THIS

This by Us: One Year Later

2010-02-10T23:39:00.005-06:00

One year ago, on February 10th, 2009, we began to post a series of words and photos on the walls of the Barbara Barker Center for Dance. We were a pseudonymous group of Dance students of Color, and our actions were a protest against the lack of safe space for students of Color in the program and the failure of the faculty to provide the resources needed for anti-racist activism and alliance.

We covered the white walls and clear glass of the building with poetry, essays, blog posts, news articles, quotations and photographs, documenting our actions and communications on a public blog (http://thisbyus.blogspot.com/). We chose each text or image because it spoke to us about resisting bigotry and institutionalized prejudice and about forming alliances with people whose oppressions both coincide with and differ from our own. Our protest physically transformed the Barker Center into a site of discussion where it was impossible to ignore what we were saying.

Among our many specifically themed postings was the one to mark Black History Month, for which we covered up the photos of the exclusively White dancers in Classroom 301 with photos of extraordinary Black American dancers and choreographers. On April 1st, 2009, we posted a list of specific suggestions that the Dance Program could implement. One item on that list was the suggestion that the photo collection of White dancers in Classroom 301 be replaced with a more racially diverse panorama — as we ourselves temporarily implemented during the protest. This small symbolic gesture had been discussed within the Program for four preceding years, but was never undertaken.

On April 5th, a group of all White students and alumni tore down our entire protest. The Dance Program administration officially described this silencing action as a "change" while issuing encouragement to students to express themselves at Peer Advisor-led meetings. The Dance administration likewise did nothing to engage the changes we had been trying to bring to the building.

Today, the dancing bodies on the walls of Classroom 301 are still all White.

This lack of response to our protest is characteristic of the Dance Program's attitude towards it, which evolved from appropriative pride, to annoyed indifference, to offended outrage, to active suppression. We held meetings with the Ombudsman’s office and the Office for Equity and Diversity to try to negotiate with the Department of Theater Arts and Dance administration. These meetings were ultimately fruitless. The Dance Program refused to examine its hostile, defensive and disingenuous response to the protest, much less accept any of our criticisms of its policies and politics.

This attitude was exacerbated by the bureaucratic indifference of the University administration at large. The problems we critiqued during our protest are endemic to the University of Minnesota and systemic through the highest levels of administration -- indifference, self-aggrandizement partnered with suppression and dismissal of criticism, defensive and face-saving solutions that do not address problems with the required complexity and rigor, a willingness to perpetuate and protect hierarchies of power, and above all, the construction of an educational institute that values students as consumers first and knowledge as relevant only to gaining power.

While we found individuals in the Department of Theater Arts and Dance, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Office for Equity and Diversity and its various service units who were well-intentioned and concerned about our well-being, they were unwilling or unable to take effective actions that would enable us to trust the official mechanisms provided for student protection.

Given this environment we have experienced, should we have expected our protest to bring about change? The change we desired was initially sparked by a painful discussion about students' racialized experiences with casting in the annual University Dance Theater concert. It is revealing that the semester following this discussion, the faculty and administration held auditions for a dance piece explicitly about transracial adoption without clarifying the casting policy for it beforehand.

A year later, the dance administration and faculty remain completely silent about our protest. Clearly those teachers who talk about the power of historiography in their classrooms are aware of the consequences of erasing history from their narratives, and find it easier to ignore our protest than to acknowledge that it happened, or to address the unresolved criticism of their actions and inactions.

A year later, our anger, born from a concerned engagement with our school and our teachers, has dwindled into disappointment and disengagement. While the overreaching issues of racism, institutional privilege, and abuse of authority remain embedded within the Dance Program in specific and the University of Minnesota at large; this educational institute has proven to be an unsupportive environment within which to point problems out, much less begin to change them.
We mourn that our protest could not effect the change we needed; that fear and arrogance led to its silencing and erasure. We indict the Dance Program for squandering an opportunity for growth by their defensive posturing and empty gestures. Most of all, we regret that our fellow and future students of Color will not have the opportunity to know that they are not alone in the isolation and alienation they may feel.

But we celebrate our protest, because for a brief, wondrous period in our education, we turned the building in which we danced, dreamed and learned into a space reclaimed by our voices, our concerns and our bodies; resonant with a challenge too beautiful, too demanding and too large to ignore.

-- us, February 10th, 2010 (http://thisbyus.blogspot.com/)

Note: We are currently (as of February 11, 2010) still in the process of distributing print versions of the above letter to University administration and placing stacks for students in University buildings. This blog post will later be fully updated with recipients and locations we have placed the print material.

An Annotated Timeline of THIS protest may be found here.

Housekeeping: A Note to Our Blog Readers

2010-02-10T14:23:00.002-06:00

Dear Blog Readers,

Our blog is currently in the process of being brought up to date.

We have updates up to May 19, 2009 - at that point last year we no longer had the energy to continue a conversation with the University which had proven to be largely unproductive. However, as the Dance and University administration in general has not and will not fulfill the task of making their processes transparent and widely accessible, we must do it here. The upkeep of the standards of documentation and reportage as in keeping with our editorial policies will take some time. Please be patient. You may email us with any specific questions, concerns, or suggestions.

Please continue to check back. We have kept largely comprehensive documentation on this blog, and are working on filling what holes exist.

Thanks,
us

Note: This entry may be edited later to reflect and include the new material as it is added.

Response: June 18, 2009

2009-06-18T08:41:00.001-05:00

Today an email from Dr. Rusty Barceló was distributed by the dance office specialist to the dancemajors email listserv only:

Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2009 08:41:36 -0500
From: Jessica Crary
To: dancemajors@cla.umn.edu
Cc: Ananya Chatterjea ,
chapi001@umn.edu

Subject: [Dancemajors] From Dr. Rusty Barceló

Dear Dance Program Students,

Over the past few weeks, the Office for Equity and Diversity staff have had the opportunity to meet with various groups and individuals to discuss the THIS protest in the Dance Program. We also would like the opportunity to meet with a broader range of students in the Dance Program to gain your perspectives about any aspect of the protest and/or the Program.

I would like to invite you to participate in a meeting set for Friday, June 26, 2009 from 11:30 am - 1:00 pm in room 432 Morrill Hall. For those of you unable to attend in person, we are making it possible for you to participate via a conference call. Please contact Celest Miller by Wednesday, June 24th at 612-626-9836 or mill3761@umn.edu to set up a conference call connection.

We are aware that the timing of this is not ideal and not many students are on campus right now. However, we believe it is important to gain as many voices as possible in order to determine future directions. I hope that you will be able to participate on some level.

Dr. Rusty Barceló
Vice President and Vice Provost
Office for Equity and Diversity

Response: May 15, 2009

2009-05-15T10:32:00.005-05:00

We received an email from the Office for Equity and Diversity, with the following text of the letter that was distributed today on all the dance (dance, dance majors, dance musicians, dance faculty, dance staff) and theater listservs. We will be commenting in our continually updated annotated timeline soon.

Sub: memo from VP Barceló and Dean Parente
Date: May 15, 2009 10:32AM

May 15, 2009

To: Students, staff, and faculty of U of M’s Dance Program and members of the larger community, both locally and nationally

From: Nancy “Rusty” Barceló
Vice President and Vice Provost, Office for Equity and Diversity

James A. Parente, Jr.
Dean, College of Liberal Arts

We are aware that broad-based grave concern exists for a positive resolution to the ongoing protest initiated by a coalition of students within the Dance Program at the University of Minnesota. We are also aware that there is concern that a lack of timely, decisive response has fueled suspicion that the issues raised are not being taken seriously and that a strategy of riding out the criticism until the end of the semester is being deployed by university administrators.

We write to let you know that this is not the case at any level of administration. To be sure, the issues being raised are enormously complex, sensitive, and painful for all involved. None of these are easily addressed or dismissed, and a real solution involves a sustained commitment to working on these issues together. The artistic, political, pedagogical and intellectual work of the Dance Program, and the dedication and commitment of several faculty members to such work, has helped to nurture and create a space where this kind of difficult student-led dialogue can begin. The Dance Program, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Office of Equity and Diversity are working towards a collaborative process that demonstrates commitment from all sides and which takes into account not only the institutional issues that need to be addressed (curricular reform, review of processes, department and institutional environment) but also the deeply emotional wounds experienced by all sides. The wounds that have resulted from the articulation of grievances not only speak to the recent incidences that gave rise to the protest, but they are also, unfortunately, part of the social legacy we all have inherited. In order to reform how we do our work to create a safe, nurturing, and inclusive environment committed to excellence, we need an integrated approach that takes into account all constituents’ needs and concerns. This is no easy task. We need patience and input from all parties involved so we can achieve meaningful and sustainable outcomes. We urge all parties to refrain from making hasty judgments or personalized attacks that might generate injury and pain, thereby undermining the possibilities for productively advancing this dialogue. If we can do this together, the protest and the institutional response can serve as a model for institutional reform.

In order to take steps in this direction, we announce some immediate first steps below. More importantly, we are committed to approaching the upcoming town hall meeting as a workshop that will identify a sustained process for addressing comprehensively all impediments to a healthy community and learning environment, one that is supportive and nurturing of inclusivity and diversity of opinion on complex social issues, including the inherent power dynamics embedded in an educational setting. The steps below are only first steps and not designed to address the range of issues raised by the protest. We ask that all parties involved approach the town hall in a reflective and thoughtful manner that can lead towards pragmatic solutions. While we understand that it may be difficult to refrain from personalizing the issues, we believe it is healthier to approach these challenges from a structural perspective that can lead to sustained change.

Here are actions raised by students, faculty and staff that we propose to act on immediately:

Provide space for expressions of dissent within the department
Initiate a process and establish a committee to re-think imagery/symbols on the walls of Barker to signify a commitment to a multi-ethnic dance heritage
Establish staffed temporary safe zones within the department for students, faculty, staff and community members to express dissent, grievances, and dissatisfaction without fear of recrimination
Invite the Student Conflict Resolution Center to continue to act as mediator
Provide program advisors with a regularly updated, comprehensive list of CLA courses that typically have diverse racial/ethnic enrollment
Provide department faculty with information and training about University policies on student confidentiality and privacy
Make small-grant funds available to support the Peers and Student Dance Coalition to hold student-only meetings to discuss issues
Continue to make students aware, on a regular basis, of campus resources to address eating disorders, depression, and other difficulties, etc.
Make students aware of all the ways they can communicate grievances about the department and/or faculty
Continue to have active student representation on faculty hiring committees
Make available to students the departmental organizational chart and roles of the faculty and staff
Disseminate agendas in advance of town hall meetings; establish a system for requesting agenda items and disseminate minutes to students, faculty, and staff after town hall meetings
Share casting policies and timelines in writing with students before auditions
Make a public statement in writing regarding the steps that the department is taking to build and sustain an ongoing dialogue about its policies and practices
Communicate publicly about the next steps to be addressed after the May 19 workshop.

If you are a University of Minnesota community member that believes you have experienced problems that need to be addressed the following resources are available to you:

Administration of the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance and Dance Program
Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action
Student Conflict Resolution Center
Office for Conflict Resolution
Office of the Dean, College of Liberal Arts

We very much appreciate your willingness to participate in working collectively with us to address the necessary changes to ensure a mutually supportive and inclusive environment in the Dance Program.

Response: May 7, 2009

2009-05-07T19:39:00.003-05:00

We received an email from a concerned dance student (who wished to remain anonymous) to inform us that they witnessed the dance program specialist removing the protest postings on the glass walls of the Barker even before the building officially opened. On multiple occasions the program specialist has confirmed this verbally as well, explaining that she is doing her job by enforcing the university policy on indoor posting.

Since the wholescale removal of the protest on April 5, protest postings have been removed five times, each time before or within minutes of the building officially opening at 8am. To date, there is still no administrative acknowledgment of any involvement in the removal of the protest materials.

We have updated our annotated timeline on the May 7 entry with our responses relating to this.

Response: May 5, 2009

2009-05-05T10:43:00.003-05:00

The following email was sent from Carl Flink's email and cosigned by Carl Flink and Dr. Ananya Chatterjea to theater, dance, and faculty/staff listservs, and cc'd to Josh Casper, Dr. Louis Mendoza, Dr. Rickey Hall, Dr. Barceló, Dr. Jim Parente, Dr. Richa Nagar, and Dr. Ananya Chatterjea:

Sub: Update on May 19 Town Hall Meeting on Equity and Difference
Date: May 5, 2009 10:43 AM

Dear All:

The department faculty, CLA and OED understand that May 19 from 10-noon is not an optimal time for students, staff or faculty to meet but dates during the last week of classes also presented serious scheduling problems. We are going to go forward with the May 19 meeting. It is important for everyone to understand that this is simply a next step in this dialogue and that it will be followed by more steps laid out in an action plan for the department that this town hall meeting will help develop.

In order to facilitate as many voices from students, staff and faculty being heard in this process Josh Casper from the University Student Conflict Resolution Center will gather suggested agenda items and future action steps via e-mail at caspe052@umn.edu. He will redact any personal information from e-mails if the sender desires to remain anonymous. Josh has also graciously offered to meet in person with anyone who wants to provide input for the May 19 meeting, but is uncomfortable sending it through e-mail. So Josh can collate everything in preparation for the meeting, please send your comments by Monday, May 18 at 9 a.m. Comments and suggestions can also be sent directly to Ananya (ananya@umn.edu) and me (Carl Flink at flink003@umn.edu). We are also willing to meet with anyone who would like to talk in person.

In order to facilitate further posting of any documents related to these dialogues by US or anyone else who desires to do so on this subject and in order to to comply with University indoor posting procedure, a space will be created in both the Rarig Center and Barker Center for postings on an official bulletin board. Postings should have a date on them and be removed by the distributer of the posting seven days after posting date. For more information on the University procedure on indoor posting please go to the following link:

http://policy.umn.edu/groups/ppd/documents/Procedure/DistPubsProc.cfm#indoor

As stated in our previous e-mail about the May 19 town hall meeting:

Vice Provost Barcelo has also generously offered to meet directly with dance program full-time faculty, affiliate faculty members and students to identify specific issues these groups face and would like addressed. These meetings will be planned in the next three weeks or in fall semester if that timing makes more sense.

We look forward to seeing you on May 19 and working with you all in the coming months on these critical and sensitive issues. Because of our students, staff and faculty, we think our department is uniquely positioned to make great progress on these very important matters.

Sincerely,

Carl & Ananya

Part 16: May 4, 2009

2009-05-04T00:01:00.007-05:00

An Open Petition to The Chair and Director of the Dance Program

From Part 16 - May 4, 2009

We ask you to demonstrate your stated commitment to ‘issues of equity, social justice and difference’ and your previously stated support of the THIS protest by undertaking the following actions before May 8--the last day of classes:

Immediately cease to remove any of the THIS protest postings on the walls of the Barker.
Repost the THIS second open letter with its list of demands, Dr. Barceló's communication with the protesters, and this petition on the walls of the Barker.
Make a public and official statement supporting the use of the Barker walls as a site of communication, in light of your previously stated support of the protest.
Invite the Office for Equity and Diversity and the Student Conflict Resolution Center into the Barker to be able to meet with as many students and affiliate faculty as possible, in order to get everyone’s input on the record.
Immediately distribute to the dance and theatre list-serves and make hard copies available of (1) the suggestions generated at the Town Hall meeting which was held on March 13th, 2009 (2) the suggestions generated at the Peers organized meeting, (3) the THIS second open letter.
Publicly and officially support the MCAE (Multicultural Centre for Academic Excellence) organized students of Color department support group, and acknowledge the need for it.
Invite an external commission to assess students' perception of institutional hostility towards criticism, and faculty abuse of positional power—this should include the situations that lead to the THIS protest.

The Student Conflict Resolution Center and the Office for Equity and Diversity have demonstrated their commitment towards working with the protesters to resolve the issues the protest has raised by responding directly to letters, respecting pseudonymity, and not denying grievances. As the leadership of the dance program, we demand the same commitment from you.

-- us, May 4, 2009 (http://thisbyus.blogspot.com)

Note: Supporters of this petition and the protest can comment here.
They can also forward their comments and letters to
Carl Flink (flink003@umn.edu)
Dr. Ananya Chatterjea (ananya@umn.edu)
Josh Casper (caspe052@umn.edu)
The protesters (thisbyus@gmail.com)

Note: This posting had already been taken down the next morning before 8am, when the building officially opens. This is the fifth set of materials that has been immediately removed since our protest was ripped down in its entirety. No one has publicly claimed responsibility.

From Part 16 - May 4, 2009

To view complete album, click on icon below or go to: http://picasaweb.google.com/thisbyus/Part16May42009#

Part 16 - May 4, 2009

Part 15: April 30, 2009

2009-04-30T23:48:00.008-05:00

We posted on the glass walls of the first floor lobby in the Barker the following response to the second town hall announcement, and addressed it to Dr. Barceló.

Note: This posting had already been taken down as of 8:09AM the next morning. The building officially opens at 8am. This is the fourth set of materials that has been immediately removed since our protest was ripped down in its entirety. No one has publicly claimed responsibility.

From Part 15 - April 30, 2009

Dr. Nancy "Rusty" Barceló
Vice President and Vice Provost for Equity and Diversity
University of Minnesota

Dear Dr. Barceló:

We appreciated our first meeting with you, Dr. Louis Mendoza, and Dr. Rickey Hall on April 22, 2009. We felt that you acknowledged our voices and respected our concerns. As agreed upon in that meeting, we publicly posted your reply to our open letter, along with our response, so that our peers would know how communicative the Office for Equity and Diversity proved to have been (this material was immediately removed—twice from the walls of the Barker and once from Rarig. See blog for documentation).

In a jointly signed email sent to the theatre list serve today, Carl Flink and Dr. Ananya Chatterjea said that they had "a very positive and constructive conversation" with the Office for Equity and Diversity, along with CLA Dean Dr. Jim Parente and CLA Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs Dr. Richa Nagar. We are very glad that your input persuaded our department to start addressing the issues raised by our protest, and we join the chair and director in thanking the OED for your much-needed experience, expertise and resources.

While we were happy to hear the announcement of a second town hall meeting, we are very concerned about the date of this meeting. To hold it on May 19--11 days after the last day of classes in the dance program--makes it even more inaccessible than the poorly attended Spring Break meeting on March 17. We have always called for the largest possible number of voices and opinions to be involved in any decision making process in the program. The voices of the graduating seniors are essential in this conversation, given their centrality to both the Dance Revolutions experience and their cumulative knowledge of the past four years in the program. We feel that many seniors will find it both inconvenient and unnecessary to attend a meeting held two days after their formal commencement. Many of our peers will already have taken up summer jobs or be traveling by this date.

Since no official meetings can be held during finals week, we would urge you to therefore try and find a way to have this meeting before classes are over. Since the dance program and larger departmental discussions are to be separated anyway, perhaps these could be two distinct meetings, planned to match the individual dance and theatre schedules. We realize the inconvenience this will cause to all administrators involved; however, the first town hall meeting on March 13 was announced only five days in advance, and we feel that the last meeting that some students will attend deserves a similar sense of urgency.

If there is no way possible for this rescheduling to happen, then we would strongly recommend that the OED along with the Student Conflict Resolution Center set up office hours in the Barker to allow as many student and affiliate faculty input to be on the record as possible.

We have some concerns about the agenda for this meeting, as well as suggestions for immediate action that the program can take beforehand. We would be happy to meet with you to discuss these further; we will limit ourselves now to saying that the first step that Carl Flink and Dr. Ananya Chatterjea can take to "demonstrate the department's commitment to a collaborative approach that involves all stakeholders" is to actively support everyone's voices remaining on the walls. We have been struggling to keep this conversation public so that students remain included and are able to form their own opinions of our protest. We look forward to your continued demonstration of these shared values.

--us, April 30, 2009 (http://thisbyus.blogspot.com)

cc:
Josh Casper
Dr. Louis Mendoza
Dr. Rickey Hall
dance list serve
theatre list serve

From Part 15 - April 30, 2009

to view the full album, click on the photo icon below or go to: http://picasaweb.google.com/thisbyus/Part15April302009#

Part 15 - April 30, 2009

Response: April 30, 2009

2009-04-30T16:40:00.002-05:00

The following email was sent out to the dance and theatre listservs, from Carl Flink's email, co-signed by both Carl Flink and Dr. Ananya Chatterjea.

Sub: Dialogues on Equity and Diversity
Date: April 30, 2009 4:40 PM

Dear TAD Department Faculty, Staff & Students:

On Tuesday morning, Ananya and I had a very positive and constructive conversation with Office for Equity and Diversity (OED) Vice President and Vice Provost Rusty Barcelo, Associate Vice Provost Louis Mendoza and Assistant Vice President Rickey Hall, as well as CLA Dean Jim Parenti and CLA Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs Richa Nagar. The discussion focused on next steps the dance program and our department might take in regards to the issues and suggestions raised by the THIS Protest and department students’ responses to it. We also discussed building on the department’s established and ongoing commitment and activities as a University leader on issues of equity, social justice and difference. We thank the leadership of OED and CLA for their commitment to supporting this process of reflection with their expertise, experience and possible resources if needed.

As the end of the semester is fast approaching and full to bursting with departmental activities, we understand the need to take concrete steps to demonstrate the department’s commitment to a collaborative approach that involves all stakeholders even as our time is somewhat limited. To advance this, we want to schedule some conversations that can help us identify a group of faculty, staff and students as a working group to develop an action plan for next fall and beyond.

After consultation with the OED staff, we will convene another department town hall meeting on Tuesday, May 19 from 10 – 12 p.m. Faculty, students and staffers from throughout the department are invited, however the meeting will be divided into two discussion groups: one will focus specifically on an action plan for the dance program, the second will focus on an action plan for the broader department. The purpose of two conversations is to provide a much needed space for the dance program community to convene to address its specific needs in this process while also facilitating a parallel and supporting dialogue for the department. These meetings will focus on where the program and department should go in the coming year and beyond. These meetings will be team-facilitated by department leaders and OED staff members.

We understand that May 19 is after the academic year has ended, but OED, CLA and we thought that it made more sense to schedule this meeting shortly after students, faculty and staff have completed the business of the academic year.

Vice Provost Barcelo has also generously offered to meet directly with dance program core faculty, affiliate faculty members and students to identify specific issues these groups face and would like addressed. These meetings will be planned in the next three weeks or in fall semester if that timing makes more sense.

We look forward to working with you all in the coming months on these critical and sensitive issues. Because of our students, staff and faculty, we think our department is uniquely positioned to make great progress on these very important matters.

Carl Flink
Chair, Theatre Arts & Dance

Ananya Chatterjea
Director of Dance

Response: April 24, 2009

2009-04-24T23:30:00.003-05:00

We were sent an email from Josh Casper, the Ombudsman we have been in communication with, saying he'd been asked if we would be willing to post the the following announcement for a Students of Color meeting to our blog. Since we have been told it is a public announcement that has been sent to the peer advisers to distribute on the dance and theater list serves, we consider it an official university (but not dance program-driven) response, and publish it here as such.

To Students of Color in the Dance Program:

The Multicultural Center for Academic Excellence (MCAE) has been following with interest the “This” protest and its multifaceted range of issues. MCAE is prepared to assist in any constructive way.

We write today to offer a service stemming from one of the issues raised in the second open letter. In the letter it states, “Students of Color and other minority identities should be acknowledged as having to deal with a continual additional burden of being a minority in an unsafe system, and should be provided space where they can safely speak about their experiences, without the burden of assuaging anyone’s guilt, or educating anyone’s ignorance, or being held responsible for generating solutions.”

We would like to provide a space for students to speak to what has been occurring, their experiences, etc. An MCAE staff member will be facilitating a discussion for students of color on Tuesday, April 28th at 3:45 p.m. in 215 Blegen Hall. We know that not all students of color will be able to meet during this time and would be open to identifying additional opportunities if needed.

The meeting isn’t about MCAE supporting or not supporting the protesters. We are aware that some students of color are supportive of the protest and others are not. Instead, this meeting is about creating a space for students of color to talk about their experiences on a predominately white campus. If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to direct those to Josh Casper at caspe052@umn.edu.

Part 14: April 22, 2009

2009-04-22T19:36:00.010-05:00

We reposted our Open Letter to the Office for Equity and Diversity, which had been immediately torn down the first time we posted it on April 16. This time, we also included Dr. Barceló's response, as well as our response (text below). We posted one copy on the glass walls of the first floor lobby of the Barker Center, and the second copy on the glass walls of the theater program's administration offices on the 5th floor of the Rarig Center.

Note: The postings had already been taken down in the Barker as of 8:05AM the next morning. The building officially opens at 8am. At some point the same day, the postings at the Rarig Center were also removed. No one has publicly claimed responsibility.

Text of our response to Dr. Barceló:

Sub: Re: An Open Letter to the Office for Equity and Diversity
Date: April 21, 2009 1:42AM

Dear Dr. Barceló,

We have decided that we would like to meet with you in person. We are hopeful that it will help in getting concrete action from the dance program before the semester is over. Thank you for stating that you will respect our anonymity, and we do ask that you keep our identities and the contents of our meetings confidential unless otherwise stated.

The best time for us to meet with you is [date/time redacted]. We welcome the presence of Dr. Louis Mendoza and Dr. Rickey Hall, as well as Josh Casper, who we would like present at any and all meetings discussing the protest (Josh, will you be available?).

We would very much appreciate, if you would not like your letter to us to be made public, a public statement from the OED giving students as much information as the director and chair of the dance program have about your involvement. It is important to us that the dance program administration is not privileged with information that the students do not have public access to. We are copying on this email only those offices who have communicated directly with us and whom we believe to be acting in good faith.

We look forward to meeting with you.

Sincerely,
us

cc:
Josh Casper
Dr. Louis Mendoza
Dr. Rickey Hall

PHOTOS

At the Barker Center:

From Part 14 - April 23, 2009

At the Rarig Center:

From Part 14 - April 23, 2009

To view complete album, click on icon below or go to: http://picasaweb.google.com/thisbyus/Part14April232009#

From Part 14 - April 23, 2009

Responses: April 20, 2009

2009-04-20T19:08:00.005-05:00

We received permission to post the following email, which is a response to our Open Letter to the Office for Equity and Diversity from Dr. Nancy “Rusty” Barceló, Vice President and Vice Provost for Equity and Diversity at the University of Minnesota:

Sub: Re: An Open Letter to the Office for Equity and Diversity
Date: 4/20/2009 7:08 PM

Dear us:

I have been watching with interest the events unfolding within the U of M Dance Program. I, and others on my staff, attended the town hall meeting and offered the services of our office as soon we became aware of the concerns. I am pleased that you have requested our assistance and we stand ready to help in any way we can.

I spoke by phone with Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs Richa Nagar on Friday morning, April 17, 2009 to discuss ideas I had about addressing the complex array of concerns raised by "THIS" protest.

The mission of the Office for Equity and Diversity is to support and enrich the experience of students, staff and faculty on campus by fostering mutual understanding and respect that builds on the strengths and synergy resulting from diverse experiences and perspectives. These values will guide us in our work with all members of the Dance Program.

I believe the most important first-step our office can take is to work with the students, staff, and faculty of the Dance Program to develop a constructive, intentional, and systematic process to address the concerns raised. The multifaceted range of issues that have been identified, including concerns with climate, policies, practices, communication, and governance, require a long-term commitment. Meaningful change requires patience and sustained engagement, the ability to listen and the will to act. I see the potential for our work together to serve as a model that can be used across campus for turning difficult dialogues into an opportunity for creative transformation.

Having said this, I also want to make my office accessible to you in a way that you feel will be most effective to resolve these issues, so I want to work with you to determine where to begin and what direction to take. I suggest we meet (or dialogue in an alternative format of your choosing) as soon as possible to explore how we can best begin the work. I am available Tuesday evening, April 21 or Wednesday, April 22 [time redacted]. I can speak with you alone, or, with two of my colleagues, Louis Mendoza and Rickey Hall, who are also available during those times and either of them could be included in our discussion at your discretion.

If one of the above times would work, please respond to this email. If these times do not work for you, or you wish to propose an alternative form of communication that respects your anonymity, I would ask you to contact, Celest Miller at 626-9836 or mill3761@umn.edu to determine another time for our meeting.

I appreciate that you contacted me directly and that you have taken what you feel is a risk to do so. Please know that we take your concerns very seriously and we will do everything we can to support an outcome that is meaningful and constructive for everyone.

Sincerely,

Nancy “Rusty” Barceló
Vice President and Vice Provost

cc: Josh Casper
Ananya Chatterjea
Carl Flink
Richa Nagar

Response: April 19, 2009

2009-04-19T22:17:00.001-05:00

Tonight Carl Flink sent out to the dance majors and theatre list serves an email jointly signed by him and Dr. Ananya Chatterjea.
We have updated our annotated timeline with the pertinent quotes and our responses to them.

Sub: Ongoing Departmental Dialogue Updates
Date: 4/19/2009 9:55 PM

Dear Department Students, Staff & Faculty:

We want to update you on the steps that we are taking at a departmental level to address the questions of institutional power, privilege and prejudice that have been raised by the THIS Project and some other students within the department in recent months. We also want to update you on conversations around the status of the departmental peers for next year.

In terms of student input on the first matter above, we are currently waiting for the peers/ombudsmen's office-driven dialogue that has had two conversations facilitated by Ombudsmen Office representative Josh Casper to develop a roster of suggested actions for the department to consider for raising awareness and understanding on these important issues within the department. We also congratulate the students who organized and participated in the recent training on white privilege led by University Faculty member Lisa Albrecht.

At the departmental level, Ananya and I are currently working with College of Liberal Arts Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs Richa Nagar to develop a dialogue with the University's Office of Equity and Diversity's Vice Provost Rusty Barcelo to identify how the Office and the CLA administration can best facilitate and support these ongoing dialogues. We hope that these conversations will bear some fruit in the coming weeks.

In terms of the status of the departmental peers, the department faculty has considered whether it is necessary to continue these positions as paid in the face of the impending budget cuts our department will need to address this summer. Over the past two weeks I have engaged in multiple thoughtful conversations with the Peers, Jasmine Rush of the X Board and a number of concerned BA students, as well as, department faculty and staff on how the department can move forward with the peers and still responsibly meet the budget reductions it is facing. I hope to have a final resolution in regards to the peers as early as this coming Friday. Students, if you have questions or input about this subject, I strongly encourage you to contact the Peers.

Sincerely,

Carl Flink Ananya Chatterjea
Chair, Theatre Arts & Dance Director, Dance Program

Part 13: April 16, 2009

2009-04-16T21:33:00.004-05:00

From Part 13 - April 16, 2009

Tonight, we posted in the first floor lobby an open letter to the Office of Equity and Diversity, along with an Annotated Timeline of Dance Program Responses.

Note: The next morning, these postings had already been removed from the glass walls of the Barker as of 8:15am Friday, April 17. The building opens at 8am. No one has claimed responsibility for removing them.

Open Letter to The Office of Equity and Diversity

Dr. Nancy “Rusty” Barceló
Vice President and Vice Provost for Equity and Diversity
University of Minnesota

We are the group of students who have for the past nine weeks been protesting the university Dance Program’s inability to provide safe space for its students of color. We organized and installed the protest project entitled THIS, which was spread throughout the Barbara Barker Center for Dance until it was ripped down by people who were not involved in our protest. You can find documentation of this protest at our blog: http://thisbyus.blogspot.com

We are writing to you because our department has proven incapable of leadership during the reactions precipitated by our protest. Josh Casper, an ombudsman at the Student Conflict Resolution Center, has informed us that the Office of Equity and Diversity is concerned with our protest, and has offered any assistance it can provide to the dance program. As students, we are therefore asking you to step in and provide help regardless of the dance program's official indifference or disinclination towards your involvement.

Since March 23rd, we have been working with the ombudsman to try to negotiate with the dance program administration. The department refused to take action, saying they needed a list of demands. We then posted our second open letter with requested demands on April 1st. Since then, nothing has succeeded in persuading the department to make a response to those demands, even the simplest ones intended merely to prove good faith engagement.

On the night of April 5th, our protest was ripped down by some White students not involved in the protest, including the president of the Student Dance Coalition, and two employees of Dr. Chatterjea’s dance company, respectively a student and an alumna of the dance program.

The only official reaction to this removal of our protest materials has been in an email, signed by Carl Flink and Dr. Ananya Chatterjea, describing the destruction as "the changes made by another group of individuals to the THIS materials at the Barker last night that we were unaware of until earlier this morning."

We are attaching a summary of the official responses (and lack thereof) to our protest, in order to provide examples of what we think has been handled badly. We have documentation of more specific instances of unethical behavior by the administration, but in order to protect student privacy, we have shared this only with the ombudsman. Should we feel your office would benefit from and can be trusted with this information, we would be happy to work with the ombudsman to negotiate your access to it.

Dr. Barceló, for speaking up in criticism of oppressive practices and demanding our right to the equitable and just educational environment entitled to us, we have been made to feel even more isolated, unwanted, and suppressed by the dance program we are supposedly a part of. Our concerns have been co-opted when convenient, and ignored or derided when not. Our words have been misrepresented, silenced, and torn up and thrown away. Our protest has been manipulated as an opportunity for White students and faculty to demonstrate their alliance with faculty of color by supporting "anti-racist" activism that treats actual students of color—us—as the problem. Our sense of safety and security inside our community has been eradicated by these demonstrations of indifference, apathy, and hostility, as well as outright threats.

We continue to maintain that we want change from our leadership; we do not ask for their punishment or removal. We want them to understand the mistakes they have made and are making, so they can learn not to repeat them. We want them to behave professionally, respectfully, and equitably—characteristics that are not much in display right now.

We have lost so much faith in our leadership that inviting the Office of Equity and Diversity to intervene feels like a tremendous risk. We can no longer trust those in authority to match their anti-racist claims with genuinely helpful action. We can only hope that you will find this situation as unacceptable as we do, and choose to intervene in a way that will help us as well as the other students and faculty in the dance program.

You may respond to us via email, or with a comment on our blog, or through Mr. Casper. But most importantly, please respond to us on the walls of the Barker Center, so that students in the dance program can see without any additional effort or inconvenience how the Office of Equity and Diversity responds to an open letter explicitly asking for their intervention and assistance. We would like proof that the larger university is not as indifferent to our concerns as the dance program has proven to be, and we hope to see that proof in your response.

--us, April 16, 2009 (http://thisbyus.blogspot.com)

The Annotated Timeline of Dance Program Responses can be found here.

From Part 13 - April 16, 2009

responses: April 6, 2009

2009-04-06T09:39:00.010-05:00

Carl Flink sent the following email cosigned by him and Dr. Ananya Chatterjea. See the April 6 entry in the annotated timeline for our responses to pertinent quotes from this email.

Subject: [Dance] Today's Peers Brown Bag Lunch - Please Attend

Date: April 6, 2009 9:39 AMTo: THEATRE-L@LISTS.UMN.EDU , 'Dance list serve', dancemajors@cla.umn.edu
CC: 'Ananya Chatterjea', 'sos', 'TAD FacStaff Mailing List'

Dear Theatre Arts & Dance Students:

We want to thank the department peers for taking on the task of continuing the discussions going on among students around race, privilege and power dynamics within our department in an open and public manner. We encourage as many of you to attend this brown bag lunch as possible, especially inlight of the changes made by another group of individuals to the THIS materials at the Barker last night that we were unaware of until earlier this morning.

We're not certain if it has been made clear that the peers asked Josh Casper from the U of MN Ombudsmen's Office to facilitate this brown bag. Josh has been a real asset during the discussions around THIS and we think his presence at this meeting can only be a benefit. We look forward to hearing back from the peers after today's brown bag lunch.

We strongly hope that both dance and theatre arts students will come together to join in this discussion. These are difficult and multifacted conversations, but we also think they present an opportunity to bridge the gaps that stubbornly continue to separate many of the programs in our department as we look for next constructive steps in this process.

Our Sincere Best Wishes,
Carl & Ananya

Carl Flink Ananya Chatterjea
Theatre Arts & Dance Chair Dance Program Director

Responses: April 5, 2009

2009-04-05T23:59:00.001-05:00

Tonight a group of all White students and alumni tore down the materials of the protest. They acknowledge their actions and identify themselves on our blog comments here (where you may scroll down to continue reading others' comments in response to the destruction of our protest).

[details and photos to be added to this post at a later date.]

Part 12: Second Open Letter to the Dance Program

2009-04-01T06:27:00.014-05:00

Today we posted a second open letter to the dance program (text below - click on link).
We also posted comments and responses to all the comments on the blog thus far. Text of our responses to be added to this entry.
Photos to be added to this entry.

From Part 12

Second Open Letter to the Dance Program

On March 10, 2009--three weeks ago--we posted our first open letter to the dance program, stating the reasons we were protesting.

Our goal with the open letter, as with the parts of the protest preceding it, was to make our voices heard, and to provoke a community response that addressed the issues we were protesting. We hoped that our faculty would initiate open dialogue about institutional discrimination and positional power, and the specific oppressions those issues perpetuate.

In these past three weeks, it has become clear that although our protest has received attention from within and outside the dance program, the dance program administration appears either ill-equipped or disinclined to meet our protest with any measure of responsible, concrete action. The Town Hall that was called was a beginning, but the behavior of the faculty before and since has not indicated concrete action but a defensive reaction to our protest.

In light of the lack of honest negotiation from the administration, we are forced to broaden the scope and intention of our protest. We had not wanted to assume spokespersonship for the student community, or dictate actions to the faculty, but given the frequency with which the faculty has been asking, “But what do they want?” we will provide demands.

Observing the faculty reaction to our protest has been illuminating--we do not think that anti-racist awareness is the fundamental issue they are grappling with. Rather, what we see is that there is an endemic resistance to addressing positional power, and the silencing of any dissent and criticism. We are therefore extending our agenda to demand a dismantling of this hierarchical abuse, and asking for actions that make the dance program a fair, equitable, just and safe space for all forms of dissent to be voiced in, including but by no means limited to the discourse on racism.

We preface the following list of demands with the emphatic note that it is only a starting point, and meant to describe broadly problematic areas and accompanying incremental steps towards fixing those problems. There is no such thing as a comprehensive list of ways to combat abuse of positional power and racism, and our demands certainly should not be interpreted as one. The faculty must continue researching their own methods of combating overt, covert, and systemic racism until there is true equality, even if it takes years or decades or generations.

A Statement about Values

We believe that the faculty of the dance program share with the students certain core beliefs in the values we want upheld at our program. We would like to state our values clearly, so that we can have a fundamental agreement as to the mutual agreement of our goals.

• Respect for diversity – The dance program must be a space where diverse experiences, voices, bodies, histories, philosophies and artistic endeavours are respected. This respect must be the foundation on which debate and dissent can be built.

• Assurance of safety – For active learning to be possible, the dance program must commit to doing whatever it takes to create a safe space not only for the bodies, but also for the hearts and minds, of every single one of its students, staff, faculty, and visitors.

• Recognition of inequality – As an educational institution equipping students to survive in a professional world, the dance program must explicitly, continually, and openly address the imbalances of power that are perpetuated by the social and political systems it is a part of. Flaws must be acknowledged in order to discuss the work-in-progress nature of social justice.

• Appreciation for dissent – A healthy society is one in which multiple and contradictory views can co-exist without coercive silence. A constructive tension born from passionate debate should not be mistaken for violence, and should be valued over the repressive ‘peace’ of hegemony. Those in power should, especially, welcome criticism as an educational opportunity to learn how to do better.

• Commitment to social justice – While art need not be bound by morality, an educational institute must be committed to ensuring that its artistic vision never supersedes its legal, social and moral responsibilities to its students, staff, faculty, and neighboring community.

• Eagerness to learn – While the desire for self-improvement and growth is routinely demanded from students, as part of a university that prides itself on its emphasis on research, the dance program must demonstrate a conscious and systematic willingness to question, doubt, reassess, and change itself.

• Fostering trust and honesty – There needs to be an acknowledgement that trust is not automatic and unconditional, and that it needs to be purposefully earned and respected. While trust cannot be earned without honesty, it is the responsibility of those with power to recognize that confidences cannot be forced, and that transparency, accountability and openness are owed unconditionally to the people they have authority over.

• Dismantling hierarchy – Issues facing a minority are the problems of the majority. One of the ways the dominant, entrenched power structure remains ensconced is a direct result of a dearth of scrutiny. The White community should be held responsible for the problems of racism, males should be grappling with sexual assault and feminism, and straight and cisgendered people should be addressing their privilege in regards to GLBTQ issues, etc.

Immediate Responses to our Protest

Our trust in the institutional engagement with our protest has been severely eroded by the official and unofficial reactions of the dance program administrators. We ask that they demonstrate that they are willing to engage with us in good faith by taking the following actions:

• Make a public and official statement, in writing, regarding the departmental stance on criticism of official policy and faculty actions.

• Immediately distribute to the dance and theatre list-serves the group discussion notes from the Town Hall meeting on Friday the 13th, 2009 as well as this—our second open letter. Make hard copies of both available for students to read and take home; we suggest using the system of distribution used for the Backstage Pass.

• Openly and publicly announce each action, response, and plan the administration has in regards to our protest; not only via email to the list serves, but also available in hard copy so that every student can access the information without additional effort.

• Invite the Student Conflict Resolution Center to act as mediator and neutral researcher for the program. We trust Josh Casper, the Ombudsman currently involved with this case, to listen confidentially and respectfully to every viewpoint, and we demand that the program dedicate the resources needed to bring him in, so that students, affiliate faculty and staff can safely and without repercussions talk to him about their perspectives.

• Use facilitators from the Office of Equity and Diversity to guide initial discussions about race in groups that separate students from faculty and White students and faculty from those of Color.

• Invite an external commission to assess students' perception of institutional hostility towards criticism, and faculty abuse of positional power—this should include the situations that lead to our protest.

• Set a time frame for negotiation with us within which concrete action will be taken before the end of the Spring semester 2009.

• Restore our first open letter, with the Addendum, and Statement about the Protection of White Walls to the glass walls of the Barker, and agree that removal of any protest material constitutes a censoring and silencing of our protest.

Faculty Development

• Facilitators from the Office of Equity and Diversity should be brought in for intensive training with all faculty, affiliate faculty, and staff, and the program should accept offers of assistance and resources from both the University and the outside dance community.

• All faculty and staff who advise students should be provided with enough regular training and resources to equip them to meet any student’s concerns about program policy, voicing dissent, and issues including but not limited to racism, sexism, ableism, sizeism, and GLBTQ issues. All advisors need to be educated about the diverse issues their advisees might face because of their identities, and have to be proactive in offering all resources to their students to help handle them.

• Dance major advisors should also be provided a clear and comprehensive list of CLA courses where the student demographics are more diverse than the average class offered by the dance program, and which can educate students in ways the dance program is not able to provide. The list should include suggestions of how students may fit these classes in their dance schedules, and should be updated and amended with student input. These courses should be considered appropriate for meeting the dance elective course requirement.

• The hierarchy between affiliate and core faculty needs to be dismantled. Affiliate faculty and staff musicians are one of the program’s biggest strengths, and most varied assets. They are often the ones engaging with the widest and most diverse demographic range of students. Their commitment is often demonstrated by the frequency of unpaid extra time they give to their students. Any discussion on the departmental response to the protest must include them, and they must be remunerated for the extra time they are asked to invest in this process.

• A concrete system for the expression of dissent needs to be set up and publicized. No faculty member, especially affiliate or international, should ever feel afraid of negative repercussions for voicing dissent. The burden of their fear should not fall on students--no student should have to silence their criticism of a teacher for fear that it will lead to that teacher losing their job. If faculty are feeling so insecure that they have to admit to students that they cannot say something in public that they might agree to in private, then the University is not meeting its basic requirements of providing our educators the safe space they need.

• White faculty members need to be made aware of how they can reduce the burden of racial education on the faculty of Color, and straight teachers need to be clear that their GLBTQ colleagues should not be the only speakers on problems surrounding GLBTQ issues. Those without personal experience of a problem need to undertake more self-education and work if they are to support their colleagues.

• All faculty and staff need to be instructed on the University policies regarding student confidentiality and privacy. Student-teacher conferences should occur in a private, closed space.

Student Resources

• Institute a mandatory series of workshops for incoming freshmen and transfer students where a baseline curriculum is taught which includes terminology such as White privilege, heteronormativity, sizeism, positional power etc. Students should be familiarized with on-campus resources and it should be made clear that discrimination is an issue in the university as it is in the outside world, and is a topic that should be talked about in the dance program and beyond.

• The Peers and the Student Dance Coalition should use funds they get and apply for to create regular student-only meetings where problems with faculty or with the department as a whole can be discussed, and where a neutral representative or spokesman can report student concerns to the faculty—these meetings should avail of the external resources available to students such as an Ombudsman or facilitator.

• While the increasing racial diversity of the incoming freshmen classes is laudable, students of Color should never be exposed to the accusation that their talent and ability is valued differently and is secondary to their racial identity. These accusations are already made; the program must prepare itself to be able to support students who face such insinuations.

• White students should be provided with resources and compassionate spaces where they can process coming to terms with White privilege and educate themselves on how to be more effective allies.

• Students of Color and other minority identities should be acknowledged as having to deal with a continual additional burden of being a minority in an unsafe system, and should be provided space where they can safely speak about their experiences, without the burden of assuaging anyone’s guilt, or educating anyone’s ignorance, or being held responsible for generating solutions.

• The dance world places relentless pressure on bodies. The program needs to acknowledge this, and provide counsellors and interventions to deal with eating disorders, weight and size issues, and the mental health issues surrounding body image.

• Multiple channels of communication should be available to students, and anyone in authority over a student should make explicit what those alternative channels are.

• Students should be able to easily and privately access their records containing feedback from their faculty, before their second year reviews and mid-term conferences.

• The dance list serve needs to be unmoderated and allow for immediate posting (spam can be checked with the authorization system the theatre listserve implements).

Program Policies and Conflict Resolution

• The decision making process for Cowles Artists should be made open to student representatives who are present in meetings throughout the process, as they are in the theater program for meetings regarding Mainstage Productions.

• Student representatives should be on every hiring committee, whether for faculty or staff.

• Any administrative meetings regarding curriculum, scheduling and policy should be public, and the minutes should be easily accessible (a departmental moodle site is one solution).

• When requesting a meeting to discuss a conflict, students should be told very clearly about the topic of discussion and the resources accessible to them. The dance program should adopt an opt-out policy where an offer will always be made for an ombudsman, advisor or trusted supporter to be present at any meeting.

• All dance students, faculty, and staff should be allowed to request to have public conversations documented via recording or transcribing. In the case of private conversations, the party with less institutional power should always be able to document the conversation, with the understanding that all legal and moral rules of confidentiality will be respected.

• A comprehensive and rigorous conflict of interest policy must be adopted regarding faculty availing of student services whether as employees, apprentices or interns must be formulated and made public.

• The program must form and/or regularly invite a watchdog group whose job is to specifically point out any potential race issues within the department.

• The official hierarchy of the department and the individual responsibilities of each faculty and staff member must be made public and clear.

• The agendas for all official meetings and Town Halls should be disseminated in advance, so that attendees can prepare themselves. There should be a system established for requesting agenda items.

• Anonymous and pseudonymous methods of expressing dissent must be respected, and even encouraged, especially given the intimate, personal nature of the dance program.

• Teachers need to acknowledge that when they are in a conversation with a student, they are in a position of power. By giving students the power to hurt, but not to question, they are silencing students. Teachers need to respond professionally to questions and critiques, and doing so does not include explaining how hurt they are by being questioned.

Casting, Auditioning and Performances

• The casting policies need to be made completely clear and consistent, and should be on paper, and handed out to students before any auditions. If there is any indication that students are being selected on basis of height, weight, costume size, race, or gender, this needs to be openly stated and explained, with mechanisms to allow debate on the casting policy beforehand, as well as challenges after the audition.

• All choreographers should do their own audition and casting. If flying them in earlier is impossible, hold the auditions later in the year, and create a system to allow students to be able to register for credit after regular CLA deadlines have passed.

• If the faculty are in any way going to offer an opinion or advice to the choreographer about a student's ability or suitability, they must do this on paper, in records the student can access.

• The policies for understudies' rights and responsibilities need to be clearly stated on paper, and available to every performer and choreographer. They must be given enough time and attention to be equipped to perform, and costumes should be built assuming the understudies might need to step in. If any dancer is unable to perform, a system must be in place to allow the understudies to perform in their place.

• If the Dance Revolutions rehearsal and performance process is distributed across two semesters, it must be increased to a minimum two-credit opportunity. Dancers in more than one piece should receive an additional credit for each additional piece they are in.

• At least one Cowles Artist should be brought in to teach a workshop class that is accessible to all students who register, and that can culminate in a fully-produced performance (one that is either a part of Dance Revolutions or a separate concert).

• Dance traditions that work at the level of the participants' abilities should not be considered less aesthetically or pedagogically valuable than those demanding an intensive audition process.

• Stage managers and dramaturges should be involved from the beginning of the choreographic and rehearsal process, and should be accessible as alternative mediators with whom students can discuss problems.

• Performances in professional pieces in the dance community outside of the University should be accepted as performance credits. The standards of these pieces can be judged by a panel that consists of a multi-disciplinary selection of faculty and student representatives, but performances in tap, ballet, hip hop, jazz and musical theater pieces should be accepted, and even encouraged, given the lack of such performance opportunities within the structure of the modern dance program.

Pedagogy and Curriculum

• The entire format of the dance history sequence needs to be overhauled, with significant student input. History must be taught before historiography is introduced. Technique teachers, including affiliate faculty, should be involved in determining which dancers and choreographers need to be covered.

• Education about social justice and diversity should be incorporated into all classes, so that the burden of educating students does not fall on the academic classes that then become bludgeons to inculcate one specific approach to critical thinking.

• The BA and BFA mandatory academic classes must include a history of American vernacular dance forms including jazz, tap and hip hop.

• There should be classes within the dance program offerings that meet the CLA liberal education core and themes requirements. If this means opening up enrollment for these classes to non-majors, find the resources needed to make this possible.

• The program needs to have a rigorous, in-depth discussion to figure out methods that bridge the divide between the “shut up and dance” way of teaching where the teacher is an unquestionable authority and task-master, and the academic pedagogy where students are expected to be active learners who use debate and questioning as tools to engage.

• Technique teachers and academic teachers need to share their knowledge and engage in the debate needed to generate a comprehensive approach to problematic terms and practices in dance. Right now students face an enormous amount of cognitive dissonance because of the contradictory and incomplete information they are given in individual classes, leading to a compartmentalization that is unhealthy and divisive.

• Cultural appropriation needs to be part of the dance discourse, and technique teachers should be provided with resources to be able to address the problematic aspects of the material they are teaching.

• The faculty needs to process their individual aesthetic preferences to find a genuine respect for genres and techniques different than theirs. No dance style should even privately be snidely alluded to. Especially, the popular dance versus high art divide needs to be broken down.

• Academic knowledge should not be privileged over bodily knowledge, and technique teachers should feel equipped to defend their positions without having to conform to academic standards of debate.

• Classes and workshops should be offered during the UDT rehearsal time slot that work around the schedules of students who are absent during the period that they are working with a Cowles Artist.

• Hip hop technique classes need to be offered as a regular course, with an urgent intention to make it part of a multi-level track.

• Change the pictures on the walls of Studio 300 and Classroom 301 and add photos in 200 and throughout the building. Use them as a means of education, and fill the building with representations of the diversity in the dance world. The building currently has a minimalist aesthetic, and of course the unmarked minimum is white, so change the decor to be non-minimal and diverse. If every teacher, staff, musician and student provided the names of two mentors or inspirations that they wanted students to know about, our walls would be filled with information.

Responses: March 30, 2009

2009-03-30T09:32:00.003-05:00

The Peer Advisors sent an email announcement to the theatre and dance listservs about a student meeting they are organizing.

Subject: Brown Bag Lunch- What do students wish to see come from THIS?

Date: March 30, 2009 9:32 AM
To: Carl Flink, crar0009@umn.edu, Dance Listserv, Theatre Listserv

Brown Bag Lunch- What do students wish to see come from THIS?
Mon. April 6th @ 11:40-12:20
BBCD 301

The Peers invite you to come to what we hope will be the first of a series of Brown Bag Lunches that will focus on the steps students would like to
take in the wake of discussions surrounding THIS.

These Brown Bag Lunches will focus on brainstorming concrete steps that our program can take in order to grow and become an program that supports ALL
students of every race, gender, sex, body type, class, etc. We want these discussions to be positive and forward thinking, focusing on what we can do
to make our program better, rather than focusing on the events that have occurred and the feelings that we have felt (not that these cannot inform
our ideas!) The Peers will also be bringing faculty suggestions to place on the table for students to think about.

At this time we are opening this discussion to students. Please bring your lunch, you ideas and suggestions, and your thinking cap.

Media: March 23, 2009

2009-03-23T10:07:00.006-05:00

The Minnesota Daily, the official daily newspaper of the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities published an article today, which may be found at:

http://www.mndaily.com/2009/03/23/students-protest-racial-issues-dance-program

Full text of article with photos posted below:

Students protest racial issues in dance program

The anonymous protesters have been putting up posters and sending e-mails.

Marija Majerle
A student walks past a statement of protest Monday in the Barbara Barker Center for Dance. The statement is part of “THIS,” a more than month long protest by anonymous students who feel institutional racism is an existing problem in the dance program.

BY Briana Bierschbach & Isaiah Potts
PUBLISHED: 03/23/2009

Until last week, a letter taped to the glass windows in the University of Minnesota’s Barbara Barker Center for Dance greeted visitors with a declaration of protest.

The letter, along with other photographs, articles and quotes, is part of “THIS,” an ongoing protest at the dance center by anonymous students who said they feel institutional racism is a problem in the program.

The protest, which has been going on since mid-February, began with a few photos and quotes posted in a stairwell, and has escalated to a full statement of protest and postings all around the dance center. The protest included an open letter to the dance department that stated the University’s faculty has failed to create an atmosphere free from prejudice.

It is unknown how many students are actually involved in the protest.

The protestors, who wish to remain anonymous, said they wanted to raise awareness of racial issues in the program and plan to continue protesting in a direct, but nonviolent way. The protestors would only respond via e-mail to protect anonymity.

There has been little exposure University-wide about the protest, but recently, several meetings were held by the dance department to address the issue.

The casting of Missa Brevis , a production in the dance program, has been acknowledged by faculty, staff and students as a catalyst of the protest.

During the casting two students of color were not selected, but felt that they should have been, said Ananya Chatterjea, professor and director in the University’s dance program.

Chatterjea said the students felt it was because of their race.

Despite the protest, Chatterjea said she feels the department promotes diversity.

“In our department, we have gone out of our way to make sure we are not only casting blonde, blue-eyed dancers, which has been the ideal of the dance world outside,” she said.

Chatterjea said she believes the University’s program is one of the most progressive she has seen.

Of the eight faculty members in the University’s dance department, four are faculty of color, Chatterjea said.

But protesters said the casting was only one example of many mishandled discussions.

Thus far, the faculty and staff at the dance center have not removed the protesters’ signs. However, some people have taken down the posters and added their own signs to oppose the original protest.

Erin McIntire, a first-year student of color, posted a series of responses, titled “THAT.”

A sign McIntire posted read, “THAT is a protest to the passive aggressive behavior of ‘THIS’ toward the faculty and staff of the University of Minnesota Dance program, regardless of ‘color’ or race.”

But the protest has been getting support from other student groups. Chardae Kimber, a junior and member of the Black Motivated Women student group , received and e-mail from “THIS” informing the group of an upcoming meeting to address the protest.

She said she feels issues of racial discrimination need to be addressed.

“I think there is a lack of faculty encouragement when it comes to students of color,” she said.

Carl Flink, director of the University’s theater arts program, said he hopes to meet with the student protestors and have an open discussion on how to address their concerns.

To come up with a solution for the concerns, Flink also said the department plans on working with the Office of the Vice President and Vice Provost for Equity and Diversity .

Media: March 22, 2009

2009-03-22T09:54:00.001-05:00

Today an article was published on the TC Daily Planet website. The article can be found at:

http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/article/2009/03/21/anonymous-protest-institutional-racism-and-white-privilege-u-m-dance-depart

Full text with photos below:

Anonymous protest attacks "institutional racism and white privilege" at U of M dance program

Photos by Sheila Regan

By Sheila Regan , TC Daily Planet

March 22, 2009

Currently there is a silent protest installation on display at the Barbara Barker Center for Dance, home of the University of Minnesota Dance Program. The installation, called This, features found images and messages about racism and body image. Among magazine pages featuring images of a diverse population, there are white pieces of paper displaying words such as this, privilege, and status quo on display throughout the building. The creators of the exhibit are anonymous, and in addition to the installation have created a blog about the piece.

Christopher LePlant, a U of M dance student who said he was not involved in creating the installation, said that it was his understanding that the silent protest erupted as a result of casting issues within the department. Last fall, the dance department brought in a guest choreographer, Sarah Stockhouse, from José Limón Dance Company, an internationally acclaimed dance company founded by Mexican-born choreographer José Limón.

The piece, entitled Missa Brevis, was performed at the beginning of February as part of a program called Dance Revolutions. Some of the students originally cast in the piece were eventually cut, and a few of those cut were dancers of color.

Yui Kanzawa, an Asian-American dancer who was among those cut from the piece but said she was not part of the protest, said she didn’t feel that her race had anything to do with the fact that she was cut from the final cast. “There were too many people,” she said. “I felt like I didn’t get the style down, I didn’t get the technique.”

The creators of the exhibit said anonymously via e-mail that they did not wish to discuss the casting situation with Missa Brevis, because This is not a protest of that event. They did, however, write that the post-show discussion following Missa Brevis was one of “the ways in which conversations about institutional racism and white privilege have been mishandled and silenced within the department.”

The anonymous silent protesters further wrote: “We are not pointing fingers at individual faculty members involved in a casting process. We are saying that the program as a whole needs to be more safe for discussions around institutional racism and white privilege to take place.” In an anonymous letter that the protesters posted on the wall and on their blog, they wrote: “We cannot have productive discussions about racism when you have a need to assure everyone that their voices are equally important. The pain of our fellow White students confronting their privilege and guilt about racism is not the same as the pain of students of Color dealing with the sometimes numbingly routine, sometimes shockingly unexpected experiences of being a visible minority.”

Carl Flink, chair of theater arts and dance, said that race and body image had nothing to do with casting for Missa Brevis. “It’s interesting,” Flink said in a telephone interview, “because José Limón is made up of 70 to 80 percent persons of color…and has a decades-long commitment of having a diverse company.”

Flink continued, “As you can imagine, I’m deeply concerned for finding communication with my students.” He said the department has to figure out a way to address the hard feelings, which is difficult when the protesters are anonymous. “I don’t want to negate any of the students’ pain,” he said. “That is a real thing.”

Ananya Chatterjea, director of the dance program, has spent many years as an activist for anti-racism and social justice. “It’s interesting,” Chatterjea said in a telephone interview. “For ten years I have had students that were mad at me that we have to study race, gender, and class. I have looked forward for the moment forever that students would join this work.” She said that when the installation first appeared, people assumed that the students were doing it as an assignment for her class.

“When the protest first started, I was so happy, said Chatterjea. “I thought I might be doing something right.” She said she felt the problem with the protest is the public shaming aspect, and a lack of a list of demands. “Anger can be a very powerful tool to reveal injustice, but I have learned anger is not always effective in leadership. If you want to effect change, anger won’t get you there, it is strategy.”

Since the silent protest was first installed, it has morphed through several transformations. On March 10, the protesters posted an open letter accusing the faculty of having a “profound disconnect” between the theories they teach and the actions they practice. On March 17, the day before the first day of the American College Dance Festival, which the University hosts, the open letter was moved by the faculty to the second floor, and several of the messages were moved or were taken down. On March 18, three students removed the hard copy of the letter.

Dance students’ reactions to This have been mixed. There have been both negative and positive comments on the “Thisbyus” blog. A Facebook page about the protest was also created.

Erin Jorich, a fifth year dance student, said that initially she thought it was great that the space had been converted, but she felt the open letter “took a really aggressive and hostile stance.” She said she was upset by the anonymity of the protesters.

Molly Stoltz, a fourth year dance student, said her feelings have been mixed throughout the process. “Right now, I think everyone was glad it was put up,” she said. “I appreciate it, I’ve learned a lot from the artist, and as far as the quotes, I’ve appreciated [them] because some of the teachers have had conversations about race and how it affects us as artists. That’s been really interesting.”

Jesse Mandell McClinton, a monitor (of African and European descent) at the Barker, said “I never thought a passive approach toward race accomplishes much.”

Carl Flink said he wasn’t sure when the exhibit will be taken down, or archived. “We’re really working hard to have a conversation about this,” he said. “But there’s never been a list of wants given. One of the challenge points that we have is how do we respond if we don’t know what is asked for?” Flink said that the department is thinking about having a series of dialogues. “One thing I can really say is that the faculty of the dance program all have intense experiences with social justice and antiracism; when something like this comes up, we take it very seriously.”

Sheila Regan is a theater artist based in Minneapolis. When not performing or writing, she serves as educational coordinator for Teatro del Pueblo.

Responses: March 16, 2009 first day of Spring Break

2009-03-16T19:00:00.007-05:00

Someone anonymously added penciled commentary on a posting on the 2nd floor Men's Locker Room.

Also in the 2nd floor Men's Locker Room someone (also anonymous) re-placed a posting that read "Your penis?" above the urinal (where we had originally placed it). It was an answer to the question, "What are you ashamed of?" that was posted on the door of the locker room.

From Responses part 11?

It reads, "shut the fuck up - you sound like an idiot":

From Responses part 11?

Part 11: March 16, 2009 first evening of Spring Break

2009-03-16T17:00:00.005-05:00

Tonight we posted a Note for Our Visitors (text below) on the inner door of the main entrance into the Barker.
We re-posted the Open Letter to the Dance Program with an added Addendum.
We re-posted the Statement About the Protection of White Walls, this time on the outside of the office door.
We also re-posted our responses to the questions that had been asked of us in the unsigned posting that had been placed last Monday on both the outer and inner doors of the main entrance; this time we put our responses in the window pane between the main office and Studio 100.
We also retaped some past postings that were now falling down.
Re-posts were re-printings of the original posts that were removed on March 15, 2009. There has been no official word from faculty or students claiming responsibility for removal.

A Note for our Visitors

From part 11

A NOTE FOR OUR VISITORS

Welcome to our building. We are proud of our space and we are glad to have you in it. What you see around you is part of a six week long protest that has led to enormously important discussions we’ve been having about institutional racism, white privilege, and power being used to silence. These are difficult things to think about, let alone talk about, and there is a lot of pain and anger and confusion in our hearts and on our walls.

We don’t all agree with one another, but even in our anger and hurt, we all respect our commitment to the space. Even as we publicly hold our faculty responsible for the issues we protest against, we also publicly acknowledge that it is their activism and effort that has generated our freedom to protest.

We are not embarrassed to take responsibility for these problems by breaking the shame of speaking about them. Our program adamantly places value in anti-racist work and has demonstrated this by publicly permitting these powerful and ugly problems to be plastered across the building. We have been taught to question and to have the highest expectations of this space being one where confronting racism is permitted. We are in the process of learning. We are struggling with looking the monsters in the eye. We want to start learning how to deal with them.

Please feel free to talk with us about THIS. The more people you talk to, the greater the variety of perspectives you will encounter, and talking about it is healthy. The issues we are struggling with here are just an extension of those that permeate the real world, and we know they are present in your spaces as much as they are in ours. We want to learn from each other; we would be grateful to hear your stories and happy to share our own.

Welcome again, to a space where we are learning to be better human beings just as we are learning to be better dancers.

--us, March 16, 2009 (http://thisbyus.blogspot.com)

Re-Post of the Open Letter to the Dance Program, with Addendum

From part 11

Text of the Addendum reads:
Don't disagree by silencing--
talk back, talk more, talk louder.
Silence is the enemy.

Re-Post of the Statement About the Protection of White Walls

From part 11

To view full album, click on the icon below:

part 11

Responses: March 16, 2009 - first day of Spring Break

2009-03-16T16:14:00.007-05:00

Today an email was sent out to the dance and theatre list-serves from Carl Flink's email address, but signed by both Dr. Ananya Chatterjea and Carl Flink.

Sub: THIS Discussion Tomorrow at the Barker Center

Date: 3/16/2009 3:12 PM

Dear Theatre Arts and Dance Department Staff, Students and Faculty:

Ananya and I will hold a conversation tomorrow Tuesday, March 17 from 11 am - Noon to discuss next actions steps in terms of the postings by THIS in the Barker Center. We invite any and all interested from the department to attend. With the ACDFA conference starting on Wednesday, we want to make intelligent and respectful decisions about the THIS postings ongoing status in consultation with anyone interested from the department. We believe there is reason to maintain a presence for THIS, but that it is also time to consider and practical steps needed to do so. We understand that time is short, but this is the best we can do given the short timing after our Friday discussion.

We look forward to seeing anyone interested in talking with us tomorrow.

Sincerely,
Carl & Ananya

If you would like to share your thoughts about our protest with the department, but are unable to attend the discussion tomorrow, we suggest that you email the official student Peer Advisors at peers@umn.edu.

We can also forward to the Peers any anonymous or pseudonymous comments left to this entry, or emailed to us at thisbyus@gmail.com. We promise not to edit any comments or emails in any way, nor reveal any identifying information unless given explicit permission to do so.

Responses: March 15, 2009

2009-03-15T15:53:00.002-05:00

So far, there has been no official reaction or response to the Town Hall meeting that happened on March 13, 2009.

Some time on March 15, various important pieces of our protest were taken down by anonymous person/s.
Our Open Letter on the window-walls was taken down.
Our Statement on White Walls on the office door was taken down.
Both the anonymous questions someone posted on the front doors to the Barker, and our signed response to those questions were taken down.
The statement "You are now entering a space of privilege and power" on the back entrance door was taken down.

We do not know if the removed material has been stored, or thrown away.
We have not been contacted by anyone about the removal.

Town Hall Meeting

2009-03-13T18:58:00.004-05:00

Today was the Town Hall Meeting.

In attendance:

The Town Hall was announced to the dance major list serve as being mandatory. No attendance of dance students was taken, and not all dance students were present. Most of the dance affiliate faculty and staff were not present.

There were theater students in attendance, both BA and BFA majors. There were also people present who were not part of the Theatre Arts and Dance department, or affiliated with the University of Minnesota.

We found out later that the following people were also present in their official capacities, although their presence was not announced:

Dr. Rusty Barceló, Vice President and Vice Provost for Equity and Diversity
Dr. Rickey Hall, Assistant Vice President for Equity and Diversity
Dr. Louis Mendoza, Associate Vice Provost, Equity and Diversity
Kris Lockhart, Assistant Vice President and Chief of Staff, Equity and Diversity
Dr. Ilene Alexander, Consultant, Center for Teaching and Learning
Josh Casper, Ombudsman and Associate Director, Student Conflict Resolution Center

Although Carl Flink, Chair of the Department of Theater Arts & Dance, had sent an email to the theater list serve inviting students and faculty to attend the Town Hall, he announced in the lobby beforehand that the program wanted to ensure that dance major students and faculty were seated first, and that fire codes only permitted a certain number of people in the auditorium. He said that the event would be televised on the screen in the lobby of the building for the people who were unable to get inside.

After the majority of the dance program students and faculty had entered, other attendees were permitted to enter, as extra seats were brought in and set up. The final count of people inside the room after the meeting began was not monitored, and there were people who watched the proceedings from the lobby monitor.

Dr. Ananya Chatterjea introduced the meeting, naming the artists of color and anti-racist scholars both hired as professors in the Dance Program and recently invited as Cowles Land Grant Chair Guest Artists. She also provided a brief summary of Dance Program professors’ history of anti-racist artistic and scholarly work. She referenced the email that we had sent out to student organizations on campus, saying that "the intention of this meeting is not what ‘us’ claims". She also said, "We hear your pain...thank you for making it so clear".

She then introduced Dr. Catherine Squires, whom the dance program had invited to be the facilitator for the meeting.

Permission was not given for the meeting to be video taped.

Dr. Catherine Squires introduced the format for the meeting. She asked attendees to form groups (of approx. ten people), separated into students, faculty, and staff. Groups were told to discuss and write down their answers for the following three issues:

1. What questions do you have for people in dance dept or university, questions that the protest brought up for you?
2. What values do you think this program and university should embody/reinforce?
3. What goals/solutions do you have about the curriculum, recruitment etc.

Dr. Catherine squires then explained that she was going to go around in a talking circle format, in which she would stand next to each group who then presented their answers.

When all groups had presented, notes from each group were collected by the Dance Program.

Any additions/corrections to this record are welcome.

Note: We have taken several of the direct references in this post from a set of unofficial meeting notes taken by a dance student that were sent to the Theater and Dance listserves. We delayed making this post in the hopes that official transcripts of Dr. Chatterjea's introduction and the group discussion notes would be made available; this has not yet happened.

Responses: March 12, 2009

2009-03-12T12:59:00.003-05:00

We were anonymously forwarded an email that Dr. Ananya Chatterjea had sent out to multiple faculty members not only outside the program but outside the university, calling for an "urgent request for support":

Subject: urgent request for support
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 12:59:08 -0500
From: Ananya Chatterjea
To: [recipient names redacted]

Dear Colleagues,

Hope this finds you well. I am writing with an urgent request. Recently, we have witnessed an incredible exhibit taking over the Barker: the "This" protest project. it began with a back stairwell exhibit on "white privilege" at which point I sent out an email to the student body, assuming it was them, congratulating them and hoping that it would spark more vibrant conversations about raced bodies among our student body. This has lead to more and more mushrooming of this exhibit and while some amazing things have happened --like the covering up of the pictures of all white choreographers and dancers in the classroom and studio 300-- and some troubling questions have come up.

For instance, since no one will assume responsibility for this exhibit, and this is happening in an entirely guerilla way, we have to assume to that students have somehow been able to access a master key to the building, or are working with custodial staff, in order to get inside the faculty bathroom, the studios etc all of which are locked by 10 pm. we have heard that some students have been seen on ladders at 2:30 am. Now, because they are putting posters up on really hard to reach places, issues of insurance are coming up as well as those of safety.

Moreover, we believe that much of this is related to an issue about casting around a contested piece for our last concert, which is much more complicated than it seems to be. Interestingly, I do not see any of my students of color clamoring to be part of my dance company of women of color doing social justice work, or work with the choreographers of color we have steadily brought in. They are angry because they did not get to participate in a mainstream dance piece. I do not mean to trivialize their struggle, but am baffled by their lack of self-examination.

On Monday, perhaps because they could not get us to be angry, they posted a scathing "open letter" to the Dance Program, lashing out at everybody and classifying the work done by faculty of color as "failures" when of course our steady work over at least the past 10 years for me, and thereafter for others, has produced so much change. Honestly if what Diyah, Cindy, Maija, and I teach is not anti-racist, I dont know what that might be. But more troubling is that while some of the quotes (about intersectionality) are directly from what I teach, a lot of the pictures and quotes they have put up remind of the old project of multicultural diversity, not really difference.

This has now escalated to a point beyond my ability at least to stomach, also because the 3 faculty of color who are in the BBCD, Diyah, Toni, and I, feel specifically targeted, and openly called out as being "complicit with bureaucracy." Also, Dance has been moving along for sure through the work we have been doing, the faculty went through an anti-racist workshop and training program 2 years ago, that then caused us to ask more questions. Many of these are reflected in curricular shifts, one of these I am implementing as my first major change as Director: introduction of a multi-level track in African dance in the main curriculum. There are other changes as well including considerations of a collaboration with African American and African Studies next year, so we are able to bring in several black choreographers to work with students.

Anyways, tomorrow (fri) from 1:30-3:30 I have called a Town Hall in Barker 100, largely because these anonymous protesters have performed their attacks, but not proposed any desired outcomes. Catherine Squires has kindly kindly kindly agreed to moderate this. Thank you Catherine!! However, because of the outreach these students (i have just learned that this includes possibly 2 students of color and 2 white) have done, the issue is totally spectacularized, and the Barker seems irredeemable, and its faculty totally ineffective.

I am fully aware that this is the day before spring break and it is ridiculous to ask you for even more of your time. But if you could show some support by showing up at the town hall, i would so so so appreciate it. I really need your support, as do the other faculty of color in this program!

Regards

Ananya

Responses: March 10, 2009

2009-03-10T21:45:00.004-05:00

Below are photos of the changes that someone (not us) made to our word posts in the 2nd floor Men's locker room/bathroom as photographed on March 10. They added the word "Proud" above "ashamed" over the question, "What are you ashamed of?" that we posted.

In the second photo, all the posts they relocated were placed above the hand towel dispenser.

From response - march 10

For the complete album of March 10 Responses, click below:

response - march 8 and 10, 2009

Reponses: March 8 and March 10, 2009

2009-03-10T15:00:00.004-05:00

The following posts were made on Monday, March 8 by people not us, as a response to our Open Letter to the Dance Program (http://thisbyus.blogspot.com/2009/03/part-9-march-9-2009.html):

On the first door of the main entrance someone (unidentified with a name or pseudonym) posted some questions to consider.

From response - march 10

Text reads:

MIGHT IT MAKE ANY SENSE AT ALL TO INVESTIGATE THE KINDS OF ANTI-RACIST AND ORGANIZING WORK OUR TEACHERS AND COLLEAGUES HAVE DONE? IS THERE ANY WAY TO DISMANTLE AND TRANSFORM? OR IS IT ENOUGH TO DEMOLISH?

We considered, then responded in a post next to it.

From response - march 10

The text of our posting reads:

“A PLACE THAT IS UNEQUIVOCALLY A PLACE OF PRIVILEGE AND PREJUDICE SHOULD BE REJECTED, NO?”

Oppression should be unequivocally rejected. It is not the burden of the people being silenced to reject the place in which it happens, in this case the Barbara Barker Center for Dance. Oppressors do not have more ownership of or entitlement to the space where the oppression happens. “Unequivocal” simply means “clear and unambiguous”. We do see the building clearly being a place of privilege and prejudice, just as we see the world outside as clearly being the same. We don’t, however, see it as being unalterably or unforgivably so.

“PEOPLE SHOULD NOT TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE NICE FLOORS, OR PERFORMANCE OPPORTUNITIES EITHER, RIGHT?”

Students do not “take advantage” of the resources that they are paying a very large amount of money for. They are entitled to them, and to voice their grievance if those resources fail to meet their needs.

“OR ARE WE ANTI-RACIST ONLY WHEN WE NEED TO ADDRESS A PERSONAL GRIEVANCE??”

You are trivializing the issue of the violence of racism and abuse of privilege by equating it with a “personal grievance”. Many people choose to fight a battle only when it arrives at their doorstep. Not every survivor can or should be an activist. We are not making it personal—we have spent five weeks cultivating the idea of institutional racism and privilege, and one of the reasons we remain anonymous is so that the focus is on the issues, not the personalities.

The second posting on the inside door of the main entrance - written in the same style as the last.

From response - march 10

Text reads:

A PLACE THAT IS UNEQUIVOCALLY A PLACE OF PRIVILEGE AND PREJUDICE SHOULD BE REJECTED, NO? PEOPLE SHOULD NOT TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE NICE FLOORS, OR PERFORMANCE OPPORTUNITIES EITHER, RIGHT? OR ARE WE ANTI-RACIST ONLY WHEN WE NEED TO ADDRESS A PERSONAL GRIEVANCE??

We responded some more.

From response - march 10

The text of our response reads:

“MIGHT IT MAKE ANY SENSE AT ALL TO INVESTIGATE THE KINDS OF ANTI-RACIST AND ORGANIZING WORK OUR TEACHERS AND COLLEAGUES HAVE DONE?”

We agree it is very important to investigate the anti-racist work our teachers here have done, which we have respect and admiration for. Our criticism of faculty actions and inaction does not negate the anti-racist work they have done, and likewise, their anti-racist work does not automatically negate the issues we have brought out in the open about the mishandling of racism in this program. Additionally, if you expect us as students to be informed about all the anti-racist work that the faculty has done, the faculty should be expected to educate each other with it. The faculty’s anti-racist work has not made the department free of racism.

“IS THERE ANY WAY TO DISMANTLE AND TRANSFORM?”

Yes, there are many ways to dismantle and transform. None of them are easy, and all of them are complex and long-term. If the University is committed to promoting racial equality and justice, it must work rigorously and consistently to implement these solutions.

“OR IS IT ENOUGH TO DEMOLISH?”

Is it enough to demolish what? White privilege? Institutional racism? Bigotry and prejudice based on any kind of identity? Demolishing any one of those would not just be enough, but miraculous and utopian. Unless you mean is it enough to demolish the pretense that everything is fine and no one feels silenced... in which case, no, it is not enough, but it is enough of a start. We are not sure what else it is you think we are demolishing, besides the white pallor of the walls.

-- us, March 11, 2009 (http://thisbyus.blogspot.com)

Erin F. McIntyre, freshman, also posted twice next to our Open Letter (in handwriting)

From response - march 10

close up - top posting

From response - march 10

text reads:
THAT [with arrow]
is a protest to the passive aggressive behavior of THIS towards the students and faculty of the University of Minnesota dance program, regardless of "color" or race.
Sincerely,
Erin F. McIntyre, freshman class, student of "color"

close up - bottom posting

From response - march 10

text reads:
part of a protest is acknowledging that some people will openly disagree with you...

our response to the top post

From response - march 10

text reads:

We think we are more constructively and passionately aggressive, rather than passively, but we support your right to protest our protest, and would like to reassure you that we do not assume that we speak for any students—of any race—besides ourselves.

-- us, March 11, 2009 (http://thisbyus.blogspot.com)

our response to the bottom posting

From response - march 10

text reads:

We not only acknowledge it, but we also acknowledge the many who have silently made visible their displeasure about us.

-- us, March 11, 2009 (http://thisbyus.blogspot.com)

To view complete album, click below:

response - march 8 and 10, 2009

There were also changes to the 2nd floor Men's bathroom. Photos and update to come.

Responses: March 10 and 11, 2009

2009-03-10T14:46:00.006-05:00

This is the first official response from someone besides Dr Ananya Chatterjea: it is an email sent by Carl Flink, the chair of the Theatre Arts and Dance department. Although the email is dated March 10th, it is time-stamped 2:33AM, meaning that it was sent out before anyone saw Part 9, which went up on March 9. The email was sent to the dance program list serve, and also to the theatre list serve, making it the first official mention of our protest outside the program.

Sub: [Dance] THIS - The Protest Project at the Barker Center
Date: 3/10/2009 2:33 AM

Dear Rarig Center Department Faculty, Staff & Students:

I would like to make you all aware of a spontaneous non-dance program directed happening which has been taking place for the past few weeks at the Barker Center. An exhibit of words and images called THIS - The Protest Project has been expanding thoughout the stairwells, halls and other surfaces of the Barker transforming the building into a vibrant space of protest and questioning of the privilege, prejudice and impacts of institutional power that exist in even a presumed "liberal" space such as the Barker Center and I might add the university as a whole. The project is driven by an anonymous group of dance program students who have invested an incredible amount of personal time and resources in creating this exhibit.
In the words of Director of Dance Ananya Chatterjea the project raises questions such as "What indeed is privilege and how does it play out in institutions like academia? How do our everyday practices reflect ingrained social prejudices?" Professor Chatterjea also points out that the exhibit raises even more complex observations and questions like "No space is
uniform, because no population/community is uniform. What transformative possibilities exist in this building, or can be eked out from the practices that reside here? What ways might there be to dismantle such prejudice as exist here? How can we build on the energy generated through this exhibit and reflect on our practices?"

This past Saturday night I spent an hour wandering through the Barker with my partner Emilie experiencing this dynamic event. I found it an incredible journey.

I encourage you to take the time to stop by the Barker and witness THIS - The Protest Project.

Sincerely,
Carl

The following email was sent out only to the theatre arts department list-serve, by the department peer advisers. They have also linked to our blog from their website with the following text:

THIS: The Protest Project at the BBCD Click here to visit the blog about the project- And go see it NOW!

Sub: CALLING ALL RARIGIANS! PLEASE OPEN (this concerns YOU).
Date: 3/10/2009 12:45 PM

Dear Peoples of Rarig,

Have you been to the Barker recently? If you haven't, please go right now. Read the writings on the walls: they are everywhere and they are blatantly protesting this department and this institution while simultaneously creating a space of unavoidable conversations about the issues raised. Next week hundreds of dance academics from across the country will be at the Barker for the ACDFA conference and they will see this. They will see how stundents within our department are reacting to their education and place within this department. We can not stress this enough: THESE ARE RARIG'S ISSUES TOO! While theatre and dance are housed in different buildings, we are under the same governing body of faculty. Do not convince yourself that this has nothing to do with you: it absolutely does.

GO THERE NOW.
ENGAGE WITH WHAT'S HAPPENING. START HAVING CONVERSATIONS ABOUT THIS.
MAKE THEM HEARD.

How will Rarig respond to this? We hope it will not be through isolation, inaction and silence. Barker is a block away: time constraints and "no reason to go there" are not excuses. This e-mail is a reason to go there. Don't tell yourself you're too busy. Everybody is too busy. MAKE THE TIME. There will be a town hall concerning this protest on Friday at 1:30 in the Barker, we hope to see many of you there.

Don't let apathy rule your life,
The Peers

Notes: The event referred to in the email is the North Central Regional American College Dance Festival Association Conference, which will be hosted by the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities from March 18 to 22.

There were at least two physical responses to our open letter posted on the walls of the Barker; we will add documentation as we are able.

The final official response from the faculty was another email from Carl Flink, time stamped just after midnight, so technically sent on March 11. This email was sent to the peers, the theatre department list serve, the dance majors student list serve, the dance program list serve, and the dance faculty list serve (which means a lot of people must have got it twice.)

Sub: [Dance] THIS - The Protest Project
Date: 3/11/2009 12:10 AM

Dear Department of Theatre Arts & Dance Faculty, Staff and Students:

Below are e-mails sent from myself and Director of Dance Ananya Chatterjea in which we both expressed strong personal support for the activities of THIS and encouraging department members to experience it. Please take the time to read them as well so you understand that the dance program and the department are fundamentally engaged in this dialogue and that there are multiple perspectives on this happening.

The town hall this Friday was called by Ananya and the dance faculty because we want to talk about the issues raised by THIS. It was meant to be a dance program event, but if more attend from the larger department we'll look forward to having your presence in the Barker too. Unfortunately, I will arrive 30 minutes late for this event because of a residency commitment at a Mpls. Public school.

Many dance faculty chose to not hold class today, Tuesday, so that the entire program and department could be focused on THIS and the open letter that was added to it. The faculty did not simply leave the building but stayed in the lobby talking with students or just being present in order to signal our connection to this happening and the commitment we feel to this program and its evolution. Many students gathered in the Barker studios to carry-on student driven discussions on this subject.

The department has and always will be deeply committed to supporting the free expression of our students, faculty and staff. The ongoing presence of THIS on the surfaces of the Barker is a testimony to that in and of itself.
As we move forward with these conversations, I encourage multiple perspectives and voices to come forward and be heard on the issues raised by THIS and the growing responses to it.

Sincerely,
Carl

Note: The email then quotes the entirety of Carl Flink's previous email of March 10, Dr. Ananya Chatterjea's email of March 9, and the Peers' email of March 10.

Update: March 10, 2009

2009-03-10T11:30:00.004-05:00

On Wednesday morning we sent out an email to POC student groups and several faculty of color within the University inviting them to the town hall meeting on Friday. The text as follows:

Hello,

We are a group of Dance students of Color at UMN-TC. For the past month, we have been anonymously installing a protest project in the Barbara Barker Center for Dance building. We have been putting up articles, quotes and pictures relating to racism and privilege, starting in the back stairwell, and spreading out over a number of days, to the second and main floors, as well as the classroom and studio on the third floor. We have been documenting the protest at our blog here: http://thisbyus.blogspot.com

Thus far, there has been no mention of this protest outside of the Theatre Arts and Dance department. A mandatory Dance Program town hall has been scheduled by the director of the dance program for this Friday the 13th, from 1:30pm to 3:30pm.

The tension surrounding this Town Hall, and the questions about our identities have been significantly raised since Monday night, when we posted our open letter to the dance program on the walls of the building. The full text of the letter can be found here: http://thisbyus.blogspot.com/2009/03/part-9-march-9-2009.html

The faculty have raised concerns about the safety of the building as though our actions indicated a threat more urgent than packaging tape on paintwork; as a result, we feel that the town hall will end up focused around the question of our identities, the validity of our methods and the tone of our protest, rather than around the issue of the failure of the University to dismantle institutional racism and educate about White privilege.

Given the deeply personal relationships and power dynamics between us and the students and faculty who will be at the Town Hall, we do not anticipate feeling particularly comfortable or safe during the event.

What we would be grateful for, more than anything else, would be the presence of other people like us--people who are concerned and interested in the University's commitment to safe spaces for racially diverse students.

We would love it if you could come to the Town Hall, if only to, by your bodily presence, help us feel less isolated and alone. We are sure that the discussion, however it proceeds, will be interesting to you, and we are pretty sure that just by being there you will help change the dynamics in the room.

We invite you to at the very least, come and see the white walls that we have claimed for ourselves, covered in the voices and images of people like us.

A map to the Barbara Barker Center for Dance can be found here: http://www1.umn.edu/twincities/maps/BarkerCtr/dance-map.html

Please forward this to other list-serves and to students and faculty whom you feel might find it of interest.

Thanks!

--us
http://thisbyus.blogspot.com

Part 9: Open Letter to the Dance Program + Statement on the Protection of White Walls

2009-03-09T23:51:00.003-05:00

From part 9: March 9

Today we posted our open letter to the Dance Program on the glass walls of the main floor lobby. We posted on the main office door a response to the faculty's concern over the paint on the walls.

Open Letter to the Dance Program:

THIS is not an exhibit.

THIS is a protest.

THIS protests against the lack of safe space for students of Color in this program.

THIS protests against the failure of the faculty as representatives of the University, to provide students the resources they need to be anti-racist allies.

Anti-racist activism is not an aesthetic choice for self-expression to be judged on its creative merit: our purpose is political agitation.

To the faculty and staff, we say:

Mere support for guerrilla art does not support us as students in the issues we are protesting; it co-opts our cause. Do not focus on the pride you feel in your 'intelligent, thoughtful students,' or the idea that you have made us so. Concentrate instead on the ways you've failed us as teachers and administrators.

THIS is your problem. You are responsible for it. The Mission Statement of the University of Minnesota declares it your job to:

Prepare students, interested in continuing education and lifelong learning, for active roles in a multiracial and multicultural world…provide an atmosphere of mutual respect, free from racism, sexism, and other forms of prejudice and intolerance, [and] empower individuals within its community (http://www1.umn.edu/twincities/hist.php).

You have not yet met these goals.

You have demonstrated a profound disconnect between the theories you teach, the ideals you talk about, and the actions you practice. You preach a pragmatism about 'the real world' while at the same time practice a blindness to the real racism that exists. You have shown an unwillingness to carry through the momentary thoughtful discussions that occur in individual, personal interactions to take definitive, institutional action. There is a deafening silence about the intimidation and coercion of students, as well as a participation in faculty politics that prevents you from learning from each other in order to create a healthy atmosphere of mutual respect that has a unified approach to valuing us.

THIS is not just in response to any one person or any specific incident, although the straw that broke our camel back was the discussion around casting and cultural appropriation that occurred during the Dance Revolutions’ post-mortem meeting on February 9, 2009. That discussion proved that the discourse on race in this program has not moved to a higher level in the years we have observed the program faculty repeatedly promise to treat it as an important issue.

We cannot have productive discussions about racism when you have a need to assure everyone that their voices are equally important. The pain of our fellow White students confronting their privilege and guilt about racism is not the same as the pain of students of Color dealing with the sometimes numbingly routine, sometimes shockingly unexpected experiences of being a visible minority.

You should not glorify perseverance in the face of injustice. You should not equate surviving abuse with making lemonade out of lemons. Racism is not a natural disaster -- it is perpetuated by you, even when you are continually working to dismantle a system that privileges them at the cost of others.

To use individual students’ pain as a teaching tool is the symptom of a lazy and selfish pedagogy. Discussions born from our anguish are not “brilliant.” The momentary empathy and enlightenment generated in White students is not more valuable that the frustration and fear required from us to create those “learning situations.” When the only discussions are personal, White students learn about pain without acknowledging their privilege, and students of Color learn that our voices will be co-opted, ignored, belittled, or squashed.

To our teachers we say:

We do not want the hypocrisy of a relationship that simulates honesty at the cost of our silence. Open dialogue can only happen when there is a respect for all the voices participating in it. It is your loss if you cannot be as open to and desirous of correction as you ask your students to be.

We are not overly concerned in assuring the University of our safety for the purposes of insurance liability; we have taken responsibility for our bodies in this as we do every day in our actions as students and human beings.

If you are concerned with our safety and well being, focus on what truly makes us feel unsafe. What really threatens us is the lack of a space where our minds are not assaulted by prejudice and our voices are not silenced by ignorance and privilege.

You cannot create safety by vocal assurances of good intent. You can only earn our trust by consistent, rigorous action. Hearing our criticism is a privilege; it is not our responsibility to educate you about the mistakes you make, but a measure of the belief we have in your good intentions.

To the faculty of Color, we say:

We recognize the difficulties you face in negotiating the power you have as faculty with the challenges you face as people of Color. We respect the battles you have fought and the work you do, even as we include you in our criticism. We are angered by the attempts to use your identities as weapons against our dissatisfaction, and resent the implications that your bodies are part of the “solution” to the “diversity problem”, because we learn from you and respect you not because of your race, but because of the quality of your knowledge and teaching. We agree that the burden of educating your White colleagues and superiors should not have to fall on you, but we must point out that your failure to do so has led to their continual assault on us. We are grateful when you help fight injustice on our behalf, but we want to remind you that you cannot speak for us, because your bodies of Color are marked with an institutional power and privilege that we do not have.

To our fellow students, we say:

If you have felt threatened, alienated, or angered by the voices on these walls, perhaps you might want to consider the extent to which we—your classmates, your peers, your friends—have been silenced for the sake of your comfort. We stand by all the words on these walls. They speak for us when we are too afraid or drained or angered to.

If you cannot understand why you must be subjected to them—take it up with your teachers. It is the responsibility of this university to educate you about views and opinions other than your own, and the education you pay for has failed you if it leaves you exposed to hurting or alienating out of ignorance the people you work with and care for.

We have put the means of educating yourself inside this very building—ignoring them exposes you to our disappointment at your willful blindness, and that you have the freedom to make that choice is a privilege. We support your anger at the institution for not giving you these tools—you have a right to demand that it is the faculty’s job to educate you.

To those who see our anonymity as cowardice, we say:

We do not trust personal discussions with any of you because you have proven yourself unfaithful too often. We are first and foremost concerned with protecting our minds and hearts from the assaults they are routinely subjected to every time we try to engage with activism. We spent four weeks creating moments where the building became safe for us because we had the freedom to invest our energy in our cause without being derailed, decried, or despised. We will only talk to those whom we trust, on the terms that we set, because any other kind of dialogue has proven unproductive for us. We have seen how even faculty members feel silenced because of their fear of those with more power than them. In such an unhealthy climate of institutional intimidation, we have no desire to test the fairness of those who hold power over our academic, financial and intellectual standing in this university.

To those who would ask us, "Well, what are you doing to be part of the solution?" we say:

Placing the burden of fighting racism on those who have to deal with it every day derails the issue. It is unjust to demand activism from students who are already coping with surviving in a system that is actively, continually, and consciously stacked against them. The solution comes from the perpetrators being held accountable.

We take real risks in challenging people in power--people who have a direct hand in our careers and dreams and aspirations, and it is a risk for us to challenge people whom we respect, admire and have deep affection for.

Do not ask us for some easy, ultimate solution when the space is not even safe enough for us to openly state the problem. We demand change from those whose inaction we are protesting.

To anyone reading this who thinks institutional racism is irrelevant:

The act of silencing is an act of violence. The abuse of power permitted by privilege is an act of violence. Talking about it is no more inappropriate than talking about sexual violence. Racism must not be treated like the molesting uncle in the family whose public acceptance is bought by the suppression of his victim’s voices. It is more shameful to be silent about the violence that to feel ashamed about its existence. Denial only aids the oppressor, and hurts the survivor.

As we confront our own unthinking prejudices and strive to become better allies to each other, we are very aware of the magnitude of what we are asking of you.

So --

THIS is how we feel. What are you going to do with this knowledge?

-- us, March 9, 2009 (http://thisbyus.blogspot.com)

From part 9: March 9

A Statement about the Protection of White Walls

We have done our best to ensure no harm comes to the building. Your worry for the “safety of...the building...being compromised” implies a threat that is out of proportion to the cosmetic injuries of peeling paint. Part of what we are protesting is that the resources that we students pay for have not been used to give us the anti-racist protection we need—in that regard, the money we have spent on this protest serves us better than our money that the University will spend on fresh paint.

We are saddened that being complicit with bureaucracy forces a real person to take a stance that says “We care more about the safety of paint than we do about Anti-racist protest.”

We will try to use the sort of mounting adhesives you ask us to, while observing the irony in us complying, at our considerable financial expense, with your demand to protect the assets the abusive system values over our protests at its failure to use the money we give it to satisfactorily protect and serve us.

If the program is indeed supportive of the material on the walls, then we suggest you actively demonstrate that support by supplying the adhesives you would like to be used, and replacing it on all the existing material.

We realize that this is a lot of work, but if you were to ask our fellow students for help, by providing materials and setting an example, we suspect that many of them would be happy to do so. Some of them might be us.

We would definitely see any removal of the material on the walls as an act of further silencing, and we are not the only ones who would feel that way.

Response: March 9, 2009

2009-03-09T14:07:00.003-05:00

From Responses: March 9, 2009

Below is the third email sent out to the dance majors student list-serve as well as the dance staff, musician and faculty listserves, once again by Dr. Ananya Chatterjea; director of the dance program. It was sent out in the morning, before Part 9 was up.

Sub: [Dancemajors] TOWN HALL FRIDAY
Date: 3/9/2009 3:25 PM

Dear all,

The exhibit that has been mushrooming over our building has provoked very interesting questions: What indeed is privilege and how does it play out in institutions like academia? How do our everyday practices reflect ingrained social prejudices? There is great momentum here to ask really powerful questions and ready ourselves for change.

There are more complex questions to be asked as well: No space is uniform, because no population/community is uniform. What transformative possibilities exist in this building, or can be eked out from the practices that reside here? What ways might there be to dismantle such prejudice as exist here? How can we build on the energy generated through this exhibit and reflect on our practices?

To this end, I am calling a mandatory Town Hall on Friday from 1:30-3:30 in 100. While I am aware that this will not resolve all of the questions that have been brought up, I do hope we can all attempt together to begin to create a safe space to ask questions and have a productive dialogue around issues of difference. I also want to urge us all to think about how certain projects might be performative and very successful in drawing our attention to certain questions, but they do not always offer opportunities to work towards a specific set of goals. The goal of this Town Hall is to get us to outline goals and move us towards certain parameters. This is only the first of such Town Halls this semester.

Once again, while this exhibit has been personally very enriching to me, I doubt that, if the safety either of the individuals involved in the exhibit or of the building in which we all work--many of us with a rich history in anti-racist work--is compromised, then we are moving towards some vision equity or justice.

I look forward to seeing everybody at this event.

Thank you so much for your attention.
Ananya

Part 9: March 9, 2009

2009-03-09T09:04:00.006-05:00

Today we posted our open letter to the dance program as well as a response to the faculty's concern about paint. We will post the text in its own separate post.

We also posted words in the 2nd floor Men's and Women's bathrooms.

Additionally, we added to existing parts: added photos of Naseeruddin Shah, Reza Aslan, and Dgakapurra Munyarryun in the second floor back stairwell, added two more photos to the invisible bodies section, posted another sign on the other public entrance to the building that reads "You are now entering a space of privilege and prejudice", and added a THIS to the underside of the lobby stairs.

Combined person hours: 41
This figure includes time spent together in a physical space doing final editing and preparation for Part 9.
This figure does not include all writing, editing, research, organizing, printing, hashing and rehashing ideas, documentation, and recovery.
This figure does not include the time of allies who have helped us write, and have written to us.

Financial costs: final costs to be calculated. Spent $10 on double sided tape to comply with the faculty request that we use paint-friendly adhesives. The words in the bathroom fell down.

PHOTOS

To view full photo album, go to: http://picasaweb.google.com/thisbyus/Part9March9#

back door - main floor

From part 9: March 9

2nd floor Men's and Women's bathroom doors read "What are you ashamed of?"

From part 9: March 9

the inside of the Men's bathroom

From part 9: March 9

the inside of the Women's bathroom

From part 9: March 9

to view full album, click below:

part 9: March 9

Response: March 6, 2009

2009-03-07T01:57:00.003-06:00

Below is the text of the second official response sent to the dance program list-serve, again from the director of the dance program Dr. Ananya Chatterjea. It was sent the morning after we put up Part 8.

Sub: [Dance] exhibit
Date: 3/6/2009 9:15 AM

Dear students,

Some time ago I had written to you congratulating you on the exhibit that has been springing up on us. Truly, this faculty has been very supportive of such guerilla art and the thoughts it has provoked. I also hope that these fantastic images and quotes have sparked really vibrant conversations and dialogues amongst you all.

However, some housekeeping concerns have been brought up to me.

1. The duct tape and packing tape as well as regular tape that have been used for the exhibit are really bad for our walls. I am requesting whoever is responsible to _gently_ remove tape and replace them with two-sided stickies. we have some of them in our office and I am not sure how you will access them given the nature of this secretly mushrooming exhibit, but i am open to suggestion. Please will you make sure that these replacements are done within a week? I am aware that this is an expensive solution, but you will all agree that we want to preserve our space.

2. I am told that Facilities Management was not happy to see tape on the freshly painted walls of the lobby. I will see what can be negotiated around that. More on that forthcoming.

3. We are _all_ becoming very concerned about your safety. Clearly people are in this building late, late at night. Obviously, there are risks being taken, many of the pictures and posters are placed in hard to reach positions. Unfortunately, there are issues around insurance that are becoming bigger and bigger. Please, please, students and artists who are responsible, can we talk--through your anonymous blog if need be--so we are assured of your safety. We are deeply deeply worried. I hope to hear something from someone through some channel by monday.

Ananya

part 8: March 5, 2009

2009-03-05T14:14:00.003-06:00

Today we spilled out onto the main floor. We lined the steps of the main staircase with the word "PRIVILEGE" on the underside and on the walking side, two sentences about privilege. On the window-wall between studio 100 and the main offices we quoted popelizbet in 250 font size lettering. We expanded into the Men's and Women's bathrooms and covered the door that opens to the back stairwell (which is never used) . And we put messages on the doors leading in and out of the building.

The only addition to the second floor today was adding a message inside the faculty bathroom.

PHOTOS

To view full album, go to:
http://picasaweb.google.com/thisbyus/Part8#

A few below:

main entrance into the building

From part 8

privilege staircase

From part 8

window-wall

From part 8

Men's and Women's main floor bathrooms

From part 8

first floor - door to back stairwell that is infrequently taken

From part 8

staircase - top (walking) side

From part 8

staircase - top (walking) side

From part 8

faculty bathroom

From part 8

main floor door exiting the building

From part 8

for complete photo album, click on the image below:

From part 8

Combined person hours: 18
This figure does not include all research, organizing, printing, hashing and rehashing ideas, documentation, and recovery.

Financial costs: final costs to be calculated. For Part 8 printing, we relied mainly on a friend's generosity in giving us access to a laser printer.

part 7: March 3

2009-03-03T10:11:00.002-06:00

Today we burst onto the second floor.

We devoted the 2nd floor glass window-walls to invisible bodies. It was a deliberate decision not to identify the bodies photographed. Surrounding the photographs we posted words - labels and categories. We also posted more written material on the door of Studio 200, the elevator foyer, the hallways leading to faculty offices (with bell hooks and Paulo Freire), and the outside of the doors of both the faculty and student bathrooms.

The authors we included (in random order): Wheelchair Dancer, Paulo Freire, nightengalesknd, Cripchick, bell hooks, Robert M. Pirsig, Gillespie and Woods, Little Light, Anonymous, Anonymous, Anonymous,

Combined person hours: 24
This figure does not include all research, organizing, printing, hashing and rehashing ideas, documentation, and recovery.

Financial costs: final costs to be calculated. Today we spent another $75 on color and black ink.

PHOTOS BEFORE

Click below to view photos "before". A small tour of the second floor, for anyone unfamiliar:

part 7 - Before, a small tour of the 2nd floor

PHOTOS AFTER

invisible bodies window-wall

From Part 7: March 3

elevator foyer

From Part 7: March 3

on faculty bathroom door

From Part 7: March 3

To view complete album, click on icon below:

Part 7: March 3

Part 6: Feb 26, 2009

2009-02-26T04:37:00.005-06:00

Today we covered the framed photographs of the local dancers in Studio 300 with famous international dance artists/companies. Thank you thank you thank you to all of you who sent us photos. The photos you've provided have been valuable in informing our dialogue about which dance artists to represent in studio 300, and which we are choosing to leave out and place elsewhere in the building. The ones we didn't end up posting today, we are saving for later.

Today's posting was perhaps the most conflicting for us so far; as limiting as it may be, we ultimately decided on dance artists who fall under the category of what is labeled "Contemporary Dance" for the following reasons: 1. We wanted to provide an alternative to the photos that had originally been there (generally of Contemporary dance artists still alive and working, most or all of whom are U of M graduates, the majority White Americans) so as to provide international examples of Contemporary dance to contrast the local examples. The aim was to widen the scope but not change where it was looking; an alternative as opposed to a comprehensive cross-section of the world. 2. It is easier to find information about international "Contemporary Dance" companies and artists and search for photos which include performer citations that can print high enough quality in terms of file size. If we left gaps or were incomplete, it only speaks to our limited knowledge, education, and time - to thoroughly research every single awesome dance artist in the whole world while also reflecting all the cultural value systems for judging the signficance of each. We nonetheless did our best to represent, and we hope to go back and improve upon it, but no matter what, we will be leaving many important dance makers out. Our goal remains to provide an alternative; we are not attempting to assume a voice for everyone.

Dance Artists and Companies posted (clumped in terms of region but not in any particular order): Batsheva (Israel), Cairo Opera Dance Theatre (Egypt), Ibdaa Dance Troupe (Palestine), El-Funoun Palestinian Popular Dance Troupe (Palestine), Company Jant Bi (Senegal), Company Tche Tche (Cote d'Ivoire), Faustin Linyekula (South Africa), Gregory Maqoma/Vuyani Dance Theatre (South Africa), La Compañía Danza Fragmentada (Cuba), Makeda Thomas (Trinidad), Cloud Gate (Taiwan), Jin Xing (China), Sankai Juku (Japan), Astad Deboo (India), Jayachandran/Attakalari (India), Padmini Chettur (India), Navtej Singh Johar (India), Amrita Performing Arts (Cambodia), EcnaD (Singapore), Lee Swee Keong (Malaysia), Sardono Katsumo(Indonesia)

Combined person hours: 24
This figures does include last minute research and printing.
This figure does not include all research, organizing, printing, hashing and rehashing ideas, documentation, and recovery.

Financial costs: final costs to be calculated. We ran out of colored ink today ($42). $16 on more photo paper.

We did not take "before" photos. Our mistake.

PHOTOS AFTER

View entire album at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/thisbyus/Part6#

Sub-Saharan African, Indian Subcontinent, South America, Southeast Asia

From part 6

Middle Eastern

From part 6

Middle Eastern, East Asian, Carribean

From part 6

click below to view entire album:

part 6

Response: February 25 2009

2009-02-26T01:47:00.002-06:00

This is the full text of the email sent to the dance program email list-serve, by the director of the dance program: Dr Ananya Chatterjea. It is the first official response we have received since we started the protest two weeks (15 days) ago.

Sub: [Dance] student activism
Date: 2/25/2009 7:42 AM

Dear all,

Many of us have recently witnessed an exhibit sprung from us from the stairwell of Barker. This has now spread to 301 and the entrances from the lobby.

Researching, planning, and realizing this exhibit has, no doubt, taken considerable time, energy, and resources. I still do not know who is responsible for this exhibit, but I have been tracking its progress.

I want to congratulate whoever has done this because of the thoughtful and thought-provoking insights with which this exhibit is filled. In particular, the thoughts around Black History Month draw our attention to today, what we need to do to think through our location in a month dedicated to commemorating "black history." I thank you for your work and for your guerilla tactics. I also thank you for your respect. There has been no angry defacing of walls but a filling up of spaces.

I am proud of this exhibit and am excited that as people from far and wide come to our campus during ACDF, they will witness a thoughtful and reflective group of students.

Thank you
Ananya

Response: Feb 23

2009-02-23T15:35:00.003-06:00

Walking down the stairwell from the 3rd to the 2nd floor, we saw that someone had contributed by writing on one of our neon arrows.

From responses: feb 23

We responded.

From responses: feb 23

Also, approaching the inside of the 2nd floor door, from inside the stairwell, we saw that one of our postings had been ripped.

From responses: feb 23

So we replaced it, making it bigger.

From responses: feb 23

We also realized we had made a mistake: we credited Eriq LaSalle instead of Mekhi Phifer underneath his photo from "ER". We fixed it.

From responses: feb 23

click below to view album:

From responses: feb 23

http://picasaweb.google.com/thisbyus/ResponsesFeb23#

part 5: feb 23

2009-02-23T08:05:00.005-06:00

Today we spilled out onto the third floor - the third floor foyer/lobby and classroom 301. 301 is where all of our history and theory courses take place. This is the same classroom where, 3 years ago, the faculty promised they were going to change the framed photographs of famous white dance artists to reflect the multitude of dance artists of color who have been seminal figures in shaping modern dance history. To date, the photos have not been changed.

So in honor of Black History Month (February), we have done it ourselves, for 16 of the photos in classroom 301, plus 2 in the foyer between classroom 301 and Studio 300. We posted photographs of seminal black dancers and choreographers over the glass frames, which included (in first name alphabetical order): Alvin Ailey, Arthur Mitchell, Bill "BoJangles" Robinson, Bill T. Jones, Carmen de LaVallade, Dianne Walker, Frankie Manning, Gregory Hines, Henry LeTang, Josephine Baker, Judith Jamison, Katherine Dunham, Norma Miller, Ralph Lemon, Robert Reed, Sammy Davis Jr, Savion Glover, Tight Eyez

In the 3rd floor foyer, we posted photos of the following African Americans (alphabetical order): Florence Griffith-Joyner, Langston Hughes, Melvin Tolson, Nikki Giovanni

We posted in both 301 and in the foyer writings and quotes from the following African Americans (alphabetical order): Angela Davis, August Wilson Jr., Colin Powell, Damion, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, James Weldon Johnson, John Hope Franklin, Larry Wilmore, Malcolm X, Marimba Ani, Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. Dubois, Yolanda Pierce, Zora Neale Hurston

One quote from a non-African American: Susun Weed

Combined person hours: 17
This figure does not include research, organizing, printing, hashing and rehashing ideas, documentation...and recovery.

Financial costs: final costs to be calculated. Today we spent $85 on refilling ink cartridges that had been brand new as of part 2 of this protest and had not been used for printing any other material. spent $15 on photo paper. Regular office paper, multiple rolls of tape.

PHOTOS BEFORE

View entire album at:

http://picasaweb.google.com/thisbyus/Part5Before#

before

From part 5 before

PHOTOS AFTER

view entire album at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/thisbyus/Part5After#

first wall

From part 5 after

first wall

From part 5 after

first wall

From part 5 after

door - inside 301, that opens to the foyer

From part 5 after

a quote from John Hope Franklin on how we must go beyond textbooks...

From part 5 after

second wall

From part 5 after

Katherine Dunham

From part 5 after

Ralph Lemon

From part 5 after

Josephine Baker, Savion Glover (left to right)

From part 5 after

3rd floor foyer

From part 5 after

on the outside of the door of studio 300

From part 5 after

to view entire album, click below:

part 5 after

part 4 : feb 18

2009-02-18T14:50:00.003-06:00

Today we introduced photos to the stairwell.

Combined person hours: 18 hours
Does not include research, organizing, printing, discussion, documentation

Financial costs: to be calculated

Photos of:

Wangaari Maathai, Vandana Shiva, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Jackie Robinson, Arundhati Roy, Barack Obama, Flaviana Matata, Maya Lin, Ruqaya Al Ghasara, Eriq LaSalle, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Amartya Sen, Cornel West, Margaret Cho, Ruan Linyu, David Henry Hwang

We started enlarging our scale by adding a big posterboard printout that splits the top (3rd) floor door (inside the stairwell).

Added more writings by:

yonmei, Monica Roberts, brownfemipower, Nelson Mandela, maritzia, gogojojo, idyllicmollusk, Zora Neale Hurston, E.J. Graff, sylvia, harrietsdaughter, Eli Wiesel, June Jordan, Sujata Bhatt, Pat Parker, Ruth Frankenberg, yeloson, Anonymous, stoneself, Holzman, Mitsuye Yamada, Beverly Daniel Tatum, Audrey Thompson, Unidentified

From day 4

people pictured: Wangari Maathai

From day 4

people pictured: Alice Walker

From day 4

people pictured: Wangari Maathai, Maya Lin, Ruqaya Al Ghasara

From day 4

people pictured: Obama in his youth, Amartya Sen, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin

From day 4

click below for more photos of part 4:

part 4

http://picasaweb.google.com/thisbyus/Part4#

part 3: feb 15

2009-02-15T22:49:00.003-06:00

We posted more writings, plus we've moved to posting on the insides of the doors in the stairwell.

Combined person hours: 12
Does not include research, printing, organizing, discussion, documentation

Financial costs: to be calculated

Writings by:
yonmei, Monica Roberts, brownfemipower, Nelson Mandela, maritzia, gogojojo, idyllicmollusk, Zora Neale Hurston, E.J. Graff, sylvia, harrietsdaughter, Eli Wiesel, June Jordan, Sujata Bhatt, Pat Parker, Ruth Frankenberg, yeloson, Anonymous, stoneself, Holzman, Mitsuye Yamada, Beverly Daniel Tatum, Audrey Thompson, Unidentified

From day 3

click below for more photos of day 3:

day 3

http://picasaweb.google.com/thisbyus/Part3#

part 2: feb 11

2009-02-11T21:39:00.003-06:00

On day two we added more articles, as well as the title of the project: THIS in big colorful letters.

Combined person hours: 9 hours
does not include research, organizing, printing, discussion, documentation

Financial costs: to be calculated

Writings by:

Sherman Alexie, Tim Wise, coffeeandink, theangryblackwoman, Naamen Gobert Tilahun, Andrea Rubinstein, Peggy McIntosh, ampersand, jen, Chrystos, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, Lee Maracle, Mitsuye Yamada, Andrea Smith, Cherri Moraga, Barbara Smith, Doris Davenport, Cherrie Mackey, Michelle Obama, Martin Jacques, Jo Carillo, Oscar Brown Jr, Arundhati Roy, Jamaica Kincaid, Luther Standing Bear, Malcolm X, Unidentified, Unidentified

From day 2

click below for more photos of part 2:

day 2

http://picasaweb.google.com/thisbyus/Part2#

part 1: feb 10

2009-02-10T20:27:00.003-06:00

Combined person hours: 1 hour
Does not include research, organizing, printing, discussion, documentation

Financial costs: to be calculated

Posted writings by:

coffeeandink, Audre Lorde, Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King Jr, Chrystos, Sherman Alexie, Unidentified

From day 1

more photos from day 1 may be viewed at:

part 1

http://picasaweb.google.com/thisbyus/Part1#

The Project: Some backstory

2009-02-10T14:12:00.004-06:00

Edited March 19, 2009 to add: our Open Letter to the Dance Program, and A Note to Visitors.

Who we are: students at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities' dance program.

What we are doing: Physically--sticking pieces of paper with text on them, on the walls of the Barbara Barker Center for Dance. Intellectually-- that's something for the reader to know, or to discover for themselves.

When we began: the 10th of February, 2009.

Why: That is both too big and too personal a question to answer here, but we acknowledge that the post- Dance Revolutions run cast discussion that happened in the Barker lobby on Monday the 9th of February 2009 was a catalyst.

What does 'thisbyus' mean: THIS is what it is. To every word, every article, every thought on the walls, we say, 'THIS'. This right here. This right now. And this is by us, for us, with us.

THIS
by
us.

Annotated Timeline of Dance Program Responses

2009-02-09T07:47:00.024-06:00

From Part 13 - April 16, 2009

Annotated Timeline of Dance Program Responses

Notes:

This is a summary of the official responses to our protest, and related actions. We have provided our commentary about these events in order to highlight specific examples of official mismanagement; this is not a list of incidents of institutional racism.
We do not intend to target individuals; we have only quoted Carl Flink and Dr. Ananya Chatterjea in their official capacity as department chair and program director.
We have chosen not to include the three affiliate faculty comments made on our blog, as we do not consider them to represent the administration's position.
We have not named any students in order to protect their privacy, and have only identified those actions publicly claimed by specific students.
We are editing this timeline to keep it updated as events develop.

FEBRUARY 9

A post-show discussion with the cast of Dance Revolutions occurred, during which concerns regarding casting were raised and student experiences regarding their racialized identities were brought up.

We would like to point out:

This discussion was only one factor in our decision to protest, and has never been the focus of it.
We acknowledged in our first open letter to the dance program that the handling of this discussion was the straw that broke the camel's back but it was certainly not the first or only instance that moved us to protest.
We have never claimed to represent the views of any students--of Color or otherwise--other than our own. The program has not once made any public gesture of protection and support toward the students of Color, both those involved in the artistic process under discussion and otherwise, who may have had to deal with hostility and stress resulting from assumptions about their involvement in or approval of our protest.

FEBRUARY 10

Our visual protest began in the back stairwell of the second floor.

FEBRUARY 11, 15, 18, 23

Part 2 and Part 3 - Added more articles and quotes
Part 4 - Introduced photos
Part 5 - Photos of black dance artists in Classroom 301 in celebration of Black History Month

FEBRUARY 25

Two weeks after we had begun our protest, Dr. Ananya Chatterjea--the director of the dance program--made the first official response in an email she sent to the dance listserv, in which she said:

I want to congratulate whoever has done this because of the thoughtful and thought-provoking insights with which this exhibit is filled.... I thank you for your work and for your guerilla tactics. I also thank you for your respect. There has been no angry defacing of walls but a filling up of spaces.

I am proud of this exhibit and am excited that as people from far and wide come to our campus during ACDF, they will witness a thoughtful and reflective group of students.

We would like to point out:

There was no acknowledgment, in this or any emails from the faculty, of the post-show discussion whose unsatisfactory resolution had been the cause of more than one classroom and personal conversation.

By describing our work as an "exhibit", the director decontextualized our protest, and suppressed any responsibility of the program to respond to it as a critique.
While we found this email to be appropriative of our efforts, we believed it to be a public, official commitment to supporting our protest, in light of the director's pride and excitement at it being seen by the regional American College Dance Festival visitors. The director's subsequent statements in emails, and agreement with Carl Flink that students should feel free to take the protest materials down before the festival on March 17, contradict this stance of support.

FEBRUARY 26, MARCH 3, 5

Part 6 - International dancer photos in Studio 300
Part 7 - 2nd floor, invisible bodies
Part 8 - Main floor, privilege staircase, entry ways, bathrooms

MARCH 6

Dr. Ananya Chatterjea sent out a second email, saying: "Some time ago I had written to you congratulating you on the exhibit that has been springing up on us. Truly, this faculty has been very supportive of such guerilla art and the thoughts it has provoked. I also hope that these fantastic images and quotes have sparked really vibrant conversations and dialogues amongst you all. "

Her email then went on to bring up some "housekeeping concerns":

I am requesting whoever is responsible to _gently_ remove tape and replace them with two-sided stickies. we have some of them in our office and I am not sure how you will access them given the nature of this secretly mushrooming exhibit, but i am open to suggestion.

She concluded:

Please, please, students and artists who are responsible, can we talk--through your anonymous blog if need be--so we are assured of your safety. We are deeply deeply worried. I hope to hear something from someone through some channel by monday.

We would like to point out:

The director's hope that conversations and dialogues have been sparked among the students once again shied away from any recognition that the faculty might also benefit from discussing the protest, and that they too might have anything to learn.
In spite of suggesting that we use two-sided stickies from the dance office, there were none available in the office, nor were any made accessible. There was no suggestion of the program sponsoring the additional costs we would incur by meeting their demands. A more complete response to these "housekeeping concerns" can be found in our "statement about the protection of white walls" posted March 9, 2009.
The director's request implies that a discussion mediated through our blog was acceptable, but since the time we posted our open letter, the pseudonymity of our protest has been officially and unofficially described as a hindrance preventing any form of communication with us, even though we have responded to posts made on walls, comments made on our blog, and requests made through ombudsman Josh Casper.

MARCH 9

Dr. Chatterjea had requested that we respond by March 9. That morning, she sent out another email announcing a mandatory Town Hall meeting:

While I am aware that this will not resolve all of the questions that have been brought up, I do hope we can all attempt together to begin to create a safe space to ask questions and have a productive dialogue around issues of difference. I also want to urge us all to think about how certain projects might be performative and very successful in drawing our attention to certain questions, but they do not always offer opportunities to work towards a specific set of goals. The goal of this Town Hall is to get us to outline goals and move us towards certain parameters. This is only the first of such Town Halls this semester.

She concluded: "Once again, while this exhibit has been personally very enriching to me, I doubt that, if the safety either of the individuals involved in the exhibit or of the building in which we all work--many of us with a rich history in anti-racist work--is compromised, then we are moving towards some vision equity or justice."

Later that evening, we posted Part 9 - first open letter

We would like to point out:

The director, by talking about an attempt to begin to create a safe space, is clearly acknowledging that such a safe space does not already exist. Her subsequent silence during the March 17 meeting in the face of Carl Flink and some White students voicing opinions that do not show an understanding of what is unsafe about the dance program, is therefore disingenuous.
The director's allusion to our protest being "performative," but not "offering opportunities to work towards a specific set of goals" not only contradicts her previous statements about the value of the protest in sparking important discussions, but also ignores that this protest was what gave her the opportunity to cancel classes in order to call a mandatory town hall meeting whose agenda she was free to set.

MARCH 10

Chair of the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance Carl Flink sent out an email very early in the morning, describing our protest as “a spontaneous non-dance program directed happening” that was “transforming the building into a vibrant space of protest”. His email concluded:

This past Saturday night I spent an hour wandering through the Barker with my partner Emilie experiencing this dynamic event. I found it an incredible journey.

I encourage you to take the time to stop by the Barker and witness THIS - The Protest Project.

The above email was presumably sent before the Chair could have seen our first open letter that we posted that night.

We would like to point out:

This first communication from the chair specifically addresses that a protest is going on in the space, and yet completely ignores who and what it is directed towards. He makes no suggestion that the department administration holds itself responsible to answer the questions he says the protest raises. Further, by elevating his experience of the "incredible journey" he went on and encouraging people to "witness" the protest, he reiterates the position of White privilege where the benefit to the majority bystander is the primary value of a minority protest action, and that the proper reaction to a protest is to "witness" rather than to respond. This is particularly disturbing since, as chair of the department, Carl Flink is in an excellent position to respond to us and take action, and to encourage others to do likewise. Instead he declines to constructively use his power and speaks only in favor of standing by and watching.

----

Partly in response to Dr. Chatterjea's request, we posted our first open letter to the dance program, along with a statement on the protection of white walls. This was the first time we used our own words and directly addressed faculty, staff, and students in the dance program.

In response, the modern dance technique teachers canceled their classes and sat in the lobby of the building, in solidarity with other faculty members who were crying or displaying other signs of grief, shock, and outrage. The musician in residence played her cello alongside them. Some teachers told their classes to talk about the protest amongst themselves.

We would like to point out:

As an official response to a student protest, the faculty's actions were appallingly lacking. Students who had paid to attend class were left to themselves while being confronted with the emotional distress of their teachers. What could have been a seminal teaching opportunity for the program and a chance to successfully respond to issues of race, positional power, and grassroots criticism was wasted on a reactive rather than professional response.

MARCH 11

In an email sent to the dance and theater listservs, Carl Flink described the faculty response in the following words:

Many dance faculty chose to not hold class today, Tuesday, so that the entire program and department could be focused on THIS and the open letter that was added to it. The faculty did not simply leave the building but stayed in the lobby talking with students or just being present in order to signal our connection to this happening and the commitment we feel to this program and its evolution. Many students gathered in the Barker studios to carry-on student driven discussions on this subject.

We would like to point out:

The chair's insinuation that the faculty could have chosen to leave the building, but didn't, completely ignores that they failed to teach the classes they were being paid to teach, without any official dictate to cancel their classes.
The chair's observation that many students gathered in studios to discuss the subject avoids the fact that students get penalized for non-attendance, and in some classes, the teacher took attendance before leaving the classroom.

MARCH 12

We were anonymously forwarded an email that Dr. Chatterjea had sent out to multiple faculty members not only outside the program but outside the university. Given the assumptions made about us in just one official email, we can only guess at the extent of what might have been said in personal conversations to receptive faculty and students (some of this rhetoric has been echoed in comments on our blog posted by people identifying as friends and employees of Dr. Chatterjea). This is the first time that this email is being made publicly available, so we include the text in full:

Subject: urgent request for support
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 12:59:08 -0500
From: Ananya Chatterjea
To: [recipient names redacted]

Dear Colleagues,

Hope this finds you well. I am writing with an urgent request. Recently, we have witnessed an incredible exhibit taking over the Barker: the "This" protest project. it began with a back stairwell exhibit on "white privilege" at which point I sent out an email to the student body, assuming it was them, congratulating them and hoping that it would spark more vibrant conversations about raced bodies among our student body. This has lead to more and more mushrooming of this exhibit and while some amazing things have happened --like the covering up of the pictures of all white choreographers and dancers in the classroom and studio 300-- and some troubling questions have come up.

For instance, since no one will assume responsibility for this exhibit, and this is happening in an entirely guerilla way, we have to assume to that students have somehow been able to access a master key to the building, or are working with custodial staff, in order to get inside the faculty bathroom, the studios etc all of which are locked by 10 pm. we have heard that some students have been seen on ladders at 2:30 am. Now, because they are putting posters up on really hard to reach places, issues of insurance are coming up as well as those of safety.

Moreover, we believe that much of this is related to an issue about casting around a contested piece for our last concert, which is much more complicated than it seems to be. Interestingly, I do not see any of my students of color clamoring to be part of my dance company of women of color doing social justice work, or work with the choreographers of color we have steadily brought in. They are angry because they did not get to participate in a mainstream dance piece. I do not mean to trivialize their struggle, but am baffled by their lack of self-examination.

On Monday, perhaps because they could not get us to be angry, they posted a scathing "open letter" to the Dance Program, lashing out at everybody and classifying the work done by faculty of color as "failures" when of course our steady work over at least the past 10 years for me, and thereafter for others, has produced so much change. Honestly if what Diyah, Cindy, Maija, and I teach is not anti-racist, I dont know what that might be. But more troubling is that while some of the quotes (about intersectionality) are directly from what I teach, a lot of the pictures and quotes they have put up remind of the old project of multicultural diversity, not really difference.

This has now escalated to a point beyond my ability at least to stomach, also because the 3 faculty of color who are in the BBCD, Diyah, Toni, and I, feel specifically targeted, and openly called out as being "complicit with bureaucracy." Also, Dance has been moving along for sure through the work we have been doing, the faculty went through an anti-racist workshop and training program 2 years ago, that then caused us to ask more questions. Many of these are reflected in curricular shifts, one of these I am implementing as my first major change as Director: introduction of a multi-level track in African dance in the main curriculum. There are other changes as well including considerations of a collaboration with African American and African Studies next year, so we are able to bring in several black choreographers to work with students.

Anyways, tomorrow (fri) from 1:30-3:30 I have called a Town Hall in Barker 100, largely because these anonymous protesters have performed their attacks, but not proposed any desired outcomes. Catherine Squires has kindly kindly kindly agreed to moderate this. Thank you Catherine!! However, because of the outreach these students (i have just learned that this includes possibly 2 students of color and 2 white) have done, the issue is totally spectacularized, and the Barker seems irredeemable, and its faculty totally ineffective.

I am fully aware that this is the day before spring break and it is ridiculous to ask you for even more of your time. But if you could show some support by showing up at the town hall, i would so so so appreciate it. I really need your support, as do the other faculty of color in this program!

Regards

Ananya

We would like to point out:

The director's personal pique that every student of color in the program has not asked to be in her personal dance company is, or should be, irrelevant to their student experience in the university.
The statement that none of the students of color in the program have "clamored" to work with the choreographers of color brought in by the dance program is false. Several students of color have been present at each audition for the aforementioned choreographers each year.
Leaving aside that we have never stated any connection between our protest and the actual casting choices made, as we have only written that our protest was instigated by a discussion about casting-- it is unprofessional for a director of a dance program to suggest that students of color lack self-examination for desiring to participate in a "mainstream dance piece" that the program has hailed as a masterwork, and that, moreover, counts as a performance credit required by the program to graduate.
Our open letter was neither "scathing" nor "lashing-out," nor an attempt to make the faculty angry. We were responding to Dr. Chatterjea's specific request that we communicate with the program.
In our first open letter we specifically recognized the work of the faculty of color, and acknowledged that they carry an additional burden of their positional power being mediated by the race-based challenges they face. By setting up a false dichotomy where any criticism is read as complete invalidation of their work, the director discourages even valid criticism of the faculty of color.
By only privately stating her concerns about the quality of our curatorial ability in selecting text and pictures for our protest, the director passed up an important educational opportunity. She could instead have provided what she would consider more appropriate information to us and to other students, as our protest has consistently been accepting and incorporating editorial corrections whenever they have been offered to us.
A director of a university program should perhaps cultivate a more cast-iron stomach, given that authority figures are routinely expected to deal with criticism professionally and responsibly.
The director's reference to only three faculty of color reinforces the hierarchy we are protesting against, by ignoring the presence and opinions of the lecturers, theater department and affiliate faculty of color who also teach in the building.
The reference to the introduction of a multi-level track in African dance to faculty outside the program, when many affiliate faculty had no idea of its existence, is emblematic of the problem of hierarchical communication we have brought up in our list of demands. The jazz and tap faculty should have been involved in the discussion around this track, given the centrality of Africanist dance in those traditions. As has subsequently been announced, students will have to choose between the jazz track and the African track, which does a disservice to the interconnections between the two forms as well as the students interested in both from the perspective of African-American heritage.
The director's insinuations about the number and race of the students she suspects are protesters contradicts the official approval previously extended to our "guerrilla tactics."
For the director to term our outreach efforts as "spectacularizing" the issue indicates a lack of appreciation for how unsafe we had stated we felt because of the hostile environment in the dance program. In addition, it is a disregard for the weight that the administration's actions carry to imply that it is the student outreach that makes a program seem "irreemable" and a faculty "totally ineffective".
It makes little sense for the director of a program to ask support for herself and her fellow faculty, against a group of students who have said that they themselves feel unsafe and uncomfortable in a meeting she has mandated and set the parameters for. In addition, if some students of color are protesting against the actions of all faculty, there is no reason for the faculty of color to imply that it is their racial identity that is being challenged, instead of their positional power.

MARCH 13

The Town Hall meeting was held in studio 100 at the Barbara Barker Center for Dance from 1:30pm to beyond 3:30pm.

We would like to point out:

Although we know now that the outreach done by us and the faculty prompted a wider university interest in our protest, and that Dr. Rusty Barcelo was present as an attendee, the faculty did not inform students of her presence, nor that of ombudsman Josh Casper, who was there in official capacity.
In the March 11 email to the dance and theater listservs, Chair of the department Carl Flink said: "[The town hall] was meant to be a dance program event, but if more attend from the larger department we'll look forward to having your presence in the Barker too." And yet, he stood at the entrance of the room preventing non-dance major students and faculty from entering, citing fire code restrictions, which were later violated anyway after the large number of people attending the event were allowed inside. Additionally, some people remained outside and were told they could watch the meeting on the widescreen in the lobby, even though the format of the meeting did not lend itself to such observation.
Dr. Chatterjea, in her introductory remarks, spoke at some length about the anti-racism work done by some of the faculty. However, she did not acknowledge any student efforts.
The initial email announcing the town hall stated that it was "only the first of such Town Halls this semester." However, a time for the second town hall was not announced, and to date, there has been no mention of any such succeeding event.
The moderator, Dr. Catherine Squires, assured participants that their group notes containing desired questions, values, and goals would be made accessible to the departmental community. We are aware that the ombudsman’s office offered to type up these notes per student request, in order to facilitate their distribution; this offer has not been taken up. On April 1 in our demands we asked that the group notes from Town Hall be immediately publicly disseminated. It has been more than a month since the Town Hall, and still there has been no statement from the program faculty on when they will make this information accessible to the people who helped generate it, nor any statement explaining what they are doing with it in the meantime.

MARCH 16, the first day of Spring Break

We noticed that both the open letter and the statement on the protection of white walls had been removed by a person or persons unknown. We replaced them, and added a note to visitors (Part 11).

An email jointly signed by Dr. Chatterjea and Carl Flink was sent out, announcing:

a conversation tomorrow Tuesday, March 17 from 11 am - Noon to discuss next actions steps in terms of the postings by THIS in the Barker Center.... With the ACDFA conference starting on Wednesday, we want to make intelligent and respectful decisions about the THIS postings ongoing status in consultation with anyone interested from the department.... We understand that time is short, but this is the best we can do given the short timing after our Friday discussion.

In anticipation of the meeting and the upcoming conference, we reposted the open letter and the statement on the protection of white walls, in addition to a note to visitors.

We would like to point out:

This manufactured shortage of time was disingenuous as best, and manipulative at worst, given that the dance program had spent the better part of a year planning for this conference. The faculty were well aware that if a community decision regarding the protest materials had to be arrived at before the event, it should more responsibly have been made at the Town Hall which had mandatory attendance of all dance students as well as a number of theater students, rather than at a hastily convened and poorly attended "conversation" during an official Spring Break.
A theatre student posted on the listserv asking for the location of this meeting, which had not been mentioned in the email. This question was not, publicly at least, replied to.

MARCH 17, Spring Break

Before the meeting, the faculty moved the reposted open letter and the note to visitors from their original locations to the second floor dance studio, claiming they had moved them for meeting attendees to read and reference for discussion during the meeting. They did not move them back. After the meeting, someone moved the note to visitors back to its original location.

We had been concerned that the meeting was going to be both unproductive and unsafe, and so we contacted ombudsman Josh Casper and asked him to be present. The events of the meeting have been somewhat documented in an unofficial (and fragmented) set of notes taken by a student and emailed to the dance and theatre listservs; we suggest talking with Josh Casper in order to form your own opinion on the words spoken during that meeting. According to those unofficial notes, Carl Flink is reported to have suggested that at "10 am people come together to take things down, and collectively archive THIS," to which Dr. Chatterjea is reported to have replied, "Hope it is student led. We can be collaborators."

We would like to point out:

The notes of this meeting circulated by a student on the dance and theatre listservs give every indication that the faculty used the relatively small number of students attending as permission to vent emotions with a vehemence and entitlement that seems entirely uncondusive to allowing contradictory opinions to be voiced. We believe it is a serious issue for an ombudsman to be on record as saying that were he a student, he would not feel safe in the space.
It is manipulative for the director and the chair to suggest that students who wish to take the protest materials down determine a time and do so, giving the indication that they support this action, without taking any responsibility for it.

MARCH 18, Spring Break and the first day of the American College Dance Festival (regional conference)

The open letter was removed from the second floor dance studio.
The statement on the protection of white walls was also removed.
The note to visitors was left up.

We would like to point out:

There was no official faculty response or acknowledgment of these actions.
There was no public official effort to themselves contextualize the protest for the visitors by issuing any statement and making it available.

MARCH 22

An article about the protest was published on the TC Daily Planet website, in which the director and chair were quoted:

Carl Flink...said that race and body image had nothing to do with casting for Missa Brevis. “It’s interesting,” Flink said in a telephone interview, “because José Limón is made up of 70 to 80 percent persons of color…and has a decades-long commitment of having a diverse company.”

Flink continued, “As you can imagine, I’m deeply concerned for finding communication with my students.” He said the department has to figure out a way to address the hard feelings, which is difficult when the protesters are anonymous. “I don’t want to negate any of the students’ pain,” he said. “That is a real thing.”

“It’s interesting,” Chatterjea said ....“For ten years I have had students that were mad at me that we have to study race, gender, and class. I have looked forward for the moment forever that students would join this work.”....“When the protest first started, I was so happy," said Chatterjea. “I thought I might be doing something right.” She said she felt the problem with the protest is the public shaming aspect, and a lack of a list of demands. “Anger can be a very powerful tool to reveal injustice, but I have learned anger is not always effective in leadership. If you want to effect change, anger won’t get you there, it is strategy.”

We would like to point out:

The racial composition of the official José Limón dance company has no relevance to the issue of the casting of a work set on University of Minnesota dance students, and that company's commitment to diversity in no way relates to the dance program's own standing on that issue.
The director does not mention that during the aforementioned ten years, students have still been facing racial discrimination. It is extremely problematic for the director to frame students' racial experiences in the university through the binary of whether they 'were mad at' her, or joined her; activism should not have to be the prerequisite to voicing criticism against racial injustices. It is also hypocritical for her to credit her own actions for the protest when it was something she did not feel was directed to her, and then not acknowledge the role her actions played in its causes when it pointed out administrative failings.
For the director to term the protest as a public shaming indicates a desire for criticism to have been kept private.
The continued framing of a lack of list of demands as a 'problem' ignores our point in our first open letter stating that "Placing the burden of fighting racism on those who have to deal with it every day derails the issue. It is unjust to demand activism from students who are already coping with surviving in a system that is actively, continually, and consciously stacked against them."
For a self-described social justice activist, Dr. Chatterjea's assertion of anger being unable to effect change completely ignores the philosophies of such activists as Audre Lorde and bell hooks, whose statements on the constructive use of anger were among the words we posted on the walls to give us strength during our protest. On the other hand, the leadership of the dance program seems to have concerned itself more with the anger it felt over being criticized, rather than with any constructive strategy to respond to that criticism.

MARCH 23

An article about the protest was published in the Minnesota Daily newspaper, in which the director and chair were quoted:

The casting of Missa Brevis, a production in the dance program, has been acknowledged by faculty, staff and students as a catalyst of the protest. During the casting two students of color were not selected, but felt that they should have been, said Ananya Chatterjea.... Chatterjea said the students felt it was because of their race.

Carl Flink.... said he hopes to meet with the student protesters and have an open discussion on how to address their concerns. To come up with a solution for the concerns, Flink also said the department plans on working with the Office of the Vice President and Vice Provost for Equity and Diversity.

We would like to point out:

Again, for the record, we have never described the casting choices of Missa Brevis as the catalyst for the protest, but have referenced the post-show discussion of those issues.
The director's facts are incorrect--four students of Color were in the second cast of the piece who were not selected for the final cast. None of those students have explicitly publicly stated that they felt they were not cast because of their race. Saying that there was a racialized tension in the casting process does not equate with an accusation of racist decision-making, nor should students voicing the former be framed as making the latter. If the director is referencing private conversations she has had with any of the students, it is a violation of the FERPA rules that protect students' privacy.
The chair knew at the time of this interview that we were not planning to have physical face-to-face meetings with him or any other dance program administrator, and in expressing a hope to meet us willfully disregarded our repeated statements about our need for pseudonymity.
More than three weeks after the chair publicly stated that the department planned to work with the Office of Equity and Diversity, we have neither publicly nor privately seen any proof that they have done so.

APRIL 1

We posted our second open letter to the dance program, which contained a list of demands (Part 12). This was in response to faculty comments about not being able to take action because they did not know what our concrete desires were, to questions directed at us at the Town Hall Meeting on March 13, and to multiple blog comments asking what we wanted.

This same day, student Peer Advisors sent out emails to the dance and theater listservs to invite students to a meeting scheduled for April 6 on the question, “What do students wish to see come from THIS?”

We would like to point out:

To date there has been no official faculty response to our demands.
The faculty response to passively permit students to self-organize in response to a protest against the administration, without any official direction or guidance, proves a deep avoidance of their responsibility to lead.

APRIL 5

Our protest materials were ripped down by some White students not involved in the protest, including the president of the Student Dance Coalition, and two employees of Dr. Chatterjea’s dance company, respectively a student and an alumna of the dance program. They commented on our blog claiming responsibility for their actions. They threw away the crumpled and torn materials into the recycling and trash bins; a student who was not involved in the taking down of the protest retrieved the discarded materials and commented on our blog saying they were "concerned about the destruction of the protest."

APRIL 6

An email signed by Carl Flink and Dr. Ananya Chatterjea was sent to the dance and theatre listservs encouraging students to go to the Peers meeting that had been announced on March 30. In this email, they describe the destruction as "the changes made by another group of individuals to the THIS materials at the Barker last night that we were unaware of until earlier this morning." They concluded: "These are difficult and multifacted conversations, but we also think they present
an opportunity to bridge the gaps that stubbornly continue to separate many of the programs in our department as we look for next constructive steps in this process."

In the Peer Advisors' meeting over the lunch period, students were asked to anonymously write on post-it notes what future steps they want the department to take, and values that they feel the department should have. These post-it notes were collected and divided into the following categories: curricular, outreach, departmental training, student training, pedagogy, and space. The Peers said they would type up and send to the listservs the typed up notes.

We would like to point out:

The director and chair disrespected and dishonored the effort that went into our mounting of the protest by describing a complete destruction of our materials as a "change". They also completely ignored the weight of their own previous public statements both in support of the protest, as well as subsequently in favor of student-led removal of material. Burying their only official reaction to this significant disruption of our protest in an email encouraging students to attend a Peer Advisor-organized meeting to discuss solutions to our protest constitutes a willful refusal from our director and chair to take any leadership responsibility. This void of leadership and the encouragement of students to fill it is a tactic to divide and conquer those with less power, and reframes the protest as an intra-student conflict. This is symptomatic of the problems we pointed out in our public statements.
We do not understand why the leadership of the dance program needs to continue to look for constructive steps to implement, when suggestions have been given to them at the public town hall, in our second open letter, and through the assistance offered by the Ombudsman’s office and the Office of Equity and Diversity. This continued expression of encouragement for students to do the work of generating actions and goals, without any indication that the department will commit to the actual work of doing them is persistent enough to constitute a derailment.

APRIL 7

Minutes from the Peers meeting was sent to the theater and dance listservs.

We would like to point out:

The Peer Advisors took on the responsibility of publicly providing all students in the department with the information discussed in the meeting; an act of conscientious documentation that facilitates transparency and community involvement that the faculty have thus far consistently failed to do.

APRIL 14

The Dance Peer Advisor sent out an email to the dance listserv announcing a second student meeting, "What Do Students Want To See Come From THIS II", scheduled for April 17.

She also sent out the typed up notes from the April 6 Peers meeting.

We would like to point out:

The significant overlap of the student requests to our demands, indicating that what we asked for can not be simply considered the demands of a select, disgruntled few.
The lack of official response to requests made from any students, protesters or not.

APRIL 15

A White caucus meeting for April 17 was announced on the dance listserv by a White student who ripped down the protest, with purported "support from the dance program," facilitated by a Lisa Albrecht-- a White non-dance faculty member who had previously commented on our blog offering assistance but who did not contact us before or after agreeing to lead this meeting.The workshop description includes the following:

The space we will create is NOT about:

1. Disrespecting anyone (present or not).
2. Going over who said what.
3. Going over who did what.
4. Discussing details regarding all that has happened.

We would like to point out:

A speaker presenting on white privilege, racism, and white supremacy did not contact the students of color in the program to inform herself of the environment she was entering into from the point of view of those most affected by the issues.
For one of the director's student employees, who has taken responsibility for destroying our protest materials, to announce that a white caucus workshop is supported by the Dance program when no such official statement has been publicly made, implies a connection between some members of the dance program administration and select students that gives those students an unethical power of spokespersonship.
The workshop description indicates a situation that prevents the examples of faculty and student responses to the protest being used as examples of White privilege and ineffective alliance in action. This reduces the education to abstract theorizing when the protest needs students in the building to take responsibility for the effect of their attitudes and actions on their real, present students of color peers.

-- us, April 16, 2009 (http://thisbyus.blogspot.com)

APRIL 16

We posted in the Barker an open letter to the Office of Equity and Diversity, requesting their involvement, along with our Annotated Timeline of Dance Program Responses.

We would like to point out:

The next morning, as of 8:15am the next morning, these postings had already been removed from the glass walls of the Barker. No one has publicly claimed responsibility, and the faculty has not mentioned it in any of their communications.

April 19

The chair sent out an email jointly signed by him and the director, to provide an update "on the steps that we are taking at a departmental level to address the questions of institutional power, privilege and prejudice that have been raised by the THIS Project and some other students within the department in recent months."

They said:

In terms of student input on the first matter above, we are currently waiting for the peers/ombudsman's office-driven dialogue that has had two conversations facilitated by Ombudsmen Office representative Josh Casper to develop a roster of suggested actions for the department to consider for raising awareness and understanding on these important issues within the department. We also congratulate the students who organized and participated in the recent training on white privilege led by University Faculty member Lisa Albrecht.

At the departmental level, Ananya and I are currently working with College of Liberal Arts Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs Richa Nagar to develop a dialogue with the University's Office of Equity and Diversity's Vice Provost Rusty Barcelo to identify how the Office and the CLA administration can best facilitate and support the ongoing dialogues. We hope that these conversations will bear some fruit in the coming weeks.

In terms of the status of the departmental peers, the department faculty has considered whether it is necessary to continue these positions as paid in the face of the impending budget cuts our department will need to address this summer.

We would like to point out:

The roster of student suggestions from the first Peers meeting that the chair and director are "waiting" for was sent out to the dance and theater listservs 5 days prior, on April 14. If they are referring to the second Peers meeting, another roster of suggestions was not generated then nor was it the focus to do so.
Apparently the list of goals and solutions generated at the Town Hall over a month ago was not enough, the list of demands we provided in our second open letter was not enough, and the list of student-generated notes from the first Peer Advisors' meeting was not enough from which the chair and director could find some suggestions of actions that they could begin "to consider". This willful inability to recognize input when it is given is at best incompetent beyond what we know them capable of, or worse, deliberate stalling in order to not have to do anything until the end of the semester.
In congratulating the students organizing the White Caucus after the fact and not promoting it themselves beforehand--while the event is proclaimed by the student sending the email to be supported by the dance program--the chair and director are demonstrating their stance of non-commitment and limiting leadership to applauding student efforts while not making any of their own, aside from the director calling the March 13 Town Hall. Meanwhile, the chair and director did not congratulate those faculty members who took the time to attend, particularly affiliate faculty, who were not, presumably, being paid for their initiative, once again indicating their refusal to acknowledge that faculty have self-improvement to do.
It is heartening to know that Richa Nagar, College of Liberal Arts Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs, is involved in a dialogue between the Dance Program and the Office for Equity and Diversity. Since Carl Flink said in an interview with the Minnesota Daily more than three weeks ago that the department planned on working with the OED, but is only now "developing" a dialogue, we would appreciate clarification on whether the dance program has involved the CLA administration in order to persuade the OED to participate in this dialogue, or if the CLA administration has been involved in order to ensure that the Dance Program delivers on its commitment.
This is the first public announcement that the Peer Advisors positions are in danger of being cut, and it is being made two days after the job application for the next year was sent to the theater email listserv, with a warning that "the structure for the Peer Advisors is subject to change" (Luverne Seifert, in an email dated April 17, 2009). This is the second time this month that official department communication has described a termination as "change"; we do not think the word means what they think it means.
This email was sent to the dance majors listserv instead of the dance listserv, presumably because the latter is moderated and even the chair cannot expect his emails to go through immediately, thus delaying effective communication. We would like to note that one of our demands was for the dance listserv to be put on the same automated moderation system, as such is the case with the theater listservs.

APRIL 20

We recieved an email response to our Open Letter to the Office for Equity and Diversity from Dr. Nancy “Rusty” Barceló, Vice President and Vice Provost for Equity and Diversity at the University of Minnesota:

I, and others on my staff, attended the town hall meeting and offered the services of our office as soon we became aware of the concerns. I am pleased that you have requested our assistance and we stand ready to help in any way we can.

[...]

I believe the most important first-step our office can take is to work with the students, staff, and faculty of the Dance Program to develop a constructive, intentional, and systematic process to address the concerns raised. The multifaceted range of issues that have been identified, including concerns with climate, policies, practices, communication, and governance, require a long-term commitment.

[...]

Having said this, I also want to make my office accessible to you in a way that you feel will be most effective to resolve these issues, so I want to work with you to determine where to begin and what direction to take.
[...] If ... you wish to propose an alternative form of communication that respects your anonymity....

[...]

I appreciate that you contacted me directly and that you have taken what you feel is a risk to do so. Please know that we take your concerns very seriously and we will do everything we can to support an outcome that is meaningful and constructive for everyone.

We would like to point out:

Dr. Barceló has been the first official member of the administration who responded to a letter by directly addressing us. This is the first example of an official choosing to communicate with, rather than at us.
The Office for Equity and Diversity (OED) had offered its services to the dance program by March 13, and yet more than a month later the chair and director were at the stage of "working with [CLA] to develop a dialogue with" the OED. Given how proactive and swift the OED's response has been since we asked for help, we can only conclude that it was the dance program dragging its feet that caused the delay in action.
Dr Barceló including concerns with climate, policies, practices, communication, and governance identified a specific breakdown of the deep, systemic problems we were facing that proved her understanding of our open letters.
Dr Barceló asked us to tell her how she could help us, and how the OED's resources could assist us. This demonstrated a practice of effective alliance that we have not seen very often, thus far. Effective alliance begins with the understanding that those affected should define how resources may be made available to them, and by the commitment to take action that respects the requests of those asking.
The respect extended towards our 'anonymity', and the willingness to work with it, gave us an assurance of good faith that we had not received from anyone except the Ombudsman. This is what earned our trust, and why we agreed to a meeting with the OED leadership.

APRIL 21

We responded via email to Dr. Barceló’s letter to us, in which we wrote:

We would very much appreciate, if you would not like your letter to us to be made public, a public statement from the OED giving students as much information as the director and chair of the dance program have about your involvement. It is important to us that the dance program administration is not privileged with information that the students do not have public access to. We are copying on this email only those offices who have communicated directly with us and whom we believe to be acting in good faith.

We would like to point out:

In an email response to us, Dr. Barceló wrote, “You are welcome to post my letter on the blog or post in any other way that would be beneficial,” demonstrating a shared value for transparency that we have repeatedly demanded from the dance administration and that we have been actively engaged in, as we have publicly documented and posted all of our material for anyone to access.

APRIL 22

We had a very encouraging meeting with Dr. Rusty Barceló, Dr. Louis Mendoza and Dr. Rickey Hall. Ombudsman Josh Casper was also present.

We reposted our Open Letter to the Office for Equity and Diversity, which had been removed once already, in the Barker as well as in the Rarig Center where the theater program’s administration offices are. We also included Dr. Barceló's response, as well as our subsequent response (see April 21 entry in annotated timeline).

We would like to point out:

The postings in the Barker were taken down as of 8:05AM the next morning. At some point the same day, the postings in the Rarig Center were also removed. Again, no one has publicly claimed responsibility, and the faculty has not mentioned it in any of their communications.

APRIL 24

We were sent an email from Ombudsman Josh Casper saying he'd been asked if we would post an announcement on our blog for a meeting for students of color in the Theater Arts and Dance Department that would be facilitated by the MCAE (Multicultural Center for Academic Excellence), which is under the umbrella of the OED (Office for Equity and Diversity). This announcement was also distributed by the Peer Advisors to the dance and theater listservs.

They wrote:

The meeting isn’t about MCAE supporting or not supporting the protesters. We are aware that some students of color are supportive of the protest and others are not. Instead, this meeting is about creating a space for students of color to talk about their experiences on a predominately white campus.

We would like to point out:

We expressed a need for a safe space for students of Color in our demands more than three weeks prior to this announcement. The dance program ignored this demand, and did nothing to promote this meeting to its students of Color.
Within two days of meeting with us and being told that students of Color needed to be prioritized, the OED took the initiative of organizing this meeting through its subsidiary center. Clearly, it did not feel it needed to wait for months before figuring out what action they could take to start the process of dealing with the issues the protest had raised.
The administration did not endorse students of Color attending this meeting, whereas they had sent out emails to encourage students to attend the Peer-led meetings and to "congratulate" the students who attended the white caucus. We interpret the dance administration’s silence as an official refusal to acknowledge concerns about climate and to take responsibility for creating a safe space for students of Color. We find this to be illustrative of the lack of support that students of Color in the program receive, and especially in light of the faculty responses to the protest that have contributed to the hostile climate in the Barker.
The MCAE very sensitively acknowledged the diversity of opinion of students of Color regarding the protest, and stated its desire to serve everyone's voices, without refusing to discuss the protest and its specifics as the White Caucus announcement did.
The fact that the MCAE made the announcement through the Ombudsman and the Peers, and held the meeting in a different building than the Barker, resonates with our own decision to circumvent the dance program, when they are proving to be unresponsive to direct requests, in order to get action taken.

APRIL 30

Carl Flink sent out an email to the dance and theater listservs cosigned by him and Dr. Ananya Chatterjea, reporting on their meeting that prior Tuesday with the Office for Equity and Diversity and CLA Deans.

They wrote:

We also discussed building on the department’s established and ongoing commitment and activities as a University leader on issues of equity, social justice and difference. We thank the leadership of OED and CLA for their commitment to supporting this process of reflection with their expertise, experience and possible resources if needed.

As the end of the semester is fast approaching and full to bursting with departmental activities, we understand the need to take concrete steps to demonstrate the department’s commitment to a collaborative approach that involves all stakeholders even as our time is somewhat limited. To advance this, we want to schedule some conversations that can help us identify a group of faculty, staff and students as a working group to develop an action plan for next fall and beyond.

After consultation with the OED staff, we will convene another department town hall meeting on Tuesday, May 19 from 10 – 12 p.m. ...These meetings will focus on where the program and department should go in the coming year and beyond. These meetings will be team-facilitated by department leaders and OED staff members.

Vice Provost Barcelo has also generously offered to meet directly with dance program core faculty, affiliate faculty members and students to identify specific issues these groups face and would like addressed.

We wrote a letter to Dr. Barceló the same day, urging the OED to work with the department to move up the date of the next Town Hall meeting. We suggested:

Since no official meetings can be held during finals week, we would urge you to therefore try and find a way to have this meeting before classes are over. ... The first town hall meeting on March 13 was announced only five days in advance, and we feel that the last meeting that some students will attend deserves a similar sense of urgency.

If there is no way possible for this rescheduling to happen, then we would strongly recommend that the OED along with the Student Conflict Resolution Center set up office hours in the Barker to allow as many student and affiliate faculty input to be on the record as possible.

We would like to point out:

The first meeting between the dance program administration and the OED took place on April 28, more than a month after Carl Flink publicly stated his intention to work with the OED, and at least six weeks after the OED had offered its assistance. We managed to move from approaching Dr. Barceló for help to meeting with her in less than a week.
To hold a meeting 11 days after the last day of classes in the dance program makes this Town Hall even more inaccessible than the poorly attended Spring Break meeting on March 17. The seniors whose input will be unavailable after this, are unlikely to find it meaningful or convenient to attend a meeting two days after their their commencement ceremony.
We find it difficult to believe that the dance program needed two consultations with the OED to take the solitary step of scheduling another Town Hall meeting, when the director had stated that the first one was "only the first of such Town Halls this semester" back in early March, failing to deliver on her commitment.
Stating that they consider the department to be a “university leader on issues" negates that their leadership is exactly what we are protesting.
The chair's hesitant gratitude expressed for "resources, if needed" indicates that he still felt that perhaps the department was capable of handling the situation on its own. Frankly, we find this to be a sign of arrogance.
This email referenced the need to take "concrete steps to demonstrate the department’s commitment to a collaborative approach" while ignoring the very simple actions we demanded as proof of good faith engagement. The dance program has been consistently ignoring what we say to them, reducing the protest to vague references of issues raised, without actually engaging with any of the specifics.
The dance program is in the strange position of regressing with each meeting agenda--whereas the first Town Hall was called to "outline goals and move us towards certain parameters", the second one is prefaced with a desire to identify a limited group that will then be asked to generate an action plan. We can only presume that these decisions will be based partly on those able to be present at this ill-timed meeting. This desire to handpick the people able to give input also contradicts the administration's previous stance of merely waiting for student generated suggestions to reach them via the Peers-organized meetings.
If the dance program leadership, which has been the subject of our protest for the last three months, considers that they are equipped to co-facilitate a meeting designed to discuss the issues we have raised, then they have either not heard, or do not care that we believe them to be incapable of such a task.
Despite informing everyone of Dr. Barceló's offer to meet with anyone with concerns, her contact information was not included, nor was there any indication that the dance program would proactively assist to make it easier for students to meet her.
Our posting in the Barker was taken down as of 8:09AM the next morning. This is the third and fourth set of materials that have been immediately removed since our protest was ripped down in its entirety. No one has publicly claimed responsibility, and the faculty has not mentioned it in any of their communications.

MAY 4

We posted on the Barker walls our open petition to the chair and director of the dance program.

We would like to point out:

Our petition was immediately removed from the Barker early the next morning, before 8am, the time the building officially opens. This is the fifth time that our material has been removed in this manner, and still there has been no administrative response regarding this repeated removal, even though we have been posting notifications of this on our blog, and they are the first people to enter the building every day.
None of the letters to the dance administration that were written in response to this petition were forwarded to the listservs. As we were cc'd on the emails, we know that the letters, many of which were not posted in full on our blog, were received by the dance admin. On the other hand, when the Peers received a letter regarding the protest, they promptly distributed it to the theater listserv.

MAY 5, 2009

The chair sent an email to the theater and dance listservs cosigned by him and the director saying they had decided “to go forward with the May 19 meeting”:

It is important for everyone to understand that this is simply a next step in this dialogue and that it will be followed by more steps laid out in an action plan for the department that this town hall meeting will help develop.

In order to facilitate as many voices from students, staff and faculty being heard in this process Josh Casper from the University Student Conflict Resolution Center will gather suggested agenda items and future action steps via e-mail at caspe052@umn.edu.

[...]

In order to facilitate further posting of any documents related to these dialogues by US or anyone else who desires to do so on this subject and in order to to comply with University indoor posting procedure, a space will be created in both the Rarig Center and Barker Center for postings on an official bulletin board. Postings should have a date on them and be removed by the distributor of the posting seven days after posting date.

We would like to point out:

Despite informing everyone of the Ombudsman's offer to meet with anyone who wanted their voices heard, there was no indication that the dance program would proactively assist to make it easier for students to meet him. In our May 4 petition we asked that they provide a space for him in the building so that he would be most accessible. They seem to have no concern for the voices that will remain permanently unheard once the seniors finish attending their last day of classes.
The meeting's agenda has now been stated to be creating an action plan. Those unable to attend it have been told to send their comments to the Ombudsman. Given the program's inexplicable refusal to talk about the suggestions they were already given at the first Town Hall meeting, and by the Peers-organized meeting, and by us, we wonder how much confidence anyone has that sending in further suggestions is worth the effort.
The program's spin on creating a space for posting is amusing when all they have done is remove all the older posts on what used to be the student board in the Barker, and the script library bulletin board in Rarig, and rename their official purpose. It is ironic that in all our months of protest, we never found a need to take down other students' material to find space for our own.
The sudden reference to University indoor posting procedure to justify the administration's continued tearing down of our protest materials is bizarre given their previous support of the "fantastic images and quotes" and "dynamic event" that provided an "incredible journey". It seems that an "exhibit" which they only have to admire is acceptable, but a "dialogue" they have to engage with is not.
It is telling that a seven day posting limit is dictated for material referring to an unresolved, ongoing protest, when previous student postings have remained on the bulletin board for longer than items are allowed to pile up in the lost and found box.

MAY 7

We received an email from a concerned dance student (who wished to remain anonymous) to inform us that they witnessed the dance program specialist removing the protest postings on the glass walls of the Barker even before the building officially opened. On multiple occasions the program specialist has confirmed doing so verbally as well, explaining that she is doing her job by enforcing the university policy on indoor posting.

We would like to point out:

The dance program pretending to “further facilitate dialogues by US” (in the March 5 email from the director and chair) when they have been the ones pulling our postings down is blatant dishonesty. If they actually wished to let our words be read, they could have complied with our demands to repost the documents we asked them to in the space they consider appropriate, distribute the documents to the email listservs, and make hard copies available for all students.
Since the wholescale removal of the protest on April 5, protest postings have been removed five times, each time before or within minutes of the building officially opening at 8am. To date, there is still no administrative acknowledgment of any involvement in the removal of the protest materials.

Comment

2009-01-01T00:00:00.007-06:00

The comments here are not edited or censored by the blog owners in any way.

If you wish to leave a comment or get information on emailing us or the dance program administration specifically in support of the protest, you may also do so here.

FAQ

2009-01-01T00:00:00.004-06:00

A FAQ is in the works.

To leave a comment for the admins, go here.

Support the Protest

2008-05-04T14:38:00.004-05:00

Supporters of the protest can forward their comments and letters to:

Carl Flink
Chair of the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance
flink003@umn.edu
580C Rarig Center
330 21st Avenue South
Mpls, MN 55455
+1-612-626-1049

Dr. Ananya Chatterjea
Director of the Dance Program
ananya@umn.edu
203 Barker Center
500 21st Ave. S.
Minneapolis, MN 55455
+1-612-626-2280

Please copy the protesters (thisbyus@gmail.com) or Josh Casper, Ombudsman and Associate Director of the Student Conflict Resolution Center (caspe052@umn.edu) on any communication you send to the dance program if you would like to make sure that the protesters are informed of it.

Note: This section is moderated for comments of support only. If you want to leave a dissenting comment, it will not be published here; please post in comments, where posting remains unmoderated and unscreened.

NOTE: Three dissenting comments have been submitted to this section, and we have reposted them in comments.