On Wednesday, Politico published an article about the opening statement I and other professors use on their syllabi at City College, Hunter College, and other CUNY campuses in New York. The statement, which I adopted in January 2017 and have included for all of my classes since, reads:
As an educator, I fully support the rights of undocumented students to an education and to live free from the fear of deportation. If you have any concerns in that regard, feel free to discuss them with me, and I will respect your wishes concerning confidentiality.
Furthermore, I am committed to making CUNY a sanctuary campus for undocumented immigrants, not just in word but in deed – through the campus community refusing to allow ICE to enter our campus and refusing to cooperate with and struggling to prevent any government attempts to ascertain the immigration status of members of our community or to detain or deport undocumented immigrants.
Since I included the statement – which I read aloud on the first day of every class – I have gotten strong, generally positive reactions from my students. In New York it’s common to have very diverse classrooms and conversations about racial, linguistic, gendered, and other types of difference include challenges to stereotypes and misconceptions about people of color, poor people, and transnational (immigrant) students and their families on a regular basis. Many of my students themselves are immigrants or from immigrant families, and many are directly impacted by the decision by Donald Trump to rescind DACA this week.
What I have loved about this statement since I included it is that it asks educators to think about what their role is in their classrooms and with their students. We should always be asking what being part of an educational community means, how we want to live and learn and teach in this community, and more than anything, how we define “community.” Including such a strong and unequivocal statement establishes an ethos of equity and safety in our classrooms, a space for learning where undocumented students could hear from their professors and know that while total protection can’t be guaranteed, their professors will stand up and fight to keep them safe, just as they would do for all students.
This equity view is very important, as is the desire to rehumanize a group of individuals which is typically homogenized and totalized as a social “issue.” I believe that we tend to take a charity view of this issue, talking about “these poor undocumented immigrants,” but the reality is, they also have positive, hopeful stories as well, hopes and plans like other students, and also regular human lives and experiences. They are regular people and not a statistic, as an undocumented student of mine over the summer reminded our class.
While this last thought was not included in the limited space of the Politico article, I am including it below. I speak of radical hope, and of remembering our history as a public university system, arguably the oldest in the country. It’s one I am very proud to be a part of as a student, an educator, a community member, and an ally:
I believe that collective activity which supports the idea of “sanctuary” as a co-authored political alternative to intimidation and fear is the only option we have. Sanctuary means acting in ways that actively resist and oppose terror. It means visibly and unequivocally protecting, valuing, and uniting behind undocumented students and colleagues as an expression of community. And I think an effect is that it means demanding that our country’s and city’s leaders refuse to support policies which are used to intimidate and divide our communities. To do anything else would be to turn our backs on our own history as well as our community members who need us now. It’s a form of radical hope and it’s an honor to be a part of this now.
