To President Neeli Bendapudi and the Penn State Board of Trustees:

We are members of the larger Penn State community:  alumni, faculty, emeritus faculty, staff, students, and concerned citizens.  Many of us looked forward with great hope and anticipation to your appointment as President of Penn State University.  However, we find ourselves concerned with the change of plans around funding a Center for Racial Justice. While appointing a senior faculty member from Penn State to lead DEIB efforts may be an effective alternative, we want to be sure this change does not slow things down. We urge you to give this work the priority, attention, and funding that is needed to bring substantive change to the university. 

Concerns about the lack of an inclusive, welcoming community both within and outside Penn State have been voiced for years. The challenges around the recruitment and retention of Black faculty members, and their experiences of racism on campus and in our communities, are well-documented in the first and second More Rivers to Cross reports (links in the update below). It will take significantly more attention and funding to rectify these challenges than is currently being allocated. We are way behind several Big Ten institutions that have set ambitious goals and provided the funding needed to reach those goals.

Through the creation of a President’s Select Commission, multiple stakeholders invested countless hours to create a vision of a university whose practices align with its core values, and to identify key changes needed to reach that vision. We urge you to include the faculty members already involved in this work in your plans as they have already studied the issues.

We ask that you provide Jennifer Hamer with the funding and authority needed to immediately begin to implement changes. We encourage you to allow her to set ambitious, measurable goals around recruitment, retention, and reducing racism. And we urge you to provide strong institutional and financial support to help us achieve the vision of a welcoming, diverse, and racially just community both on campus and in the broader society.

We recognize that difficult decisions must be made to ensure that the University remains fiscally sound and that this is a challenging political environment. And yet, this work is arguably more important than numerous initiatives on campus that are still moving forward despite the budget cuts. We have to prioritize promoting racial justice even when budgets are tight and especially when it is difficult. As students, staff, faculty, alumni, and community members, we believe that it’s well past time to act. We are… committed to change and stronger together.