Lang faculty recently approved several motions seeking to address systemic racial injustice within the university, a step student organizers hope will further pressure university administrators to adopt their list of demands drafted last November.
The faculty council voted on the resolutions at the Lang Chairs & Directors meeting on Feb. 11 in solidarity with the demands, which centered around social justice, race, and the experience of marginalized students among other issues communicated at the meeting.
Evan Rapport, chair of Contemporary Music at Lang and supporter of the demands, said faculty have taken on responding to the demands as the university has prioritized social justice issues.
“We’re trying to offer our own voice of solidarity and our own ideas for moving forward as a college, at least to try to contribute with what we’re able to do locally,” said Rapport. “[At Lang], we have a Civic Engagement and Social office, for instance… Dean Browner has provided a lot of leadership there.”
The current plans in response to the demands revolve around creating more diverse spaces for The New School community. The resolutions include a plan to start a college-wide week dedicated to social justice, instituting workshops on race-oriented classroom discussion and climate, and the establishment of a department for Ethnicity & Race, which aims to provide an institutional space for compensated full-time faculty to provide leadership and support on curricular guidance and faculty hiring.
The exact language on the motions passed by the Lang Faculty Council reads as follow:
1) The Lang faculty advise the Dean to explore the establishment of a major in Ethnicity and Race at Lang/TNS (including the hire of full-time tenure-track faculty for that program).
2) The Lang faculty advise the Dean to require workshops for all Lang faculty with an outside group that specializes in facilitation skills for conversations about race in pedagogy and classroom dynamics (with faculty vetting of the groups under consideration).
3) The Lang faculty advise the Dean to create a college-wide week-long required reading event focused around a selection of texts on social justice (could have departmental and/or disciplinary organization).
4) We also voted in favor of formalizing student representation on faculty search committees.
Overall, the student demands were met with general support.
“Normally our votes take several meetings to come to fruition and often motion don’t pass over details,” said Rapport. “I found it encouraging that we were able to get this done so quickly and with such strong support.”
Aliyah Hakim, senior at Lang and a student involved in the drafting of the list of demands, felt the meeting was a success.
“I feel positive about the strides that have been made [at the meeting] in intervening in racial injustice on campus as it gets expressed through our curriculum, staffing practices, the student body, and in larger structural dynamics,” Hakim said.
Although she sees these steps taken by faculty as a triumph, she acknowledges the time that the process will take and as something that is still far from over.
“While I observe that the process to make these cultural and structural shifts has been a slow one, I’m confident that the current steps that faculty and staff are taking to implement these changes will open up room for even more critical and radical shifts in racial dynamics at Lang/The New School and beyond,” Hakim said.
“I hope that The New School will make efforts to compensate this hard work through recognition and explicit gratitude at the least.”