We, the faculty of the Intercollegiate Departments of Chicanx Latinx Studies, Africana Studies and Asian American Studies, stand in solidarity with our students and urge Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr and the Board of Trustees to reverse the suspensions of the 12 Pomona students charged, through opaque processes, with being present at Carnegie Hall on Oct. 7, 2024. These students had their suspensions upheld late Thursday evening, Nov. 7, 2024, some for the remainder of the fall semester and others for a full year. We are dismayed that the Pomona administration has failed to adhere to established fair, equitable and transparent processes. Furthermore, the banning and suspensions from campus by Pomona College are tarnishing and disruptive to the Claremont Colleges consortium.
The 12 suspended students face harsh and disproportionate consequences meted out by an alarmingly unfair process. Their initial interim suspensions were transformed to full suspensions by President Starr, who invoked her claim of “extraordinary authority,” granted by the Pomona Student Code which states she has the capacity to “act in extraordinary circumstances in order to ensure the safety of individuals, the protection of property, and the continuity of the educational process.” Rather than litigate the case against students who attended the direct action protest that day (incidents for which a long-standing institutional process has been established to adjudicate), Starr erased the suspended students’ rights to due process through administrative overreach. The use of this authoritarian power to strip all students present of their rights is what concerns us most.
This exercise of “extraordinary authority,” which Starr has claimed on dubious grounds, sets a precedent in which the right to protest and advocate for any cause is subject to being labeled a threat to “the safety of individuals,” an infringement of “the protection of property” and a disruption of “the continuity of the educational process.” Such determination circumvents the established adjudicative process with the mere stroke of a pen. With this new authority, students — and any expressions of activism and free speech — can be characterized as “disruptive, unsafe, and destructive.” Yet it is the Pomona administration and the Board of Trustees who have created an environment that is disruptive, destructive and unsafe for our community. Their actions set a dangerous precedent for the abuse of power through unilateral, top-down decision-making that runs counter to the ethos of shared governance and the educational charge of Pomona to foster “engaged members of society.”
The Intercollegiate Departments of Ethnic Studies, at our inception, radically restructured the institutions toward justice, equity and the deep interrogation of power. These principles continue to stand as the moral center of what we do here as educators, scholars and activists. Our pedagogy honors the historical legacies of our own communities, who spoke truth into power to defend and secure their civil rights. Our very departments and fields of study exist because of civil disobedience and student-led protests challenging a higher education status quo that violently disenfranchised most of the world by intellectually excluding and devaluing the knowledge and experiences of people of color.
We urge the Pomona administration to embrace the values and ethical commitments to restorative justice, reconciliation and deliberative mediation as core educational principles rather than enforcing retributive, punitive and suppressive tactics.
We stand in solidarity with our students as they call upon all of us to center our conscience and ethics as educators and engaged citizens in response to the ongoing, expanding Palestinian genocide and land-grabbing imperialism of Israeli forces undergirded by military aid from our own United States.
We stand in solidarity with students’ rights to protest without being racially profiled as criminals or dangerous persons due to their political stances and expressive tactics. Our students are not a danger nor a threat to our classrooms and community.
We stand in solidarity with students’ rights to protest without draconian responses that criminalize and penalize them in processes that are neither transparent nor agreed upon intercollegiate policy or subject to the whim of one college president granting herself “extraordinary authority” to decide who gets to continue their education. We are an educational institution, not a penal institution.
We stand in solidarity with students as a collective of Intercollegiate Ethnic Studies faculty who prioritize the intellectual work of theory and practice. We care deeply for the well-being of our students in pursuing their educational goals and defining their roles as world citizens. Our solidarity with their First Amendment rights to public expression and protest arises from our collective academic work on the long, impactful American tradition of direct action by citizens and university students of moral and ethical conscience exercising their democratic rights. It is our duty to express dissent and demand change from institutions that uphold, fund or otherwise support practices that contribute to the oppression, disempowerment and dehumanization of any group of people.
Intercollegiate Department of Chicanx Latinx Studies at the Claremont Colleges
Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies at the Claremont Colleges
Intercollegiate Department of Africana Studies at the Claremont Colleges
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