Dear TCU Community,

The time is now to act.

As a group of concerned faculty, we are deeply disturbed at the recent allegations of unchecked racial and gender discrimination and open hostility at TCU. We stand in solidarity with current and former marginalized undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff who are speaking out and demanding an immediate change. We want to affirm our students, who have clearly laid out the changes that they need to see (click here to see the demands). We know all too well that, in times like these, institutional racism quells students’ progressive visions for their education rather than uplifts them. We also recognize that trauma begets trauma; the unaddressed transgressions of TCU’s past have led to this painful present. We speak out today in hopes of preventing future trauma, knowing that our many Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) faculty are uniquely qualified and ready to lead dynamic and difficult discussions about race. Fort Worth needs healing. TCU needs healing. Let us help.

To students, we stand in solidarity with you and Jane Doe #1 (click here for information about the lawsuit and click here for the text of the actual lawsuit). While we refrain from commenting on her lawsuit as it moves through its own due process, we want to affirm that students of color and students of other marginalized backgrounds HAVE and ARE being underserved and undervalued at TCU. It is not just in your head. We, too, are devastated by your isolation, lack of social and literal physical space, and the infuriating stories you have shared with us during our office hours and in passing about what you experience in the dorms, in class, and while trying to obtain services on campus. We are in awe of your resilience that we wish you did not have to have in the face of routine micro- and macroaggressions on campus; reinforced white supremacist frameworks that you experience daily at the hands of your professors and peers. As faculty, we are invested in helping you navigate processes for improving the conditions in the classroom and across this campus. In addition to bringing to bear our knowledge, we extend our collective and individual support to you in whatever form that may take.

To our fellow faculty members, we must all stand up and be agents of progressive change at TCU for the betterment of our students, staff, and one another. As other recent lawsuits have laid bare, faculty, too, are harmed professionally and personally by long-standing ideologies of white supremacy, fascism, patriarchy, queerphobia, xenophobia, and ableism (click here for information about lawsuit). As BIPOC faculty, we are confronted daily with the gross realities of TCU’s deep-seated history of systemic racism — from unchecked racial terror and hate speech espoused in our own classrooms and on-campus by students and visitors, to being saddled with higher teaching loads than our white or male faculty counterparts that stifles promotion, to unrecognized and uncompensated service work that we are tasked with by administrators to hold TCU together. And, it is apparent that this culture of exploitation and negligence has made it grossly difficult for TCU to not only recruit and retain students of color, but faculty of color, too. We must stop with the band-aids, and be brave enough to put forth and implement bold, holistic and transformative prescriptions for eradicating the systems of oppression that have a grip on our workplace.

To the administration, we continue to be committed to eradicating the various obstacles that students of color, especially Black and Brown students, face at this institution, but we need your expeditious and explicit support. In order to advance equity and justice on-campus in the best interest of our students, strengthen the university’s academic profile and reputation (a stated goal in the Vision in Action Strategic Plan), and ensure the recruitment and retention of BIPOC faculty, we call for:

❖ Joint hires, cluster hires in the research areas of Ethnic Studies (i.e. Asian American, Black, Native American, and Chicanx/Latinx Studies)and Gender and Sexuality Studies,

❖ Immediate investigations into salary gaps in and across departments and colleges, and a public commitment to closing those gaps and ensuring pay equity across all units,

❖ More transparency about salaries and start-up packages across the university, including digitally published and regularly updated classifications and pay scales,

❖ Better workload standards across departments and colleges (i.e..2-2 standardized teaching load for all faculty, 1-2 for new faculty),

❖ Clearly defined and quantifiable criteria for tenure & promotion across departments,

❖ The recognition and compensation of invisible labor—i.e. mentorship of historically marginalized students, departmental service work, and other duties that often go unaccounted for in faculty annual reviews and tenure & promotion,

❖ The creation of a university ombudsperson’s office and the development of fair and transparent processes for filing and resolving complaints (i.e. Title IX, EEO, Dispute Resolutions, etc.), including the annual reporting of received Title IX complaints and greater compliance with other civil rights and anti-discrimination laws,

❖ The hiring of much more student affairs and academic affairs staff to meet the personal and professional needs of our students so that faculty, in particular BIPOC faculty, who are not trained to provide those types of professional services, are not left shouldering the weight of student growth and development,

❖ An end to the ongoing slashing of faculty benefits, which disproportionately harms junior and BIPOC faculty; we need comprehensive medical care (including mental health care) that is culturally responsive, accessible and affordable and more medical health providers on campus who reflect our state’s demographics, and

❖ Daycare services and after school programs provided on campus to support faculty, staff, and students with children.

You have heard from an abundance of students (as well as BIPOC faculty that have left TCU after having similar experiences), who have offered accounts of their experiences of systemic racism on this campus. Do know that these stories are not surprising to us and many of them we have personally supported students through. Our students’ trauma directly affects faculty productivity and well-being, both of which can lead to burnout. If TCU is truly committed to being among one of the best places to work in the nation, as often touted, we feel strongly that mechanisms to address structural racism operating on campus need to be implemented and/or enhanced without delay. The cultural deficit discourse that frames marginalized students goes regularly unchecked at both graduate and undergraduate levels. Diversity is not an obstacle to be navigated in our academic and professional careers. It must, instead, be a transformative core value of this institution.

We see, affirm, and offer our support to the vision of the students, faculty, and staff, who are working towards a truly transformative education here at TCU.

Signed,

Carmen Kynard, Ph.D. – English
Brandon Manning, Ph.D. – English
Jeanelle Hope, Ph.D. – Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies
Rima Abunasser, Ph.D. – English
Jane Mantey, Ph.D. – Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies
Melanie Harris, Ph.D. – Religion
Brian J. Dixon, M.D. – TCU-UNTHSC School of Medicine
Hanan Hammad, Ph.D. – History
Stacie McCormick, Ph.D. – English
Santiago Piñón, Ph.D. – Religion
Adam McKinney, M.A. – Dance/College of Fine Arts
Eric Fisher Stone, MFA— English
Jason Helms, Ph.D. — English
Sarah Robbins, Ph.D. — English
Ann George, PhD — English
Brad Lucas, Ph.D. — English
Regina Lewis, B.A. — English
Sharon Anderson Harris, Ph.D. — English
Charlotte Hogg, Ph.D. — English
Carrie Liu Currier, Ph.D. — Political Science
Jessica L. Fripp, Ph.D. — Art/College of Fine Arts
Gabriel Huddleston, Ph.D. — Curriculum Studies/College of Education
Suki John, Ph.D. — Dance/ College of Fine Arts
Max Krochmal, Ph.D. — History and Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies
Nino Testa, Ph.D. — Women and Gender Studies
Linda Hughes, Ph.D. — English
Wil Gafney, Ph.D. — Brite Divinity School
Lori Boornazian Diel, Ph.D. — Art/College of Fine Arts
Lauren Mitchell, Ph.D. — TCU-UNTHSC School of Medicine
Jennifer Martin, Ph.D. — Social Work and Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies
Babette Bohn, Ph.D. — Art/College of Fine Arts
Angela Towne, Ph.D. — Women and Gender Studies
Breinn Richter, MBA — Management and Leadership/Neeley School of Business
Neil Easterbrook, Ph.D. — English
Claudia Camp, Ph.D. — Women and Gender Studies
Rebecca Sharpless, Ph.D. — History and Women and Gender Studies
Annette Wren, Ph.D. — TCU Writing Center
Alex Hidalgo, Ph.D. — History
Kurk Gayle, Ph.D. — Intensive English Program
Layne Craig, Ph.D. — English
Gene Allen Smith, Ph.D. — History
Sylvia Mendoza, Ph.D. — UTSA and Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies
Bonnie C Blackwell, Ph.D. — English
Shweta Reddy, Ph.D. — Fashion Merchandising/College of Fine Arts
Sara-Jayne Parsons, M.A. — Art/College of Fine Arts
Rhiannon G Mayne, Ph.D. — Environmental Sciences
Jill C. Havens, Ph.D. — English
Jessica Zeller, MFA, Ph.D. — Dance/College of Fine Arts
Mary Twis, Ph.D. — Social Work
Katie Lauve-Moon, Ph.D. — Social Work
Lynné Bowman Cravens, MFA — Art/College of Fine Arts
Sheriee Parnell, B.S. — TCU-UNTHSC School of Medicine
Matthew Pitt, MFA — English
Margaret Lowry, Ph.D. — Women and Gender Studies