Dear President Hamilton, Provost Fleming & Vice President Coleman,

The publication of New York University Politics Department faculty member Lawrence M. Mead’s “Poverty and Culture” (July 21, 2020, Society [1]) has been an embarrassment to NYU’s scholarly reputation [2]. Mead’s article has also caused an enormous amount of pain and anger within the NYU community, particularly among faculty, staff, and students of color. In a spring and summer marked by a global pandemic that has disproportionately killed Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people—alongside the murder of George Floyd and rise in police violence across the country—faculty and students of color were already feeling surrounded by too much death, violence, and loss. Having one of our NYU colleagues publish a racist and dehumanizing account of our families and communities has made an already stressful and heartbreaking time in our lives a little more ugly and a little more hateful.

We are not going to spend additional time in this letter refuting Mead’s claims, which have been widely criticized by our colleagues at NYU [3] and beyond [4]. Instead, we take inspiration from the wise words of Toni Morrison, who observed:

“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”

Morrison  reminds us that racism doesn’t just steal our humanity—it steals our time. Here at NYU, it steals our time as scholars, as workers, and as students. The time spent discussing and condemning Larry Mead and his ilk is time we could devote to our own scholarship, our teaching, and caring for ourselves and those we love. And whose time is most wasted? Faculty, students, staff and administrators of color, of course. Following every attack on our communities, we inevitably get sucked into the gears of NYU’s diversity machine, compelled once again to discuss the racist and intellectually shoddy scholarship of men such as Mead. To this we say, enough.

The flurry of negative attention surrounding Mead’s article has led us to think not so much about his voice than about the voices that are missing from NYU—in particular, the voices that are missing from Mead’s home department: The Wilf Family Department of Politics at NYU employs no Black faculty. At a top-ranked research university. In New York City. In 2020.*

Consider what that means. It means undergraduates and doctoral students cannot be mentored or taught or advised by Black faculty in the Politics Department. It means no Black faculty sit on the graduate admissions committee in the Politics Department. It means no Black faculty are chairing doctoral dissertations in the Politics Department. It means no Black faculty can vote on tenure decisions in the Politics Department. This absence is indefensible.

Nor is it typical. The Political Science Department at Columbia University has Black faculty. The Political Science Department at the University of Chicago has Black Faculty. UCLA’s Department of Political Science has Black faculty. Political Science at the University of Michigan has Black faculty. The Politics Department at Princeton has Black Faculty. The same can be said of Harvard University and Hunter College, Fordham University and the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth, Williams—the list goes on and on. Our peer institutions are hiring and tenuring Black faculty. But here at NYU—in the department that Larry Mead inhabits—our Politics Department looks as though it’s from another era.

We therefore call on NYU to immediately authorize a cluster hire in Black politics in the Politics Department. It is imperative that over the next two years the university hire at least two scholars of Black politics, one at the junior and one at the senior level.

Mead’s intellectually indefensible and racially offensive scholarship—alongside his department’s absence of Black (as well as Latinx and Indigenous) faculty—has deeply negative repercussions, not only for the university’s reputation but, more importantly, for NYU’s current and prospective students. Now more than ever, students entering the Wilf Family Department of Politics need access to a diverse faculty whose approach to the field of Black politics is characterized by depth and rigor. Our students also need and deserve spaces characterized by respect, a sense of trust and belonging so that they feel heard and respected, and can grow and thrive intellectually regardless of their background. What they currently face is a department with zero Black faculty and the unwelcome notoriety of Larry Mead.

If NYU allows this situation to continue, what message does this send to our students, their families, and the wider scholarly community? Our students come from all over the world. They are facing a global pandemic that has exposed profound racial disparities. They are witnessing and participating in nationwide Black Lives Matter protests that have unleashed a racial reckoning across the nation and around the world. Students here need access to the faculty most capable of teaching a diverse student body in an era of profound racial transformations. Only then will our departments be able to deliver the kind of teaching and mentorship that NYU students both need and deserve.
 
Let us be clear: We are asking the administration to help resource a department so that it builds on its existing strengths. In this way, our call for a cluster hire is a gesture of support for the Politics Department and the students it seeks to teach. And it’s critical to note that political science is a field with a deep pool of top scholars engaged in the study of Black politics. Black political scientists even have their own association and annual meeting, the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. That said, the decision of whom to hire should obviously be up to the department and NYU administration, with the department establishing the methodology and the scope of the two searches. Given the applicant pool’s quality and size, it’s our belief that two searches in the area of Black politics should produce an outstanding and highly diverse pool of applicants to hire from.

We realize, of course, that the Politics Department is merely one example of too many departments and schools with no or few Black and Latinx faculty. Broadly, NYU should also prioritize hiring of Indigenous faculty across the university. And there are many related issues to address in the coming academic year, from racial wage and safety inequities across NYU’s workforce to immigration and policing concerns. We hope to work with NYU to address these issues in the coming months. However, given the intellectual, political, and teaching climate we face this fall, conducting a cluster hire in the field of Black politics  at the NYU  Politics Department is an obvious, urgent, and much-needed first step.  

We look forward to receiving your response.

Sincerely,


Faculty for an Anti-Racist NYU

Sinan Antoon, Gallatin
Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Gallatin
Mohamad Bazzi, Journalism
Renée A. Blake, SCA and Linguistics
Cristina Beltrán, SCA
Sebastián Calderón Bentin, Drama
Paula Chakravartty, Gallatin & MCC
Marie Cruz Soto, Gallatin
Arlene Dávila, SCA
Jacob William Faber, Wagner and Sociology
Ada Ferrer, History and CLACS
Natasha Iskander, Wagner
Kimberly Johnson, SCA
Aisha Khan, Anthropology
Arang Keshavarzian, MEIS
S. Heijin Lee, SCA
L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy, Sociology of Education
Ritty Lukose, Gallatin
Jennifer Morgan, SCA & History
Fred Moten, Performance Studies
Vasuki Nesiah, Gallatin
Crystal Parikh, English and SCA
Sonya Posmentier, English
Dean Saranillio, SCA
Pacharee Sudhinaraset, English
Jini Watson, English
Deborah Willis, Tisch and SCA
 


Additional Signers
 

* Mead also has an appointment at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, a program that trains and educates "the world's future public service leaders" in order to "translate ideas into actions that have an effective and lasting impact on the public good" and whose faculty's research "changes the way people frame, understand, and act on important public issues." It's unfortunate that Mead's racist scholarship is demeaning the reputation of two programs at NYU.

[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2020/07/31/journal-editor-regrets-publishing-racist-article
[2] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/07/28/leading-voice-welfare-reform-accused-racism
[3] https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/july/Statement_FAS_Wagner_Leadership_Lawrence_Mead.html)
[4] https://retractionwatch.com/2020/07/27/hundreds-petition-to-retract-paper-they-call-unscholarly-overtly-racist-and-full-of-racially-violent-narratives/



cc: Antonio Merlo, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science
Sherry Glied , Dean, Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service  
Gene A. Jarrett, Seryl Kushner Dean of the College of Arts and Science
Phillip B. Harper, Dean, Graduate School of Arts and Science
David Stasavage, Dean for the Social Sciences
Susan Antón, FAS Director, Faculty Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Development
Sanford C. Gordon, Chair, Wilf Family Department of Politics