Photo from Stop Spencer at the University of Michigan Facebook page

We, the faculty and staff of Semester in Detroit, vehemently oppose Richard Spencer and white supremacy in all their violent and nefarious forms. We stand in solidarity with students organizing to Stop Spencer from coming to our university.  We believe it would be impossible to provide a safe environment for students and the university community at-large were Spencer to come to campus. Of course, we understand that simply denying Spencer’s request will not make our campus safe for marginalized students.  However insufficient, we believe this is a fundamentally necessary step in the longer-term fight against the disease of institutionalized racism and systemic white supremacy of which Spencer is a mere opportunistic and symptomatic scab.  By granting Spencer the opportunity to speak on our campus, the university would be sanctioning, however unintentionally, the further emotional, and possibly physical, traumatization of our students and the larger university community; moreover, we would be undermining our own best efforts toward creating a more diverse, inclusive and equitable campus community.  Therefore, we call on our university to respect our students’ lived expertise when they say they will not be safe and deny Spencer’s request to speak on campus.

In solidarity,
Semester in Detroit faculty & staff