The chair of the Ethnic, Race, & Migration studies at Yale University affirmed Monday that she and 12 other senior faculty are withdrawing from the academic program because it isn’t getting the needed resources that students deserve and that university leaders have been promising for years.
The issue is problematic on two levels, said Dr. Alicia Schmidt Camacho, an American Studies professor and chair of the ER&M program, who spoke on behalf of the group, all of whom will retain their other faculty positions.
At one level, “a growing set of responsibilities to students” in the midst of insufficient resourcing makes it difficult to “ensure the integrity of the program is intact,” she said. Additionally, she added, questions around staffing, curriculum and advising “are just fraying at the integrity of the program” and don’t best serve the 87 student majors.
On another level, Camacho said, program faculty “have been raising questions about the institutional climate for our fields of study where we’re not gaining any ground and we’re not gaining permanency within the university” for various fields of ethnic studies.
While the ethnically diverse program faculty are assuming the burden of carrying the growing ER&M program without pay or recognition – or participation in the promotion and tenure processes – programs in the school of arts and sciences are losing Black faculty, flat in Native American staffing and are not consistently building capacity across ethnic studies programs, she said.
“This is not a problem exclusive to Yale, but one that faculty of color face elsewhere,” said Camacho. “The difference is Yale has enormous resources. So we have to ask questions beyond resources and ask about competency and climate and equity.”
Although they have committed to remaining with the program until the current junior and senior classes finish, the withdrawal of Camacho and her 12 fed-up colleagues could decimate the bachelor’s degree program. They represent more than two-thirds of ER&M’s 19 faculty and every tenured one, as well as everyone who has chaired the program since its inception in 1997. Additionally, all are program officers and hold faculty positions elsewhere on campus – four are endowed chairs, two head residential colleges and four are program or department chairs.
