the U.S. academy. In this endeavor, we commit to accountability to one another, to students, and to the broader Haverford community, and we appreciate the diversity of knowledge and experiences we all bring to the table. We acknowledge that it is unjust to privilege only one perspective and ignore the experiences of others. We also acknowledge that conversations over ideas—inside and outside the classroom—do not occur in a vacuum and recognize our privilege and power as faculty members.

We, as a department, commit to the following actions in support of these principles:

• Amnesty for strike participation

  • We will not penalize students for not attending class or for not turning in assignments while the strike is ongoing.

• Internal departmental self-reflection by faculty

• We are committed to self-reflection. The faculty will have honest internal conversations about their assumptions and prejudices regarding the marginalization experienced by those who are Black, indigenous, people of color, first generation, low-income, people who experience oppression due to their gender identity or sexual orientation, and people of different abilities.

• Classroom culture and student feedback

  • We will create a variety of spaces for students to share their concerns about classroom and departmental culture so that we may address these issues. We will provide a diverse array of channels for students to engage us with reflections, critique and ideas.

  • We will create a feedback form on the department website that will include an anonymous option. This will be accessible to all students enrolled in our courses.

  • We will actively listen to concerns and suggestions from students and colleagues and commit to finding a way for each faculty member to receive honest, constructive, and safe (for faculty and students) feedback on their classroom environments as they pertain to diversity, equity and inclusion.

• Accountability

  • We will report back to students annually on the progress we have made.

  • We commit to holding annual departmental town halls during which students can provide feedback and demand answers.

• Ensuring that our teaching and syllabi embrace the diversity of perspectives on our campuses and in the world

Though syllabi creation is in the hands of individual faculty rather than the department as a whole, we each commit to taking steps to increase the diversity (broadly conceived) of the authors/creators included in our collective course offerings and teaching. This can take many forms. Most syllabi should embrace and attend to perspectives that are not white, rich, and male. Faculty can learn from the amazing diversity that already exists within the student body, the faculty, and the curriculum.

• External review of the department

  • We will host an external review team during the academic year 2021-22. This team will consist of esteemed faculty from political science departments at peer colleges. These visitors will evaluate the department through fact gathering that will include majors and give an opportunity for students to share their concerns anonymously with the team. The recommendations of the outside review team will provide an important set of concrete steps that we can take as a department to do better

  • We commit further to making sure the faculty who comprise this external review team are themselves diverse and that they are deeply knowledgeable both about struggles to diversify the Political Science discipline and about the discipline’s historical entanglement with patriarchy, imperialism, and white supremacy.

The actions detailed above are not meant to constitute an exhaustive list; they are a beginning. The Political Science department acknowledges that we have work to do to learn and understand our shortcomings. We hear the student demands as a call to reckoning that we must do better. We thank students for courageously calling us to this challenge.

Respectfully,

Craig Borowiak

Tom Donahue

Anita Isaacs

Steve McGovern

Barak Mendelsohn

Zach Oberfield

Paulina Ochoa

Susanna Wing

Religion Department Statement

November 9, 2020

We in the Haverford Religion Department are grateful for the courageous actions of Haverford’s student body in responding to the College’s statements regarding the brutal killings of George Floyd and Walter Wallace Jr. by highlighting how the College is implicated in and actively perpetuating the racist structures that negatively impact the lives and livelihoods of Haverford’s BIPOC, LGBTQI+, disabled, lower income, and other marginalized staff, students, and faculty. We stand inspired and indicted by the criticisms of the College presented by Black Students Refusing Further Inaction in their open letter to Wendy Raymond. The College has failed to make good on its promises of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

As a Religion Department, we have reflected on our practices, policies, and attitudes and begun considering how we must change if we are to contribute to dismantling structural injustice and racism at Haverford. As a department, we acknowledge that we have inadequately met the needs of BIPOC, LGBQTI+, disabled, FGLI, and other marginalized students who have enrolled in Religion classes, and who have majored or minored in Religion.

Not only does this failure compromise the joy, mental health, and academic pursuits of BIPOC, LGBTQI+, disabled, FGLI, and other marginalized students, it adversely impacts Haverford’s community at large, undermining the College’s stated mission to provide an outstanding liberal arts education. Being committed to that mission entails being committed to urgently, actively, and immediately working toward sustainable institutional transformation.

In this spirit, the Haverford Religion Department is committed to immediately developing advising, curricular, extracurricular, and pedagogical reforms. No aspect of our departmental practices can go unexamined or unassessed, including how we recruit majors and faculty, hire student assistants, organize departmental events, select course offerings, structure and evaluate student assignments, and relate as a department to other College programs, initiatives, and student organizations.

But even were it possible to become a just and anti-racist department, that alone would not suffice. Haverford College and the Religion Department must cultivate relationships and connections to social justice-oriented initiatives, practices, and organizations beyond campus and the township. Reorienting the department in this way will be challenging for many reasons, including the College’s history and persisting identity as a quaint, safe liberal arts learning community set apart from the urban--Philadelphia. Still, we must collectively reimagine how we are connected to one another in our intellectual projects and how we are connected to Haverford alumni, organizations, and scholars in the wider society. This will have implications for daily habits that include pedagogical practices.

We are excited about this work. We are committed to this work. We have already started. We don't know if we are in the middle, but we know that we are not close to the end.

We call upon the whole college – the administration, the faculty, the staff, and the students – to seize this moment and commit to doing everything that is reasonably within our control to abolish racist, sexist, patriarchal, heteronormative, ablest policies, attitudes, and practices.

As individuals and as a department, we commit to:

● Revising existing courses to substantially incorporate work by Black scholars and scholars of color;

● Integrating critical analysis of how race and racism coincide with the development of “religion” as a discourse and field of study into required courses such as REL299; ● Creating a slate of new courses that address social movements, racial and gender justice; ● Reimagining our departmental curriculum and requirements to account for the interdisciplinary nature of the problems we face and the forms of inquiry best suited to addressing those problems;

● Using departmental funds to support programming that centers BIPOC, LGBTQI+, and disabled scholars, activists, and artists, and ensuring that students are actively engaged in the speaker selection process;

● Educating ourselves about and implementing best practices for supporting BIPOC, FGLI, LGBTQI+, and disabled students in our roles as advisors and mentors;

● Prioritizing the hiring of faculty in Africana studies, gender and sexuality studies, and indigenous religious traditions, and including BIPOC students in the recruitment process for all faculty;

● Developing a departmental process for students, staff, and faculty to report and address concerns related to classroom and departmental climate; this process will be informed by restorative and transformative justice practice.

We call on the College to:

● Create and fully fund a cluster hire in BIPOC and Gender Justice, in line with the proposal currently under development, which would result in the hiring of 7-8 new tenure-track faculty members in these underrepresented areas of the curriculum over three years;

● Prioritize social and racial justice initiatives, including new TT lines and an academic center in social justice, in ongoing fundraising and new fundraising campaigns;

● Support faculty in the design and implementation of a social justice requirement for all students;

● Chart a path toward a curriculum in which knowledge is understood as networked, rather than disciplinary, recognizing that the problems facing us locally, nationally, and globally require new forms of thinking and collaborating; this should be developed in relationship to the social justice center, bringing together the interdisciplinary programs under the social justice banner;

● Increase the budget and capacity of CAPS and other physical and mental health services on campus, with particular attention to the hiring and retention of BIPOC and LGBTQI+ staff;

● Develop a campus safety plan that recognizes that the harms of policing and surveillance are largely borne by BIPOC, LGBTQI+, and disabled people, and that transitions to a community safety model based in principles of transformative justice and abolition;

We commit ourselves to working together to effect all of these changes and to transform Haverford College into a community where all will be able to flourish and thrive.

Anne McGuire, The Kies Family Professor of Humanities; Associate Professor and Chair of Religion

Ken Koltun-Fromm, Robert and Constance MacCrate Professor of Social Responsibility and Professor of Religion; Director of HCAH

Naomi Koltun-Fromm, Professor of Religion

Pika Ghosh, Visiting Associate Professor of Religion

Molly Farneth, Assistant Professor of Religion

Guangtian Ha, Assistant Professor of Religion

Terrance Wiley, Assistant Professor of Religion and Coordinator of African and Africana Studies

5 November 2020

Dear Tri-Co Linguistics students,

We write to affirm our support for the student strike led by coalitions of BIPOC and FGLI students at Haverford and Bryn Mawr. We support both students' right to strike and the reasons behind this particular strike. We acknowledge that this strike occurs in the context of systemic police violence toward Black individuals, including the recent murder of Walter Wallace Jr. in West Philadelphia. We acknowledge the systemic inequalities faced by BIPOC and FGLI students on campus and elsewhere. We also recognize the enormous courage and significant labor of the strike leaders in showing us what needs to change.

We thank those who reached out to us, and we appreciate your patience as we have navigated the complexities of being the only Tri-College department. While many of us teach courses that aspire to embody anti-racism, it is clear to us that academic engagement on its own does not address the conditions that led to the current strike. We therefore wish to affirm our support for the strike in the following ways:

• Across our Tri-College department, we make a commitment to striking students that we will not penalize you for participation in the strike and do not expect you to continue class work at this time.

• If the strike ends within the coming weeks, we commit to finding ways to meet the request to teach material in a way that does not unduly burden students who participated in the strike, including reassessing syllabi to best use the remaining time in the semester.

• Bi-Co linguistics formal class meetings are suspended until further notice, but faculty remain available to students for guidance, discussion, and support.

• Because Swarthmore students are not on strike at this point, Swarthmore classes will continue to be offered, but striking students will not be penalized for participating in the strike.

• We are actively exploring options for adjusting the thesis timeline to accommodate for time spent striking. Thesis students should feel free to be in touch with their thesis advisor.

• We acknowledge that many students are using this time to engage in anti-racist action and learning, and we commit to doing the same. Some current activities include:

  • Volunteering with organizations that work toward racial justice.

  • Educating ourselves about white supremacy in Linguistics (e.g. Anya 2020, Motha 2020, Charity Hudley et al. 2018) and in college contexts (e.g. Holliday & Squires 2020, Charity Hudley & Mallinson 2018) and reflecting on what we can do differently.

  • Working as a department to strengthen anti-racist and decolonizing pedagogical approaches in conversation with students and community stakeholders.

  • Compiling and making available resources on linguistic (anti-)racism to Tri-Co Linguistics students and faculty. We invite you to email us any resources you would like to add to the list.

• Members of the department are contributing funds to the organizations mentioned in the What Does Striking Mean document and other anti-racist organizations.

We view this as part of larger, ongoing work, and we look forward to working as a collective of faculty and students to move forward in meaningful ways. We admire and are inspired by the courage, initiative, and labor of the Women of Color House, the Black Students Refusing Further Inaction, the Black Student League, and everyone engaged in the strike. We remain hopeful that this moment will be an opportunity for substantial and lasting change.

In solidarity and hope,

The Tri-Co Linguistics Department Faculty

Jane Chandlee

Rikker Dockum

Jeremy Fahringer

Theodore B. Fernald

Emily Gasser

K. David Harrison

Shizhe Huang

Patricia Irwin

Brook Danielle Lillehaugen

Amanda Payne

Kate Riestenberg

Jonathan Washington

Miranda Weinberg