BY MARK S. JAMES

This blog post originally appeared on the Molloy College AAUP chapter website. We are reposting it here with the author’s permission.

Dear Colleagues,

I am a black man in America. I grew up in a white family that didn’t want to talk about race. Yet race was everywhere. The dangers of me saying or doing the wrong things were everywhere. All day, every day.

I went to college where I learned how to recognize and speak about these things. I studied the history of why so many who claimed to love and support people of African descent refused to address what was not only obvious to us, but dangerous. Yet, when I would bring it up with family they would change the subject. Make excuses. Deny. I was armed not just with my own experiences but experiences reflected in African American literature since before America was America. I had knowledge of US and world history, access to reports from US government agencies, reports from the UN, libraries of books and articles to back me up. I earned a PhD on this topic from one of the world’s most prestigious universities, but still . . .

Make no mistake about it: My advocacy for academic freedom, shared governance, and due process is a direct result of this experience. It was only when I went to college that I learned I wasn’t making it all up and that I could speak truth to power. Now, I am a black man who teaches on controversial issues like white supremacy at a predominantly white institution, and the arguments I make have very powerful enemies. Turning Point USA, for example, was created to delegitimize teaching that challenges the myth of American exceptionalism and research that critically explores various forms of oppression in American life. The organization also maintains a “Professor Watchlist,” and the professors on that list teach and research the same things I teach and research. Supporters of Turning Point USA include the president of the United States and the current secretary of education, and many of our students and colleagues repeat the talking points of that organization without reflection.

As many of you may know, some people on campus say that I am a troublemaker. This has not been because the things I’ve said have been invalid. I have always done my research and grounded my interventions in the faculty handbook and the standards of practice established by organizations like the AAUP. I have made sure that my executive committee stands behind everything we have published, and despite initial resistance our arguments have prevailed in the end.

Yet the impression of the troublemaker persists. This is the result of a culture where the comfort of false harmony is valued over the discomfort of honest discord. There are those in leadership positions—faculty and administrators alike—who have taken our professional criticisms personally and have tried to silence us rather than address the issues we have raised. On a campus that markets itself as a place where everyone gets along, labeling someone a “troublemaker” is an effective way to silence the critic and evade the criticism. Anyone who has studied the histories and strategies of domination and oppression can tell you how this works, and it is antithetical to the values that have made many institutions of higher education in America the best in the world.

Consensus may have been desirable on a college campus where most administrators, faculty, students, and staff shared similar backgrounds, where the majors were vocational rather than academic, and where everyone was expected to “fit in.” Consensus continues to be useful for administrators who find it easier to manage faculty who think of themselves as employees who must do whatever their bosses tell them to do. However, it is dissensus—not consensus—that leads to real knowledge production. More importantly, we are now witnessing in real time just how damaging consensus can be on a campus where different viewpoints are no longer a matter of opinion that only affect them, but are a matter of life and death for us.

Like many faculty, I was impressed by the clear and unequivocal stand that our students, parents of our students, and alumni have taken on Instagram. I have been equally impressed with one of our colleague’s willingness to speak out on this issue herself. I have been heartened by the unqualified support of colleagues and allies. And I have been awed by the bravery of our junior faculty who explicitly stated their disappointment in the administration’s flat-footed response. I expect that they and others like them will be radical change agents on this campus for decades to come. Like some of my colleagues, however, I was not surprised by the president’s initial message, nor his mealy-mouthed response to the criticism.

Many critics on Instagram have given the administration credit for better messaging, but they are clear that Molloy has a lot of work to do to make students, faculty, and staff of color not just feel welcome—which implies that we’re still visitors here—but that this is our campus, too. This necessarily means we will have to engage in an honest interrogation of Molloy’s intimate relationship with the history of white supremacy on Long Island. One can sense this history not only on the campus itself, but one can literally see it by turning left or right on Hempstead Avenue.

I am pleased by the universal condemnation of Derek Chauvin for taking George Floyd’s life and at the renewed recognition of how his actions are part of a larger pattern of devaluing black life. But that is just a starting point. After all, not even Donald Trump or Rush Limbaugh could justify that. For our purposes, a more relevant recent example is that of Amy Cooper, the young, affluent white woman in Central Park who called the NYPD and accused a black birdwatcher of threatening her when he asked her to leash her dog. She called the police . . . even though she was the one violating the law.

Amy Cooper is the culture of Molloy.

Guest blogger Mark S. James is an associate professor of English at Molloy College and the president of the Molloy College AAUP chapter.