Memory Work
Kent,
You say you care about memory, but everything you've done since you've arrived at Syracuse has ignored the memory of our students. Funny how lawyers have a way of forgetting history. Kent, I'm a Remembrance Scholar. And I learned a lot about my student and the time period in which they attended SU. I'd like to think that living in that time, they cared about pressing social issues, like AIDS and the war on poverty. I don't think they would want their deaths used to obscure the social problems facing us today.
There ARE urgent challenges that require our attention: well-documented micro-aggressions that occur in class and on campus; endemic racism, classism, ableism, hetero-patriarchy; vicious sexual assaults and no resources afforded to survivors, just a bro-tastic campus that breeds rape culture, struggles for diversity that are about numbers but so much more;
Kent, we want to assure that your memory of our students is long--of their accomplishments long before you arrived, of the accumulated education debt anchored in legacies of chattel slavery, share cropping, and Jim Crow laws, of the gender disparities and violences women, queer students, and trans* students face on campus. If we are to memorialize the loss of those killed on Pan Am Flight 103, we must also face Syracuse's deeper, albeit tarnished, history. Cutting programs like POSSE or The Advocacy Center merely push these histories, and their memories, under the rug; it is a shameful history Syracuse chooses to ignore or, more accurately, erase. We refuse this erasure. Memory-work, after all, compels us to face all histories, not through the perspectives of those in power.
We ask you, Kent, to "Act Forward," maybe taking a cue from #DATmovementSU??
Taylor, Class of 2015, Remembrance Scholar