Yale Daily News
On March 29, 2019, thirteen senior faculty members withdrew from the Ethnicity, Race and Migration program, generating campus-wide debate about the University’s support for the program.
At the time, ER&M was among the University’s fastest-growing majors, and many prominent faculty members with backgrounds in ethnic studies had recently been hired by Yale or given second appointments in the program. Still, years of failed negotiations with administration for additional funding, an upgrade to departmental status and hiring abilities reached a breaking point as prominent tenured professors announced their withdrawal in a March 29 press release.
“We’re withdrawing our service to the program because we feel it has become both unsustainable and detrimental to both our faculty and students to operate in these conditions,” professor of American studies and current chair of ER&M Alicia Camacho told the News in March 2019. “It is not up to us whether the program continues or ends. It is up to the administration … they need to decide in what conditions it will go forward.”
Ethnic studies had already become a point of contention earlier in the semester, when many students began voicing concerns after several prominent professors of color left the University. The Coalition for Ethnic Studies at Yale formed in February 2019 with a list of demands that included upgrading ER&M to a department.
The professors’ press release ignited this existing discontent, and students protested in solidarity with the program across the University’s campus. Coalition for Ethnic Studies at Yale created a pop-up library on Cross Campus celebrating the withdrawn professors’ academic writing. The News and several students released opinion pieces in support of the professors.
Ananya Kumar-Banerjee ’21, who has since graduated with a thesis in ER&M, said that though their academic future became unclear, they also support the 13 professors.
“[The professors] have been exploited by the University for quite some time,” they said. “Their exploitation also meant that students in the major were not getting the support they deserve … I have never been more proud to say that these are the professors who have shaped, and hopefully, will continue to shape my life.”
A week after the press release, more than fifty students affiliated with Asian American Student Alliance, as well as over eighty alumni, interrupted a speech being given by University President Peter Salovey at a gala dinner, demanding greater support for ethnic studies.
Pressure on administrative officials increased further when over 500 scholars from institutions around the country — including 32 professors from Brown University — signed petitions calling on Yale’s administration to provide greater support to ER&M.
“The faculty who work in [Yale’s ER&M program] — including those who have resigned — are globally important to ethnic studies, with sterling reputations as teachers and writers producing re-orienting works of scholarship,” Brown chair of American Studies Matthew Guterl, who signed onto both the Brown letter and the nationwide petition, wrote in an email to the News. “To watch the program die slowly, killed off by a thousand cuts or by negligence, would have been extremely painful — for students at Yale and for all of us in the field. Their mass resignation was a wake-up call, with stakes that are just simply bigger than Yale.”
Ultimately, the professors reached an agreement with administrative officials that included five permanent faculty positions to the program, which had previously only held four “ad hoc” or temporary positions that required professors to also hold an appointment in a different academic unit.
All thirteen professors recommitted to the program in a statement released May 2, 2019.
“On behalf of my colleagues, I thank the Yale administration for affirming ER&M’s importance as a program that requires resources and standing on par with other academic units,” Camacho wrote in the statement. “I take great joy in imagining the future of the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Program at Yale and our new capacity to partner with institutions and colleagues beyond this University. I am grateful that our faculty remains committed to teaching and mentoring students interested in what has become one of our university’s most dynamic and fastest growing undergraduate majors.”
The ER&M program was established in 1997.