We the Bard College Community,
Stand firmly in Solidarity with the Diaspora Coalition of Sarah Lawrence College and the student body in their efforts to decolonize their institution and demand the treatment they so clearly deserve. We, as one of their many liberal sibling predominantly white institutions, share in the sins perpetrated by spaces of higher education. This statement also stands against the senior administration of Sarah Lawrence and any administration that stands complacent in and directly supports systems of bourgeois elitism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.
We recognize and applaud the persistence in action and look toward it as a model to counter complicity on our own campus. Our proclamation of solidarity stresses our institutional similarity, with a focus and critical understanding of our positionality as a Predominantly White Institution in the pastoral, that occupies native lands and continues a history of segregation, exclusion, slave labor, and elitism that is the legacy of the Hudson Valley.
We stand in power with reimagining what an institution of higher education has the potential to be. Bard is nominally “a place to think” but instead is more accurately a gatekeeper for financial success within our society. The College must be that place for all students, not just those who have the social position and economic ability to access it. We are moving forward, as a campus, towards creating a space that allows all students to access higher education through restorative justice that empowers and upholds the concerns of individuals who have been most affected by this institution’s policies.
The Bard community stands united in the fight for racial and economic justice against an administration that has repeatedly failed to address the demands of students. We want you, the Diaspora Coalition, and all students affected by systemic oppression, to know that we, the Bard Community, do not just stand in solidarity, but in action.
In Power,
The Dissonance 