A Note from CCPA Leadership

We want to take a moment to thank you for all the ways you show up. The last few months have proved a deluge of uncertainty, stress, loss, grief, discouragement, exhaustion, frustration, and deep pain for many of our members. In the wake of furloughs, hiring freezes, increasing workloads, and unexpected transitions, staff and faculty at institutions across California have continued to demonstrate care, compassion, advocacy, resilience, and resistance in remarkable ways. We applaud you.

In the midst of a crisis disproportionately affecting Black and Brown communities, the longstanding violence, brutality, and trauma enacted against Black bodies persists. White supremacy sustains this violence and must be dismantled. We are heartened by the support we have seen for nationwide Black Lives Matter protests and grassroots organizing, and we recognize that this is only the beginning of a very long journey to dismantle inequitable and lethal structures that threaten the wellbeing of our communities.

As CCPA leadership has been meeting over the last year, we are continually engaging in conversations about how higher education inherently perpetuates white supremacy, economic disparities, structural racism, revisionist histories, and societal norms that should never have come to be. We are grateful to be affiliated with ACPA--an organization that has continually stood for racial justice and seeks to change higher education for the better. In 2016, ACPA published the Strategic Imperative for Racial Justice and Decolonization, calling for radical change, which CCPA continues to champion.

We support taking actionable steps, such as the #ShutDownAcademia protest that is occurring today, organized by academics, researchers, and staff in STEM. The protest is designed to call attention to the ways that research--across disciplines--has shaped anti-Black narratives and been weaponized against Black communities. 

The complicity of higher education in this trauma must end, and CCPA is committed to developing both an organizational action plan as well as a list of actions that higher education professionals can proactively engage to hold our institutions and educational systems accountable for dismantling structures that perpetuate harm. 

We invite you to come on this journey with us and will follow-up with the resources we develop. Please feel free to email us if you have suggestions or examples for the action plan.

With Compassion,

Julia Stanton, CCPA President
Chris Trudell, CCPA Past-President
Queena Hoang, CCPA President-Elect
Janeece Hayes, CCPA Director of Professional Development
Ryan Darling, CCPA Director of Communication
Dr. Soua Xiong, CCPA Member-at-Large
Dr. John Bacolores, CCPA Member-at-Large
Christopher Johnson, CCPA Member-at-Large