- Target:
- Colorado School of Mines
- Region:
- United States of America
- Website:
- docs.google.com
After recent events, including the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the Black Lives Matter protests, we the students and alumni of Colorado School of Mines are requesting that CSM administration and faculty take significant action to dismantle systems and policies that allow discrimination of Black, Asian, Latinx, Indigenous, and all other people of color and to end White supremacy in the Mines community.
We have created a proposal letter (see website link) that will be sent to the Mines administration to address our own role in systematic racism and to better promote social justice at our campus. By signing, you stand in solidarity to ensure that our campus is reflecting the values we want to see in the world, and the values that we find crucial to creating equity, equality, and justice for all.
We, the undersigned, call upon the Mines Administration to enact the following requests:
-Engaging existing programs such as Humanitarian Engineering (HE) and Diversity Inclusion and Access Committee (DI&A) to help administration successfully include topics of social justice and systemic racism in every course at Mines;
-Listening to the voices of the students and faculty within the Multicultural Engineering Program (MEP) and utilizing the space and communities they have created to ensure that needs of underrepresented students are being heard;
-Creating curricular requirements for every course at the undergraduate and graduate level to show (as they do for ABET accreditation) how the professor and the subject matter address social justice;
-Demonstrating its commitment to diversity and inclusion by becoming a partner institution of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME);
-Enhancing access to financial support and improving academic support for community college transfer students (many of whom are low-income/first-generation and/or students of color) to make the transition into Mines more accessible to students from various backgrounds;
-Committing to ending racist practices in STEM universities and industries by signing the #STEMforBLM Call to Action;
-Implementing a required admissions essay where prospective students (graduate and undergraduate) explain how they are planning to connect science and engineering to social justice;
-Creating new requirements for student organizations to show a plan for how their organization will address social justice in order to receive funding from the university;
-Requiring research proposals to show how the research will address social justice in order to be approved by Mines Office of Research Administration (ORA) before being submitted to the National Science Foundation (NSF);
-Opening discussions with current and prospective faculty about how to address their commitments to social justice and facilitating diverse and inclusive classrooms during campus interviews and job talks (this includes new hires in upper administration: deans, provost, department chairs, etc.);
-Continually holding Mines in its entirety (e.g. faculty, the administration, diversity organizations, etc.) accountable for working towards ending systemic racism and dismantling racist policies at Mines and in engineering by acknowledging the strong presence of racism on campus, implementing these requests, and going beyond this list of recommendations.
You can further help this campaign by sponsoring it
The Integrate Social Justice at Colorado School of Mines petition to Colorado School of Mines was written by Julianna Valenzuela and is in the category Justice at GoPetition.