On April 1st, 1996, four students began a hunger strike to fight for the departmentalization of Ethnicity and Race Studies at Columbia University. Today, in 2023, we are fighting the same fight. The incredible efforts of these students led to the creation of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race [CSER], a Center which has housed hundreds of undergraduate majors and minors in its short tenure. But a Center is not a Department. With over 124 current graduate and undergraduate students, we have one permanent professor, one small classroom, and no PhD program. It is unfathomable that an Ivy League Institution like Columbia, which boasts “diversity and inclusion,” would so blatantly undervalue CSER and the critical knowledge and frameworks that it brings to the Columbia community. If you support CSER’s movement to departmentalize, please sign below:

Image by Kate Gerhart