College of Liberal & Creative Arts Dean, Schools, Departments Release Statements Supporting Black Lives Matter Movement

Statement from Dean Andrew Harris

Dear students, faculty and staff in the College of Liberal & Creative Arts,

I want to start by acknowledging the pain, the anger, the sadness and the frustration that many of you are feeling now directly as people from communities suffering from the violence and inequity of systemic racism. Many of us are allies, but the empathetic pain of an ally is not the same as the pain of a member of that community. These are times that challenge our resilience, and highlight the profound and overlapping challenges of social and racial inequality.

Black Lives Matter. The College of Liberal & Creative Arts stands with Black students, faculty and staff; it stands for justice; it stands for the power of knowledge to shed light on racism, inequality, privilege and power. We stand for the power of ideas; our power to make meaning in the world is the force of liberation, of critical understanding, of creative expression that exposes injustice and of the path to a better world. Our faculty, including our newest endowed chairs in Creative Writing and Cinema, exemplify this commitment to scholarship in support of social justice. As poets, journalists, scholars, artists, filmmakers and designers, as theorists and as practitioners, we stand in solidarity against racism and we kneel in humility at our power to overcome it.

With wishes for your good health and the health of our civil society,

Andrew Harris
Dean, College of Liberal & Creative Arts