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So I signed up for the D&I committee in my department at NYU. Putting the list of things that I think universities should pay attention to and consider that I typed up for our first meeting (thread):
(This is mostly from the perspective of having been an international student and now immigrant faculty)
· Listening to and surveying international students, faculty, and staff for what changes they would want addressed and how, rather than assuming and taking measures on their behalf,
building sites and spaces to facilitate this, broadening representation on policy-making bodies at the university to take in international perspectives, and giving agency to non-citizens to take the lead in decision-making that impacts their experience at the university;
· Transparency and clarity in addressing issues that international students, faculty and staff face in navigating through visa and US residency requirements and restrictions,
when opening up student applications and at student orientations, or in the case of faculty and staff, when hiring them, of how these might impact the educational\\teaching\\service experience of the faculty;
· Making sure that all university staff undergo racial\\cultural sensitivity training (and not the usual bullshit 20 minute videos that we sit through that lead us through a list of talking points);
· A commitment to bringing in students that are truly diverse by paying closer attention to student backgrounds, and reaching out to marginalized communities in home countries through changed marketing strategies and academic requirements
the nature of academic intakes, and how fellowships, scholarships etc. are handed out in the US and elsewhere have historically caused more harm than not in countries of origin through intakes that frame international students
as either easy sources of income for the school or cheap labor, and exclude students from marginal groups in their home countries;
· Pedagogical changes focusing on onto-epistemic decolonisation, teaching epistemic humility, and bringing in non-Anglo-European perspectives, as well as putting Anglo-European knowledge systems into global perspectives and contexts;
· International students and faculty should conversely, also be exposed to histories and perspectives in the US context on anti-Blackness, racism, and other local inequalities of difference,
it should not be taken for granted that foreign students arriving in the US know or have a sense of US cultural and political dynamics or of US history;
· The mandatory teaching of critical liberal arts courses irrespective of major, with a focus on exposing students to a broad range of disciplinary perspectives;
· Better support for early-career faculty of color and international faculty and a factoring of faculty backgrounds in the hiring process,
with a focus on hiring with an eye to hires' needs rather than just program needs (“What can we do for faculty we hire to help them succeed?” in addition to “What can they do for our program?”);
· Guidelines that make service expectations of early-career faculty concrete and paths to promotion clear and explicit,
with department heads making sure that their faculty are not overworking themselves and have the time to balance teaching and service with research and personal practice;
· Better and fairer hiring practices that focus on being clear and transparent around issues of pay, agency, etc.,
and making sure that hiring is done in an inclusive and non-tokenizing manner by committing to creating more full-time positions for faculty from diverse backgrounds and introducing practices like cluster hires;
· Enforce faculty retirement, especially for tenure-track positions, since this precludes new faculty from being hired and ensures that programs change at a snail's pace - this could be done by introducing sunset clauses in contracts;
· Actively support the unionization for contract faculty and bring them on parity with tenure-track faculty, as well as for graduate students and adjuncts;
· Change policies to move away from carceral logics of discipline and expectations of assimilation,
e.g. change the way that sexual harassment training, anti-racism training etc. is done; change the policies around faculty evaluations as basis for evaluation of teaching effectiveness; how issues in the classroom with students are resolved etc.;
· De-bureaucratization and reduced reliance on rule-following and standardized procedures and practices in favor of more contextually situated procedures that emphasize dialogue and flexibility (restorative and reparative justice, not retributive justice);
· Professors who conduct research for military institutions, or that has explicit military applications, should, if not barred from conducting such research, be heavily taxed for this - policies that strictly de-incentivize research with these applications;
· How research is taxed by the school needs to be rethought with a sensitivity to what kinds of research specific departments do, and labs and faculty who do research in areas that are actively contributing to social and cultural welfare and the public good should be incentivized
Just a basic list, thought I would share with colleagues who are also fighting the hard fight at their institutions.
