Dr. Graham Carr, President
Dr. Anne Whitelaw, Interim Provost
Dr. André Roy, Dean of Arts and Science
Dr. Rebecca Duclos, Dean of Fine Arts
Dr. Mourad Debbabi, Interim Dean of Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science
Dr. Anne-Marie Croteau, Dean of John Molson School of Business
Dr. Effrosyni Diamantoudi, Interim Dean of Graduate Studies
Dr. Guylaine Beaudry, University Librarian
Dr. Lisa Ostiguy, Special Advisor to the Provost on Campus Life
Dr. Nadia Hardy, Interim Deputy Provost and Vice-Provost, Faculty Development and Inclusion
Dr. Nadia Bhuiyan, Vice-Provost, Partnerships and Experiential Learning
Dr. Sandra Gabriele, Vice-Provost, Innovation in Teaching and Learning
Dr. Paula Wood-Adams, Vice-Provost Research and Graduate Studies
Ian Rakita, Concordia University Faculty Association President
Robert Soroka, Concordia University Part-Time Faculty Association President

June 9, 2020

Dear Concordia leaders and community members,

We are a group of Concordia University professors, lecturers, librarians, students, staff, and alumni. We are writing to communicate our solidarity and support of Black activists in the United States, here in Canada, and around the world, as they fight to eliminate police racism and violence, as well as systemic and interpersonal anti-Black racism in general. We extend our support for these activists by taking direction from them, as we believe that Black communities best understand the systemic oppression they face and the best ways to oppose it. We also support the calls of Black activists in the US, Montreal, and around the world to de-fund the police and reinvest these funds in services and initiatives that actually benefit Black communities.

The global uprising sparked by the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police Department is an historic event. Starting in Minneapolis on May 25, creative and broad-based protests have spread to all fifty US states, as well as 36 countries worldwide. In Canada, protests have erupted in dozens of cities, highlighting the recent police killings of Regis Korchinski-Paquet and Chantel Moore, as well as a longer history of police killings, racial profiling, and racist violence against Black and Indigenous people.

As the protests make clear, police killings of Black people are not isolated events. They are a recurring outcome of police institutions oriented toward racial terror and premature death. Policing, moreover, is just one element of a broader system of white supremacy and racial violence that dates back centuries and has intensified in the past decade. The protests are indeed inseparable from a terrifying broader context that includes the rise of far right movements, the election of far right leaders, and the disproportionate health and economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic on Black communities.

For much of the public, the recent protests have brought new visibility to the extent and depth of police racism and violence in our cities, and the pervasiveness of anti-Black racism throughout society. For Black people, in contrast, these realities have always been well known and have been resisted, individually and collectively, for centuries.
 
At the same time that we express our solidarity with Black activists around the world, we believe it is important to organize against anti-Black racism where we are situated and where we have the greatest ability to effect change. Ending anti-Black racism requires more than ending police violence. It requires broad-based systemic and institutional change across all sectors of society, including education. As such, we have developed a series of demands, which aim to eliminate anti-Black racism at Concordia University and move toward a pedagogy grounded in racial justice. Our demands are as follows:
 
1. We call for Concordia to minimize its recourse to the Montreal Police department (SPVM) and re-assess how to address the needs of people in crisis and work with community partners to prevent and address violence on campus. Anti-Black policing has deep roots in Montreal, dating back to the earliest days of this city. In the last fifty years, the SPVM has taken dozens of Black lives and disproportionately profiled, arrested, and harmed Black Montrealers. Given this reality, Concordia’s present security relationship with the SPVM must be examined and significantly revised. To achieve this, we call for the creation of a task force with the mandate to introduce new protocols for Concordia security that minimize reliance on the police and ensure a safe campus for the Black community. The task force should also work with members of other communities disproportionately targeted by police, including Indigenous people. Black members of this task force, as well as other members representing disproportionately targeted groups, must be compensated for their time, or given time off from their usual duties, to participate.
 
2. We call for immediate commitments to Black Studies at Concordia, including the following:

a. A commitment to hiring six Black tenure-track faculty members who are trained in Black Studies or otherwise centre Black life in their research over the next five years. The demand for a Black Studies program at Concordia dates back to the 1960s, and has gathered increasingly widespread support in the last five years. A draft proposal to create a Black Studies program, which included faculty hiring commitments, was rejected in 2018 due to the present lack of Black faculty at Concordia trained in this field. To move past this chicken-and-egg problem, we call for the creation of an endowed chair in Black Studies within the next twelve months. We also call for the hiring of five more tenure-track Black faculty members, who are trained in Black Studies or centre Black life in their research, over the next five years. While the humanities and social sciences are the most obvious places for such hires, we encourage consideration of hires in STEM and fine art disciplines as well. There is precedence for this in other Canadian institutions, such as OCADU, Queen’s, York, and McGill, which have each hired 4-5 Black Studies faculty members in the last two years.

b. We call for the creation of a task force to oversee the development of a Black Studies program and expand Black Studies teaching at Concordia. The task force will involve faculty and students from across disciplines and faculties. The work of the task force will be to design the Black Studies curriculum, identify existing courses where Black Studies material could be integrated, develop a plan to expand Black Studies teaching across the university (inside and outside the Black Studies program), and develop a policy to ensure a wide roster of courses either focused on, or relevant to, Black Studies is available to meet the growing demand of Concordia’s student community.

3. We call for action to address the hostile culture and oppressive environments that reproduce anti-Black racism on our campus. For decades, Black students have highlighted the racism they face in Concordia classrooms. Examples include hearing other students or the professor use the N-word, being asked to speak on behalf of “their people,” having faculty encourage the exploration of racist ideas as “thought experiments” in courses, dismissing and/or failing to recognize the contributions made by Black students to the classroom and in their assignments and research, and omitting the work of Black scholars to disciplinary histories and course syllabi. In this oppressive context, Black faculty, lecturers, and staff are asked to play an informal and uncompensated counseling role for Black students. To address these problems, we call for an investment in mental health and counseling services, geared toward Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour students. We also call for the informal counseling provided by BIPOC faculty members to be recognized as a component of their required university service. More broadly, we call for proactive investments in antiracist education and resources for Concordia faculty, administrators, governors, and employees. Finally, we call for a review of the role of the Ombuds Office in addressing complaints of racism within the Concordia community and the development of a policy to deal with cases where faculty members have promoted, allowed, or mishandled racist comments in their classes. These measures, together, are a necessary companion to the hiring of Black professors and the development of Black Studies. For Concordia to move beyond structures and philosophies of white supremacy, anti-Black racism, and colonial racism, it must create changes in the content of teaching and research, but also address the oppressive environment in which teaching and research occurs.  

4. We call for a commitment to funding Black research at Concordia, including the creation of $250,000 in new scholarships for Black students and other measures. Black scholars and research with Black communities are chronically underfunded across Canadian institutions, and especially so at Concordia. Research on Black communities is rarely community-led, which means scholarship seldom benefits the very communities that research is conducted on. To address this, we call for the creation of $250,000 in new scholarships for Black undergraduate and graduate students, new research grants geared toward Black undergraduate and graduate students, and the creation of a pre-doctoral fellowship in Black Studies for Black scholars doing transformative work. We also call for a commitment to promoting and disseminating Black scholarship in and beyond the university through the funding of a lecture series, through public relations activities across various university departments (e.g., the library, archives, alumni relations, admissions and recruitment), and through other means. We call, finally, for a permanent centre for Black research at Concordia. The Black Perspectives Initiative (BPI), created in 2019, has begun this work. The mission of the BPI is to connect and support Black scholarship and research at Concordia and within Montreal’s Black communities. We call for expanded and permanent funding for this initiative, including transforming the current part-time coordinator position into a full-time permanent position, providing a permanent space, and creating an account for project funding. We call for the coordinator of the BPI to work with the Black Studies task force to determine how the BPI can serve as a hub for the Black Studies program (as the latter will not be a department) and help to allocate the aforementioned scholarships and research grants for Black students.

5. We call for a commitment across the university to ensure that financial resources and employment represent the racial diversity of the Montreal population. To achieve this goal, the university must bring together the various actors that shape fundraising and hiring practices to the detriment of Black people. The persistence of anti-Black racism and the lack of Black representation at Concordia cannot be addressed through the actions of the university administration alone. The work of University Advancement determines whether money is available for Black scholarships and research, and whether programs like Black Studies and projects like the BPI are supported. The policies and practices of unions like the Concordia University Faculty Association (CUFA) and Concordia University Part-Time Faculty Association (CUPFA) shape hiring practices and the possibilities for prioritizing the hiring of people from underrepresented groups. Various actors have stood in the way of the university generating accurate data on the racial backgrounds of faculty members and other employees and, thus, identifying problems of representation. To address this, we call for the creation of a task force that brings together Black members of the Concordia community with members of the unions, University Advancement, and the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion office. The mandate of the task force will be to examine current structures and practices and institute changes that expand fundraising for Black programs, increase the hiring of Black candidates for jobs across the university, and rapidly move toward a distribution of financial resources and employment that reflects the diversity of the Montreal population.

6. We call for the DB Clarke Theatre in the Hall building to be renamed the Coralee Hutchison Theatre. DB Clarke was the Principal of Sir George Williams University during the 1969 Computer Centre Occupation, in which Black students and their allies fought for action on institutional racism at the university. DB Clarke, rather than accepting the students’ demands, called on the Montreal police on the 13th day of the occupation, prompting an attack on the students that led to the death of Coralee Hutchison, a Black student at the university. DB Clarke’s name has no place in a university that purportedly welcomes Black students and faculty, while Coralee Hutchison’s name stands for the role that Black students have played in making Sir George Williams, and now Concordia, a better place. Along with this name change, we call for a rewriting of the institutional history of the Computer Centre Occupation, including removing the present neutral language in that history, which fails to acknowledge the university’s role in the violence. While these measures will only partially address the acknowledged need to recognize and redress the violence that is part of the social and institutional history of Concordia, it will send a clear message to Concordia's Black community that the university recognizes this need and commits to engaging on that path.
 
7. We call for the university’s commitments to meeting these demands to be communicated in a public statement from President Graham Carr. Dr. Carr’s statement on June 4th regarding the global uprising against police violence does not do justice to the university’s responsibilities. While it expresses support for Black activists in North America, it makes no new commitments to addressing anti-Black racism at Concordia, and mentions a series of existing commitments, including EDI (Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion), which involve no specific goals to expand Black employment or address anti-Black racism at Concordia. We appreciate Dr. Carr mentioning the legacy of Black students at Concordia, including the 1969 Computer Centre Occupation. The reality, however, is that the university itself responded violently to this political action, never apologized for the violence, and never met the demands the students made - demands which included the creation of a Black Studies program. It is time for Concordia to genuinely honour this legacy by addressing the longstanding demands of Black students, faculty, lecturers, librarians, and staff. More than this, it is time for Concordia to assume its role in the development of a pedagogical project that moves beyond the structures and philosophies of white supremacy, systemic anti-Black racism, and colonial racism and moves toward a context of social and cultural justice, equality, and reparation.