Department Statements
Nov. 23, 2023: Statement on Free Speech and Police Presence at Brandeis
Recent actions by the Brandeis administration have gone against the university’s true ethos, against its commitment to academic freedom, to diversity of opinion, and to toleration of political and religious differences. The administration has wrongly attempted to narrow discussion and debate about politics in Israel and Palestine. In particular we disavow in the strongest terms the Brandeis administration's resort to violence on Friday, November 10. It must not occur again.
Our institution is damaged, and it will take effort on our part to put it to right. We recognize that our student community is balancing many different views about what safety means on campus right now, including feeling threatened by police presence. Other students fear outbreaks of antisemitism and Islamophobia, such as have occurred on many campuses in the last few weeks. The English Department remains committed to the values of freedom of inquiry, freedom of thought, and freedom of speech. And we know that many of us at Brandeis are now engaged in repairing our university and trying to rebuild the trust that was broken by the administration's actions and statements over the last several weeks.
March 19, 2021: Statement on the Murders of AAPI People in Atlanta
The English department stands in solidarity with our Asian and Asian American colleagues, students, staff here at Brandeis, and with communities more broadly in light of ongoing violence against these communities outlined in the “Stop AAPI Hate National Report” issued by the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center on March 19, 2021, just before the murders in Atlanta. We own and mourn the mass murder in Atlanta, and incidents since that time.
June 9, 2020: Department Initiatives in Response to the Racist Killings by Police
The Brandeis University English Department is enraged at the police murders of George Floyd in Minneapolis, of Breonna Taylor and David McAttee in Louisville, of Tony McDade in Tallahassee, and the many others who have been killed by police. We give our support to Black communities, Black organizations, and the Movement for Black Lives that have demanded justice and accountability in the wake of the ongoing and pervasive criminalization, hyper-incarceration, and state murder of Black men, women, and children in all 50 states and around the globe.
These protests reflect a long history of Black struggle against the systematic structures of racism, antiblackness, and oppression that have been part of the U.S.’s settler colonial and racial capitalist projects. We are an English department in a state and community with a history and present of racism, as discussed by local journalists. Massachusetts also has the history of Crispus Attucks, a Black man who was the first casualty in the Boston Massacre of 1770, along with the Boston Tea Party, the first violent looting of the American Revolution.
We understand that in order to dismantle white supremacy we must continue to resist racism and especially antiblackness in our classroom pedagogy, training for graduate students, and our vision and goals for the department. This work must center how to make a material difference in the lives of our Black colleagues, staff, students, and community.