Professor Nathan Connolly, an Associate Professor in the History Department at Hopkins, gave a talk on Wednesday focusing on scholarship and responsibility in current academic spheres.
Connolly opened with a land acknowledgement. Afterward, he continued to share the story of two letters he received from two different people in the fall of 2019.
One came from a prison inmate who requested reading materials. The other came from a man who wanted to express his support for the University’s stance on the private police force.
The latter sender included racial epithets to demonstrate his point.
Despite the differences in tone and meaning between the two letters, Connolly drew parallels between the letters and the gentlemen that wrote each of them.
“Both men wrote with some understanding of the University as a place of resources, expertise and societal standing. Both espoused a notion about how we who traffic in ideas can have some discernible impact on others’ lived experience,” he said.
He explained that these letters represented hope, speculation and harm.
Connolly went on to delve further into the issues with racism, sexism and assault that still raise concerns in the minds of the University’s faculty, staff and students.
“What can be done to programmatically mature our institution, from one merely committed — albeit, emphatically — to diversity, to actively working to eradicate racism?” he said.
He explained that many black staff and faculty expressed serious concerns about racism, sexism, coercion and assault in the workplace to him and his colleagues as part of a past project that he was involved with.
The struggles they face in dismantling these systemic issues, he says, is that their desire to do meaningful and important work is met with the fears of danger to themselves that can come with increased exposure and success, evidenced by the threatening letters Connolly receives.
“We therefore ought not to let the temporary condition of our respected professional exceptionalism... prevent us from organizing and institutionalizing what remains merely, at present, a scholarly critique,” he said. “We should take today and the conversations to come as an opportunity to weaponize our knowledge about racial and gendered power.”
The town hall following the lecture centered primarily on ways that those at different levels of power within the University’s hierarchy can bridge their gap to support organizing among members of the Hopkins community.
Multiple topics were discussed, centering mainly on the private police force and the concerns among students and faculty over its implementation, as well as how organizing and protesting could be improved to achieve greater change going forward.
Senior Morgan Griffin expressed her feelings about the event in an interview with The News-Letter.
“It was a very important point of view that I feel like took a lot of bravery for him to discuss, knowing that he is an employee of the university that he’s talking very purposely and critically about,” she said. “I feel like it touched on a lot of topics both regarding racism and sexism and their effects.”
In an interview with The News-Letter, Tara Bynum, a Hopkins alum as well as a professor at Hampshire College, shared takeaways from the event in reference to previous remarks from the town hall forum.
“My hope in sharing my perspective was to offer up a real life situation of an institution that, though much smaller than Johns Hopkins University, is still very much wed to a faculty, staff and student model, and there’s something real that happens when those three are not able to have a conversation,” Bynum said.
This perspective, Bynum explained, demonstrates the importance of understanding the needs of this movement in higher education in order to meet the collective needs of students, faculty and staff.
Connolly pointed out that this might include trying to bridge the gap between these groups and other groups like the Board of Trustees or the accrediting bodies for the institutions, a point that Bynum echoed later on.
In an interview with The News-Letter, Connolly elaborated on what undergraduate students specifically can do to bridge the gap between student and faculty communications over issues like racism and sexism in academic institutions.
He also noted that students, in the eyes of the University, can be seen as consumers and specifically as future donors.
Thus, he explained, student demands register a level of sensitivity that concerns from faculty or staff might not.
“Students are the bridge between faculty and staff because they have contact points with many of these folks, whether it’s in the dorms or in their work-study capacities,” he said.
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