A Message on Racism and Brutality from The UK Graduate School

 

We in the Graduate School at the University of Kentucky stand with local and global efforts to eradicate racism and to reform any systems within higher education that may allow structural racism to exist or individualized racism to take hold.

 

The dehumanizing brutalities of our society are unacceptable, whether they are manifested through institutionalized systems of oppression or acts of violence by one human being on another.

 

Ahmaud Arbery (25, Brunswick, GA)

Breonna Taylor (26, Louisville, KY)

George Floyd (46, Minneapolis, MN)

Rayshard Brooks (27, Atlanta, GA)

 

We recognize that their deaths are among the most recent in a long brutal history of racism in the United States. Countless lives have been lost; others have been shattered and traumatized. Hearts are broken. We have a responsibility to work diligently to heal the social ills that plague us. 

 

Lives within the university and throughout the public sphere are changed as we engage in research and teaching. The Graduate School is working to assure that graduate education at the University of Kentucky changes lives for the better. 

 

The success of our Black graduate students is vitally important to us. Success is more than academic achievement: It is flourishing as a human being and thriving as a researcher, teacher, and scholar. It is enlarging one’s capacity for empathy and compassion. It is learning and growing with mentors who respect differences, and it is serving as such mentors to others. It is speaking up and taking reformative actions against injustices.

 

The Graduate School is committed to reviewing our policies and practices to identify how we may improve student success and supporting our Black students, in particular.  We are committed personally to looking inward, to reflecting deeply, to seeing how we can improve our own individual professional development in service to this mission. 

 

We are also taking the following immediate steps:         

  • Increasing funding and further expanding our commitment to the Black Graduate and Professional Student Association (BGPSA).
  • Funding a Faculty Fellow (a UK faculty member) who will focus on racial issues within graduate education, complemented by a Visiting Speakers Series, envisioned as a collaboration among the Graduate School, BGPSA, Black Student Advisory Council, Center for Graduate and Professional Diversity Initiatives (CGPDI), Graduate Student Congress (GSC), Student Government Association (SGA), and other campus organizations and units. 
  • Implementing opportunities within our Preparing Future Faculty and Preparing Future Professionals coursework (GS courses) and all of our professional enhancement programs and initiatives to promote readings, resources, and encounters that help graduate students achieve a higher level of understanding and practice in areas of social justice and racial equality. 

 

Novelist, short story writer, and activist James Baldwin wrote in 1963, “The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.”  This profound consequence of education resonates in graduate education and permeates life-long learning. The Graduate School embraces this paradox, and we will urge and support change to enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion.