To the Silver Community,
I want to take this moment to extend my warmest and most enthusiastic congratulations to our 2021 NYU Silver graduates! We hope you continue to celebrate your outstanding accomplishments, and we look forward to supporting you as you take your next steps after this intensely challenging academic year has drawn to a close. I hope all members of the Silver community are continuing to take care of yourselves and your loved ones, and are, like me, recognizing some signs of hope on the horizon for our future.
During this time of transition, it’s important to reflect on where we are as a School community and where we must continue to grow. We have been navigating with great perseverance through the many challenges of 2020-21, while working to build a culture of inclusive excellence, and a more equitable, diverse, and welcoming community. I am deeply appreciative of all the hard work so many of you have engaged in to build and strengthen our School community.
I have been engaged in my own ongoing self-reflective process around anti-racism, repair, and humanizing our School; I am learning and consulting with colleagues, including with one of our Restorative Justice trainers, L.Tomay Douglas, MSW, and I am continuing to realize what a “work-in-progress” both I and the School are. With that, I want to apologize for the role I have played in the harm and pain released from discussions on the self-assessment on race and racism at the School conducted by Dr. Kenneth Hardy, and identified in discussions with the School’s Social Justice Praxis Committee and in a recent Statement of Harm email. I should have more transparently sought broader and earlier input on the decision to release the assessment themes and recommendations of Dr. Hardy without releasing the “raw data” (which would have breached anonymity by including personally identifiable narratives from community participants). Since receiving this assessment, we have been building a Silver climate support system to address harms at the School drawing on restorative justice principles, but we also should have moved more quickly to undertake a comprehensive review and strengthening of accountability systems at the School to address past harms and prevent future harms.
Apologies need to be joined with a commitment and action for change, so I want to reaffirm my commitment to fostering that needed change and to building a more inclusive, antiracist School grounded in individual and organizational accountability, transparency, and trust. Toward that end, I want to let you know about a couple of particularly relevant action items on our DEI agenda at Silver: