Response to Belmont Statement
#BeBetterBelmont Response to Belmont’s public letter distributed July 27, 2020
Dear Dr. Fisher and Belmont University administration,
We are thankful for the public message issued on 7.27.2020 in which Belmont University affirmed that “Black Lives Matter.” This was a much clearer acknowledgement of the BLM movement than Belmont’s original message in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
We appreciate that Belmont has consolidated the feedback heard in listening sessions, and has responded by developing a list of next steps that administration and faculty will take in order for Belmont to bring an end to systemic racism. As members of the #BeBetterBelmont campaign, we stand with Belmont in wanting to fight against systemic racism.
However, while the listening sessions and campus improvements are important investments in diversity, there hasn’t yet been any clear indication from Belmont that the University takes responsibility for its own institutional complicity with systemic racism. For Belmont to commit fully to anti-racist work, it must first begin with an honest self-assessment of personal complicity with racist structures, whether or not that complicity was intentional.
“Anti-racism is the active process of identifying and eliminating racism by changing systems, organizational structures, policies and practices and attitudes, so that power is redistributed and shared equitably.” — NAC International Perspectives: Women and Global Solidarity
If Belmont University intends to put an end to systemic racism and be truly anti-racist (as defined above), then Belmont must first publicly acknowledge the power conferred to racist systems through its partnerships with the prison industrial complex, which is a significant perpetrator of systemic racism in the United States.
The fight against systemic racism may be bolstered by developing anti-racist policies, practices, and culture. Therefore, Belmont needs to improve and evaluate its organizational structures, increase transparency concerning financial and governance practices, and refine its anti-racist Vision 2025 goals with clearer measures.
We specifically observe that even under the stated Vision 2025 plan, Belmont fails to acknowledge or amend a crucial complicity in systemic racism: its association with CoreCivic. There is no mention of the fact that CoreCivic’s CEO Damon Hininger has a presence on Belmont’s Board of Trustees, nor is there any mention of the use of CoreCivic dollars for Belmont’s funding. In these ways, Belmont’s Vision 2025 plan fails to divest from CoreCivic and the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC).
As we have stated before, the Prison Industrial Complex punishes people instead of merely healing them. The PIC allows for legal slavery, has been flagged as violating human rights and civil liberties, and disproportionately hurts historically oppressed communities and people of color. We stand strong in our position that Belmont University cannot be anti-racist until it has fully divested from CoreCivic and the PIC, and we will not rest until this work is done.
Although we believe Belmont’s response falls short of true anti-racist work, we are glad to see some alignment between our demands and the steps that Belmont is taking to address the four overarching themes identified during listening sessions. In the following, we outline this alignment, as well as our analysis of how Belmont’s response addresses our demands:
Our Demand:
[Define] Belmont should publicly acknowledge a mission for anti-racist work/policy institutes and commit to that mission as part of its 2020 Vision and strategic priorities with clear goals and a progress report.
Belmont’s Response:
[Strategic Shift in Culture] Diversity, inclusion, and equity will continue to be embedded in the soon to be announced Vision 2025 plan, but it will also be elevated in our efforts as one of eight broad strategies for the overall guidance of the university.
Our Analysis: We acknowledge that Belmont plans to incorporate diversity, inclusion, and equity as part of its 2025 Vision. However, this is only a subset of anti-racist work, which begins with and is informed by an honest reflection and self-assessment of personal complicity. True anti-racist work must actively fight systemic racism through anti-racist policies, practices, and culture. If Belmont wants to put an end to systemic racism as has been stated, then we would like Belmont to take its action further by clearly defining and acknowledging anti-racism as part of Vision 2025, with clear goals and a progress report toward these ends.
Our Demand:
[Develop] Belmont University should implement a campus-wide hate and bias incident- reporting system with safeguards for victims and transparent methods for addressing all reports effectively. Belmont should ensure that collected data on incidents is disseminated for analysis, policy improvements, and prevention.
Belmont’s Response:
[Providing Additional Student Support] We will create a formalized process for reporting and following up on incidents involving inappropriate race-related interactions.
Our Analysis: We think this action is a great start, but weneed Belmont to disclose how “policy improvement” is defined, particularly in relation to Belmont’s understanding of how racism manifests in its own campus, culture, and structures. We would like to see a funded reporting system that deals with issues beyond race to include allhate and bias incidents, especially to have safeguards for the victims. We would like to see the administration review these incidents and use them for policy improvement and incident prevention to protect students, faculty, and staff from hate and bias.
Our Demand:
[Develop] Belmont University should reinvest in the community by undergoing new searches and screenings to identify local groups who work to ameliorate the far-reaching and insidious consequences of the prison industrial complex. Belmont should also establish relationships with local BIPOC-owned organizations, especially historically black colleges and universities, to support and deepen our mutual commitment to pursuing and preserving diversity in education.
Belmont’s Response:
[Providing Additional Student Support]
● More business and professional people of color will be invited to speak on their professional pathways, whether they are physicians, scientists, lawyers, judges, business leaders, entrepreneurs, etc.
[Supporting the Nashville Community]
● We will explore partnerships and educational opportunities with community organizations devoted to racial justice and reconciliation.
● We will ensure that a diverse mix of businesses, congregations and other organizations are invited to campus events such as job fairs, church fairs, etc.
● We will expand our partnerships with local HBCUs Fisk and Tennessee State.
Our Analysis: We are happy to see a push to include the diversity of Nashville’s BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) population as guest speakers. We share a desire to invite BIPOC organizations to campus events and to expand partnerships with local Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). We alsoask Belmont to partner with racial justice organizations that are focused on the Prison Industrial Complex, which is one of the most weaponized and insidious forms of racial injustice in America. We also would like to emphasize that BIPOC educators and speakers should be paid competitively for their efforts to come to share their learnings with the Belmont community since historically communities of color have been asked to share their knowledge for free which undermines efforts towards anti-racism.
Our Demand:
[Disclose] Belmont should also disclose any other relevant screening processes for outside partnerships including community organizations, vendors, and third-party contracting services.
Belmont’s Response:
[Supporting the Nashville Community] We will continue to build up our purchasing program designed to engage minority-owned businesses as business partners with Belmont.
Our Analysis: We love the effort to build vendor relationships with minority-owned businesses, but we wish to see further transparency in the procurement process. We would like the screening process for all outside partnerships, including vendors, to value and prioritize businesses owned by BIPOC. We want this screening process to identify and exclude organizations that are directly or indirectly complicit in, dependent upon, or derived from the prison industrial complex.
Our Demand:
[Develop] Belmont University should reform service programs so that they do not re-enact colonialist exchanges with communities of color. For example, Belmont should actively identify and root out any possible white saviorism that could manifest in service programs when there is a power imbalance between students and residents.
Belmont’s Response:
[Supporting the Nashville Community] We will expand service learning opportunities for students to serve under-represented populations in our communities.
Our Analysis: Student outreach, while well-intended, can actually hurt under-represented populations in our community if this outreach is not guided by a critical understanding of personal accountability for systemic racism. That is why we ask again that service learning opportunities involve careful preparation so as to not re-enact colonist exchanges with communities of color or underrepresented populations. It is important to consider the power imbalance between the students in the service program and the populations they’re designed to help, in order to avoid any white saviorism which would validate or uphold systemic racism.
Our Demand:
[Develop] Belmont University should create a plan in collaboration with faculty and departments to create courses, workshops, and curricula focused on restorative justice; social justice and reform; racial justice; and race, ethnic, and gender studies for the 2021 academic year. This plan should include a significant increase in investment in order to fund this type of curriculum, as well as the hiring of additional faculty talent to help develop such programming.
Belmont’s Response: [Enhancing our educational efforts]
● This year’s Faculty Workshop will focus on opportunities to address race, diversity and inclusion.
● Faculty members will be asked to include diversity and inclusion-related topics in each of their classes — we will seek ways to utilize the faculty evaluation process to reward those who lead and support this effort.
● “Champions” will be identified in each college who will mentor and partner with faculty colleagues in their efforts to embed diversity in their courses.
● First Year Seminar will address additional topics and readings related to race and inclusion.
● First Year Writing classes will be restructured to provide additional opportunities to learn and write about race and diversity.
● Both the Curb College of Entertainment & Music Business and the College of Music & Performing Arts have been asked to examine their programs to determine how to broaden the learning and presentation of music to further include genres that are rooted in the Black experience.
● Additional WELL Core sessions and BOLD training workshops will address topics such as implicit bias and micro-aggressions.
● Diversity, equity and inclusion training will be required for all student leaders.
● We will redouble our efforts to recruit and retain diverse faculty and staff.
● Our efforts to enhance faculty diversity through the Faculty Scholars Program will continue and intensify.
● We will seek ways to utilize the complete and accurate history of the Belmont Mansion as an educational component to help students, and all who come in contact with the Mansion, to understand and acknowledge the history of portions of Belmont’s property prior to the establishment of Belmont College/University. The Faculty Senate has an ad-hoc committee developing a plan to create a physical plaque or other monument that will recognize the full history of the property.
Our Analysis: While we love to see a focus on including race, diversity, and inclusion in educational endeavors in partnership with faculty, we still see a lack of emphasis on restorative and social justice which is concomitant with race and diversity & inclusion. However, it has been proven repeatedly that Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) training alone is not enough to advance racial justice and equity. Without a balanced focus on justice, we could be at risk of studying race from a purely academic and potentially colonist viewpoint which perpetuates systemic racism without giving students the tools and frameworks to remediate systemic racism. We also wish to see an explicit investment effort towards these ends in terms of hiring new faculty or staff to accommodate these new requirements.
In closing,
We believe that Belmont can make a successful effort to divest from CoreCivic because Belmont has made changes to its associations in the past. In 2007, Belmont University cut ties with the Tennessee Baptist Convention, which allowed the university to have a broadened educational ministry. It is now time for Belmont to make another change and join other universities in a prison divestment campaign (PDC). Universities like Brown, Claremont McKenna, Columbia, Duke, Georgetown, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Vassar College, Vanderbilt, and Yale have all begun — and in some cases completed — campaigns to divest from the Prison Industrial Complex. All of our work is guided by research and alignment with a larger coalition of these divestment campaigns.
It should be noted that our divestment efforts represent a large body of Belmont community members. Since the movement’s inception, #BeBetterBelmont has amassed over 2,000 followers on Facebook and Instagram, and our letter of demandshas collected 700 signatures from Belmont students, alumni, and community members alike. Our numbers represent a wide and growing demand for Belmont University to acknowledge and dismantle its historic and current contributions to systemic racism.
To support Belmont in its anti-racism efforts and build a continued dialogue, we persist in our request for an opportunity to speak about our demands with the Belmont administration and President Bob Fisher, as we have repeatedly done since July 13, 2020. We again request further financial transparency with an added interest in exploring how financial data and practices were or were not examined in the formation of Belmont’s most recent Vision 2025 plan.
#BeBetterBelmont is here to support positive change for the Belmont community and the world at large. These requests represent our mission-driven desire to walk with Belmont on its journey toward applying honest, holistic justice to all of its policies, practices, investments, and governance.
