Thursday, 10 December 2015 - 3:51pm
Human dignity is at the core of human rights. Without dignity, none of the protections of the various legal human rights mechanisms have any real meaning, which is why the concept has held, and continues to hold, a central place in the international human rights.
Without dignity as the central organizing principle of our policies and practices on higher education campuses, none of our attempts to create equity and inclusion will hold together.
We know this truth. Black students and professionals on campuses witness to our failures as they organize and resist the top-down hierarchy of discrimination and hostile campus environments. Our institutions were born to serve white supremacy and there has been no resurrection to transform this legacy.
Trans* identified students and professionals testify to our failures as they struggle to enroll with names and bodies that may not match birth records, are misgendered in class room roll calls, as they seek all-gender restrooms and housing and health care coverage that includes hormone treatments and transition surgeries.
Native, aboriginal and indigenous students and faculty find very little in white spaces to acknowledge that the lands upon which our colleges and universities are built are stolen property or the lives erased to ensure that the dominant white narrative prevails.
Hispanic, Latino and Chicano, immigrant, Muslim, LGB and queer students and professionals find hard passage into the white dominant cultures into which they are expected to assimilate without complaint.
The recitation of the names of those whom we have failed is longer than the list of all graduates of all of our campuses for 400+ years.
Yet, I remain hopeful on Human Rights Day 2015 because our institutions can be made whole. Their healing will emerge out of our deliberate choice to center on student learning and development over any other compelling interest or distraction.
"Young people in the United States and across the globe have challenged and changed the world again and again: from Little Rock to Birmingham, Soweto to Tiananmen, Palestine to Chiapas, Wounded Knee to Cairo. In the past decade alone, college and university students have been a pivotal force in political movements for social change, including the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, the immigrant justice movement, the movement to address climate change and Black Lives Matter. These students have tackled issues their elders avoided, imagined new possibilities that previous generations had deemed unrealizable, and demanded redress for injustices that otherwise would have been ignored. In moments of sometimes uncomfortable tension and confrontation, our students become our teachers and if we are wise enough to listen, they become our partners and allies in challenging injustice and democratizing the culture of the Academy...If we as educators are doing our jobs...we will help our students become critical thinkers and committed agents of change in the world..." (Barbara Ransby, AACU, 2015)
Activism is not inherently adversarial, in fact, it is most often essential if we have hope of deliberative democracy rather than the tyranny of white supremacy. We must model and facilitate environments where academic freedom and free speech and the right to peaceful assembly are taught as core to life in America, not artifacts of our history to be discarded as anomalies.
"Higher education's goals should be aspirational , not for the democracy we have, but for the democracy we need." (Nancy L. Thomas, AACU, 2015, p. 4)
*Barbara Ransby in Students as Moral Teachers: A survey of student activism and institutional responses, Diversity & Democracy, AACU, Fall Edition, 2015, vol 18, No. 4
Nancy L. Thomas, The Politics of Learning & Democracy, Diversity & Democracy, AACU, Fall Edition, 2015, vol 18, No. 4. **