Flyers and Campus Climate

Dear Students, Staff, and Faculty,

Over the past several weeks, flyers urging whites to “love who they are” have appeared across campus. They are produced by an organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as a white nationalist hate group. While we unequivocally support freedom of expression on campus, and student and employee pride in their identities, as an institution of higher learning we are equally committed to ensuring that our campus community has the historical context needed to understand the arguments these flyers make.

Campus Diversity Officers Dr. Teresa Maria Linda Scholz (Staff & Students) and Professor Martin Berger (Faculty) invite you to participate in a conversation about the flyers and campus climate. The event will take place on Monday, May 15 from 5:30-7:30 pm in the Oakes Learning Center.

We will begin the event by hearing briefly from faculty who work on race, gender and representation about the flyers’ ideological significance before turning to audience roundtable discussions. We ultimately want your perspective in determining concrete steps that our campus can take to build a more inclusive community—for those of us of color, those of us who are white, and all of us with multiple, intersecting identities.

We want people of color to feel safe and valued on campus and we want European Americans to feel safe and valued on campus. We hope that European Americans will understand that they have a role to play in addressing the problems of race and that students of color will appreciate that European Americans can be allies in the fight for racial justice.

We—a daughter of Central American immigrants and a son of European immigrants—stand united in urging our community to embrace our multiracial makeup as a strength. The conflict we face is not between different groups of people but between different systems of belief. We know that all of us can be united on the right side of that conflict, on the right side of history. Whatever your identity, please join us in rejecting any message that seeks to divide us by race.

Sincerely,

Teresa Maria Linda Scholz
Campus Diversity Officer for Students and Staff

Martin A. Berger
Acting Vice Provost for Academic Affairs & Diversity Officer for Faculty