Upcoming forum at NYC public college: 'Whiteness continues to be a crucial problem in our English department'

The description of an upcoming forum at the publicly funded City University of New York begins by noting that "whiteness continues to be a crucial problem in our English department."

"Refusing Institutional Whiteness: Possibilities, Alternatives, and Beyond," sponsored by the school's Graduate Center, indicates that the English department's "whiteness problem" is manifested by "faculty representation and student demographics (and retention)."

Therefore "a group of scholars and thinkers in a range of disciplines" will gather "to help us imagine, discuss, and produce new ways of resisting whiteness and envisioning alternatives in institution settings — whether that be through refusal, protest, dissent, or new types of social, artistic, and methodological existence."

Panelists for the March 22 event are Bianca Williams, CUNY Graduate Center associate professor of anthropology; Tami Navarro, associate director, Barnard Center for Research on Women; and Asilia Franklin-Phipps, Lauder Post-Doctoral Fellow, Teaching & Learning Center, CUNY Graduate Center.

You might recall

The City University of New York has seen its share of radical happenings over the last couple of years:

• Students from its School of Law last year disrupted and heckled a conservative law professor's speaking engagement, hollering "f*** the law," "shame on you," "legal objectivity is a myth," and "white supremacist."
• Its Graduate School of Public Health chose Sharia Law supporter Linda Sarsour as its 2017 commencement speaker.
• Also in 2017, a poet who teaches medieval literature at the school blasted "linguistic racism" and said students' slang usage shouldn't be corrected.

(H/T: Campus Reform)