On Her Experience at Columbia School of Social Work
In February, Hart shared the details about their exit from Columbia's School of Social Work in order to bring awareness to the deep institutionalized racism Black people face and how we can help change it, writing on Instagram:
"CSSW administration has attempted to silence me, push me out quietly and punish me for being unwilling to teach a gender course from an apolitical basis or hide the fact that I'm queer and non-binary. When I brought these issues to all levels of administration, I was warned by one dean not to complain about the student as she feared that they could counter with their own complaint purely out of spite (which I didn't realise was a common practice weaponized mostly against Black professors there). When I escalated the issue to upper level admin, I was gaslit, told I was the problem, and when I filed a complaint about those deans to their direct supervisors, I was told, curtly, that they 'considered the matter resolved.'
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After 4 years teaching at the University, my name and picture have been taken down from the website, and my emails removed from the server without any notification as to why (note: my class was/is still being offered—this time taught by a newly hired white cisgender professor who is using the syllabus I created).
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I was 1 of 10 Black adjuncts at CSSW and 1 of only 3 Black, queer and nonbinary adjuncts. There have been racist faculty that met no consequences and very little reprimand for their behaviour. White faculty and deans do nothing despite releasing a bogus values statement in June 2020, where Deans Monique Jethwani, Julien Teitler and Melissa Begg signed their names below a letter 'condemning anti black racism' after actively perpetuating it just months prior.
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Folks have been asking how to support—You can:
- Email the Deans of the School of Social Work
- Share this or the full statement on Medium.
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Demands:
-I don't want my job back. I don't want them to use my syllabus anymore. I want the Deans to be held to account for the harm they caused, to publicly admit what they did, and for CSSW to release the demographic information for adjunct and full-time faculty
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- For racism to no longer happen to any Black professor at that school (or any) ever again. This isn't the first time and I'm not the only one."