Thread by @taoleighgoffe

I am a professor and as of today, I quit my position as Artist-in-Residence #ColumbiaUniversity which I have served for the past two years. I am an Associate Professor at Hunter College and in support of the courageous student protestors at Columbia, I cannot in good conscience..

be affiliated with an institution that arrests, intimidates, endangers, and censors its students. Until the students are reinstated, apologised to, and have their records expunged, I will #boycott giving lectures @Columbia or Barnard. I commit to donating the money I was awarded

for the position to charitable causes in Gaza as is the request of the students.

Both the silence and silencing of comfortable tenured and tenure-track faculty has been appalling, though not surprising. It is loud. But the student protestors are louder and being heard by..

the world 🌏right now. Lip service is great. What are tenured faculty willing to give up? For freedom fr Gaza to the West Bank to Congo to Haiti, this blueprint of organized dissent matters.

While I’ve personally been treated well and been generously supported by staff in my…

unit at the climate school, I am all too aware that universities depend on the 4-year cycle of graduation to quell dissent. Finals and the relentless schedule are used to suppress any sort of gathering.

Across the country I’ve learned about college dorms designed after 1968 specifically to preclude the possibility of students congregating for protests.

Those Columbia lawns are symbolic and pristine. They ought to be trampled and used for taking a stand.

So much of the curriculum champions these principles.

Separate from my art residency, over the past year, I have been asked to give no less than 6 talks at Columbia / Barnard (architecture, music, art, digital humanities) where in each I encouraged students to grapple with

what Columbia has represented for 270 years, predating the Nation. From the genocide of King George to the namesake Christopher Columbus to the Manhattan Project (Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Oppenheimer) medical school experimentation in stolen dead bodies,

the labs named for the Caribbean island Nevis where Alexander Hamilton was born. Displacement and gentrification ongoing in the architecture of that campus.

I’m aware my labor as a Black woman and a Professor is outsourced, as a bandaid. Without structural commitment to change,

I can be paid an honorarium to say the radical but really obvious things about the university’s role in genocide, historic and present. Where is the ethical commitment to change?

I grew up knowing a Columbia with the tradition of protest in 1968, against South African Apartheid,

and where my dad stood up as a student against the US invasion of Grenada. He was taught AND encouraged by professors Edward Said and Amiri Baraka. I don’t see those faculty on campus today. The air of conservatism is powerful and suffocatingly normalized.

The students are giving a masterclass in what it means to apply to the core values. Protect privacy. Protecting one another by masking outdoors during the ongoing pandemic. Mutual aid. Leading by example. And studying for finals!

Does the core curriculum train students to sound erudite at cocktail parties? This is what I have heard, and it signals the mission statement of elite reproduction.

Totalitarian actions belie the true core and commitment to the endowment.

Columbia is so much less conservative and more supportive of students than other Ivy League universities and colleges and that is saying a lot.

One day I will write a book on how the Ivy League is ruining the world. This is my conclusion after 15 years being taught in or teaching for Ivy League institutions (Princeton/Yale/Cornell). I am happy to be employed at a state institution, CUNY,

where at least for now, more seems radically possible.

Now we must support these students who have been purposely abandoned right before graduation. This sends a clear message to prospective students that admittance is not acceptance, as many of these students are PoC & allies.

My actions are small especially as I do not depend on this university for my full-time employment. However, the academic climate is more toxic than people know, especially for those of us teaching Black and ethnic studies.

Doxxing is commonplace as well as targeting by Fox News and vandalism in the places I have worked.

Today I am learning from the Columbia students. Divest. Refuse. Retain the right to say NO.

End the suffering in Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Haiti….

Sincerely
Tao Leigh Goffe, PhD