Category: Statements
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Public Statement to Protect Campus Speech and Academic Freedom
We publicly condemn the UC leadership’s adoption of policies that criminalize our right to teach, write, and research the truth about Palestine. We publicly condemn directives that limit our rights to free speech and expression on behalf of Palestinian liberation with threats of censure or retaliation. We express our commitment to supporting and affirming students,…
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Calls for Academic Institutions to End Genocide against Palestinians
Open Letter from the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism’s Research Community Open Letter from Birzeit University in Palestine to International Academic Institutions Statement on Bias in UC Statements from the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council
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CRES Statement of Support for the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism
Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) is a department at UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) that studies race intersectionally in the context of power. In this moment—when we are grieving lives lost, fearing the many more to come, and witnessing Israel once again retaliate against a trapped Palestinian population in Gaza—we want to underscore the need…
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Call for a Global General Strike
As a department, we are observing the Palestinian-led Global General Strike and will not conduct university business as usual on 10/20/23. We are in full support of the strike to stand against Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza, itself an extension of the ongoing Nakba Palestinians have experienced for over 75 years. As educators, following our colleagues…
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CRES Faculty Letter in Support of UAW Strikes
The Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department urges the UCSC administration to persuade UCOP to bargain with the UAW in good faith and to take the bargaining position of the UC Graduate Student Associations seriously. This is necessary to bring UC’s graduate student employee salary scale into line with that of our comparison institutions, to…
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Statement in Support of the UC A-G Ethnic Studies Requirement
Starting in 1968, students at two public universities in California–first San Francisco State and then UC Berkeley–courageously led the way for the grassroots formation of ethnic studies by going on strike and shutting down their campuses despite police brutality and military repression. Well over half a century later, the University of California has at long…
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CRES Supports the “Students for Sustaining Black Wellness” Referendum
The faculty and staff of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department and the Black Studies Minor wholeheartedly support the “Students for Sustaining Black Wellness Referendum” (below) put forward by the Black Student Union (BSU) and the African American Theater Arts Troupe (AATAT). The vibrancy of UC Santa Cruz and the famed social consciousness of…
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CRES Statement of Solidarity with the Palestinian People on Nakba Day
As a program committed to the study of colonialism, military occupation, and Indigenous resistance, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies stands in support of the Palestinian people as they live under multiple forms of violence imposed on them by Israel. As an academic program housed on Turtle Island, we oppose settler colonialism everywhere and we condemn…
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Why Nick Mitchell Is Returning the Chancellor’s Achievement Award for Diversity
Dear Chancellor Cynthia Larive, Last year I received, from your predecessor George Blumenthal, the 2019 Chancellor’s Achievement Award for Diversity. I was proud then to accept the award. I took it to represent UC Santa Cruz’s continued recognition, not of me in some narrow fashion but to the collective worlds that made me possible. Those…
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CRES Solidarity Statement with COLA Campaign
The faculty in the Program in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) at UC Santa Cruz expresses our solidarity with graduate students who are calling for financial resources to meet the rapidly rising costs of living in and around Santa Cruz. CRES, like so many other ethnic studies programs, owes much of its existence to…
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CRES Faculty Condemn Recent Police Violence against Student Protesters
Dear President Napolitano, Chancellor Blumenthal, and EVC Tromp: We, the undersigned principal faculty of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies program, are compelled to write out of a sense of profound dismay and anger. On Friday, November 16, 2018, UC Santa Cruz students marched to the University Center at Colleges 9/10 with the intention of…