03/25/2021
Faculty members of the Department of Rhetoric & Communication Studies would like to express their full support for the Black Student Coalition’s “Protect Our Web” statement and the ensuing campaign to see its urgent demands met by the administration, including the movement toward disaffiliation. This is a watershed moment in the history of the University of Richmond, where as a community we can confront the university’s legacy of racism and its grip on our contemporary moment together, or we can continue a painful divide, where our black students suffer indignities while the university uses (and even profits off of) them to make claims of inclusivity. It is these same students that are leading this charge and mobilizing the UR community at great risk—the sacrifices that they are making for the good of the University and for future students are monumental, and we stand in solidarity with them.
The members of the RHCS community (students, faculty, and staff alike) know full well the value of language, the power of symbolism, and the importance of context. The BSC’s campaign to change the names of campus buildings, for example, is part of a larger history of challenging white supremacy on campus and in the city of Richmond—a larger history that so many UR students (including many in RHCS) are mining and bringing to life through their own research on and off our campus, and using such context to inform their current activism. Their use of the tools of critique, argumentation, and historical analysis to call for meaningful and significant change at the university are modes that RHCS students have come to appreciate and demonstrate in their studies, and are now seeing as critical in actual practice.
It’s important to note that the students’ demands for change are not empty gestures—in fact, they are crucial to the University administration acknowledging the ways its symbols have actual material effect on student safety, security, and health. That is why we also support the coalition’s demand for expanded mental health benefits and academic relief. Within both a global health crisis and the crisis of racism at UR, black students are disproportionately bearing a higher burden of the attendant stresses, and we believe meeting their mental health and academic support needs is essential.
Following our students’ lead, we believe that the “educational mission” that the Board of Trustees referred to as its reasoning for keeping the building names is not the educational mission that we recognize in our classrooms and in our interactions with UR students. We recognize a mission of an honest education built on mutual respect and an ethic of care, but also a willingness and even a responsibility to challenge and critique accepted modes of thought and action and engage in the promotion of social justice—the kind of mission the Black Student Coalition and their student allies are modeling and embodying so profoundly in their work. As faculty, we not only support this work, but in this moment we also recognize the need to listen and learn from our students, rather than the reverse.
For more information on our department values, see RHCS’ Inclusivity Statement: https://rhetoric.richmond.edu/major-minor/inclusivity.html
Tim Barney, Associate Professor & Chair
Paul Achter, Associate Professor
Scott Johnson, Associate Professor
Nicole Maurantonio, Associate Professor
Frankie Mastrangelo, Adjunct Professor
Mari Lee Mifsud, Professor
Lauren Tilton, Assistant Professor
