Dear editor,

As Syracuse University is, once again, roiled by racist acts, hateful attacks and targeted symbolic violence against members of our community, the executive council of the American Association of University Professors calls on the SU administration to respond with urgent commitment to student and faculty demands for an inclusive, anti-racist campus culture. As students, once again, are forced to take collective leadership in the struggle for racial justice, the executive council of the AAUP calls on the SU administration to respect and protect student protesters and their right to peaceful assembly.

The AAUP, built around a core commitment to academic freedom, condemns the SU administration’s initial attempts to silence students who were targeted by racist speech in their own campus home, in Day Hall. Administrators warning students not to spread news or images of the racist attacks — at the same moment that the chancellor publicly calls for heightened “free speech” protections on campus — raises profound questions about the institutional power dynamics animating whose speech is permitted and whose will be contained.

The “free search for truth” in pursuit of the “common good” at the heart of the AAUP’s mission is today embodied in SU students’ resistance to racist intimidation, and their challenge to a university leadership that has, repeatedly, condemned such racism and then largely moved on.

#NotAgainSU requires the university as a whole to reckon with racist violence and its unequal, unfree effects on campus members in far more sustained, far more collaborative and serious ways than we have to date. This means that faculty, too, cannot move on. With our primary responsibility to ensure the best possible learning environment for all of our students, faculty too must persist in establishing a sustained, collaborative process at every level. Or else we will be here in this crisis, again and again.

Sincerely,

Crystal Bartolovich

John Burdick

Katie Feyh

Gail Hamner

Matthew Huber

Jackie Orr

Mark Rupert

Syracuse University AAUP, Executive Council

Published on November 17, 2019 at 11:53 pm