The Future is Another Country
“At the University of Mississippi, the incompetence and unwillingness of the administration to address Confederate symbols further entrenches white supremacy. It is, as they say, a feature and not a bug.”
The men of the Dunning School might not advise theses any more, and the historical interpretations these men crafted might now be largely discredited and discarded. But their legacies remain.
By examining the rise of university police departments at State University of New York at Albany, the first SUNY school to arm their campus police officers, this article provides a historical perspective to better understand contemporary instances of racialized policing behind university gates.
“Cocking accepted his job offer by telegram in September of 1937. A year and a half later, Dean Cocking held a staff meeting so controversial that it led to the state revoking UGA’s accreditation and mobs burning the governor in effigy.”
We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, we just need to help set it in motion and watch it crash into the structures that for far too long have limited our vision of community to brutality and fear.
How Virginia Commonwealth University’s efforts to expand by buying up property in Richmond and creating a highly-policed bus route through historically Black neighborhoods has contributed to White Supremacy.
What might a reparative approach to heritage preservation look like? First, a reparative approach to heritage preservation involves taking seriously the collective wounds and violence on which institutions like the university are structured.
We hope, by publishing a pledge and a public list of those who have taken it, to pressure academic institutions and societies to better reflect both the diverse nature of existing scholarship and to foster a more inclusive profession that embraces the diversity of our communities worldwide.
This article explores the history of police presence in the university setting to understand the gap between administrators’ professed desire to keep campuses safe through policing and the reality that police presence makes campus climates less safe for students of color.
We have a way to go before we reach a fair and just tenure and promotion process for faculty of color at institutions. Change is possible if administrations commit to an overhaul of the systems and demand the impossible.
The Activist History Review