DACA and Our Core Values
Dear students, staff, and faculty,
Welcome to the fall 2017 semester at Brooklyn College. I am glad you are here. The new semester provides us with an opportunity to reflect on our core values as an academic institution and to work together to enhance them in the coming year.
At Brooklyn College, people of many different backgrounds and life experiences come together to teach and learn from one another. Our campus is a place of extraordinary racial, cultural, and religious diversity. Since our founding in 1930, we have offered an excellent education to immigrants and others who form the complex and multi-dimensional diversity of the great borough that is our namesake.
This morning, the federal government announced that it is rescinding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which prevents the deportation of nearly 800,000 immigrants brought to the United States as children without documentation. This decision will harm the Brooklyn College community. I want to assure our DACA students that we will do everything in our power to support them.
As CUNY Chancellor James B. Milliken has said, “We are fully committed to the thousands of CUNY DACA students and will do all we can to support them. They represent some of the most talented and creative voices in the CUNY community and our city. We will do everything we can to help persuade Congress to shore up support for the DACA community, not undermine it, and CUNY will provide counseling and guidance to help our DACA students with their needs and questions.” Help is available at the CUNY Citizenship Now! Program at 212.652.2055.
There is more we can do to enhance our community and core values as the semester begins. Last year, we began a series of events called “We Stand Against Hate: Enhancing Compassion and Understanding.” The series included dozens of lectures, workshops, art exhibitions, concerts, and programs organized by Brooklyn College students, faculty, and staff. It aimed to deepen our historical, cultural, and political understanding of conflict in the world, enhance our compassion for one another across differences, and foster inclusiveness and peace on campus.
Recent demonstrations for white supremacy, including the August rally at the University of Virginia in which a neo-Nazi killed a civil rights activist, underscore the importance of standing against hate. If you are interested in helping to develop the We Stand Against Hate series this year, please join me in my office this Friday, September 8, at 4 p.m.
This fall, let’s take every opportunity to nurture a campus community of intellectual engagement, inclusion, and compassion for one another.
