We, undersigned cultural workers, voice our outrage at the pernicious attacks on artists, scholars and educators, who are/ fight for women, queer and trans people, Black and Indigenous people, disabled people and immigrants. we repudiate the silence, inaction and active betrayal of institutions that would sacrifice their integrity rather than their funding. We watch, mortified, as universities relinquish storied histories of political courage in favor of a callow punitive response to recent right wing criticism of artist and educator Shellyne Rodriguez.
Prompted by concerned students, Rodriguez confronted a group distributing anti-choice propaganda on Hunter College campus. Her interaction with the nationally- organized group was being handled internally by Hunter, when right wing media fomented a wildly disproportionate public response, focusing on Rodriguez' identity as a queer, Black, Latinx woman. Her phone and home address were publicly disclosed. She was deluged with racist, homophobic threats, facilitated in no small part by Hunter's failure to publicly defend her. After a highly publicized confrontation with NY Post reporters who had, unannounced and unidentified, accosted her at her home, Hunter College and the School of Visual Arts terminated her without further inquiry. The craven hypocrisy of these self- described progressive institutions exposes the emptiness of their articulated commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion. In the face of racist, homophobic attacks, Hunter and SVA failed to stand by a beloved professor, and their stated values.
The vast majority of professional artists are teaching artists, an economic dynamic from which schools such as Hunter and SVA benefit greatly. They boast of us in promotional materials; they celebrate, but also bask in the glow of our successes. They profit from our reputations, while offering few protections and no job security.Both Hunter and SVA traffic in the cachet of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Queer, and Trans adjuncts. That they simultaneously exploit and decline to stand up for us is galling. Artists and targeted groups are historically among the first to defend free thought. It should be the shared responsibility of the universities to defend not only spaces of learning, but also those who shepherd that learning.
Attacks on targeted identity groups are always also attacks on culture, art, and the spaces where the creative and the intellectual flourish. Banning Black history books and criminalizing drag are but the most recent object lessons in such thought policing, but they are far from the first. In Republican lawmaker's call to defund CUNY we hear echoes of Jesse Helms' 1989 call to defund the NEA. And what we should have learned in 1989 is that what is required of public institutions in the face of such attacks is not moral panic, but intellectual honesty, ethical fortitude, and a vigorous defense of the possibility of a unique perspective, however despised or marginalized.
One year ago, Hunter College renamed a corner of its main campus after Black Lesbian poet laureate Audre Lorde. In her spirit we demand our universities defend artists and educators who speak against the vile attacks on all of our freedoms. We demand our universities adopt measures and create a Harassment Response and Prevention Plan to support members of their faculy when under right wing attacks. As Audre has repeatedly warned us, "...when they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you."
