Response to the Dean's Message of Solidarity from GSAPP Alumni

Below is a copy of the open letter sent to Dean Andraos on June 5, 2020 which was signed by 629 GSAPP alumni from all programs.

Dean Amale Andraos
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
Columbia University
1172 Amsterdam Avenue
New York, NY 10027

June 5, 2020

Dear Dean Andraos,

We are GSAPP alumni writing in response to the Message of Solidarity you shared with our community on June 2. With all due respect, we feel your Message fell short of its own stated goals. An expression of solidarity without a clear commitment to action amounts to little more than optical allyship. You explicitly stated the call to “speak not empty words of change,” yet without a single actionable proposal within your Message, we are left to wonder: What is GSAPP actually going to do?

While listening may be the “foundation of our ongoing work as architects and educators,” GSAPP teaches disciplines of literal construction. Our actions and decisions have direct, tangible consequences on the lives of the people who inhabit our work. We have the power to design spaces that speak to our collective values and ideals; too often, however, we are complicit in projects that persist structures of inequity and injustice. 

Listening is fundamental yet passive, and insufficient to advance change. You share some difficult, important questions; indeed many of us have heard these questions from those black colleagues and friends who have been generous enough to share them, and we need to confront the hard work we each have to do. We must acknowledge that the school, university, and its constituents exist within, are part of, and benefit from systems of white supremacy and colonialism. We must all be active in becoming aware of and dismantling these relationships. As Dean of GSAPP, we expect you, and other leaders of powerful institutions, to tackle these entanglements head on.

Some, but not nearly all, of the issues we believe demand urgent answers include:

1. GSAPP’s continued inaction in the face of unconscionable and unacceptable barriers for Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) to be part of our institution as students or faculty, and the consistent lack of engagement with those communities impacted by these structures of exclusivity, including our fraught history with the Harlem community. 

2. The failure of the school to adequately equip all graduates with the necessary tools, skills, knowledge, and resources to become practicing, licensed professionals who are empowered to dismantle systemic racism and inequality.

3. The outlandish financial burdens placed upon students, which vastly favor the privileged and tacitly promote jobs within structures of systemic oppression to serve that debt, while pushing careers of meaningful impact further out of reach.

4. The failure to take a stand against firms that practice unpaid internships and pay gaps, a noted source of inequity as old as GSAPP itself. Leaders of such firms are welcomed as faculty, event speakers, and career fair recruiters, while the school does nothing to counter their discriminatory practices in its teachings.

5. The urgent, critical need to reverse our complicity in climate change, the underlying intersectional issues of race and privilege, and building a curriculum around the critical issues of our day. The built environment comprises a third of the global carbon footprint, causing environmental erosion that disproportionately affects underprivileged communities worldwide. The means to escape the initial effects of the new climate are held by the same people who benefit most from our silent enablement.

As alumni, we are looking for clear answers, backed by changes to the school’s curriculum, operations, and admissions, as well as in the discourse it facilitates and produces. We therefore ask you to create a specific, comprehensive plan to address these issues. We ask you to adopt transparent processes and public reporting that you will hold yourself accountable to. 

We believe it is GSAPP's responsibility to fully own its role in perpetuating the structural problems presented specifically within this letter, as well as the manifold others present in our society. Please join and engage us in doing the hard work of dismantling these systems of oppression.

Sincerely,

GSAPP Alumni Group for Action

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Full text of “A Message of Solidarity”, Dean Andraos email to GSAPP Alumni sent 6/2, follows below:

Dear GSAPP Community,

I write to express my commitment to addressing how racial injustice, bias, and violence course through and underpin our own discipline in visible and invisible ways. The deep pain, anger, and suffering that we have experienced and witnessed this past week is the pain, anger, and suffering of a long history of violent discrimination. To everyone grieving and calling for action in our community—our admired and beloved faculty, students, alumni, and staff—GSAPP stands with you in solidarity.

The recent tragic killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis by police, of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, come on the heels of a pandemic that has devastated communities of color in disproportionate numbers—laying bare the enduring inequities that shape the built world, and life and death in it. Both crises have revealed how the right to breathe is determined unevenly according to race, and how cities, across the US and the world, are at the front lines of these struggles—for justice and accessible housing, for climate action and clean water, for mobility and resilient infrastructures. As architects, planners, preservationists, designers, developers, and educators—dedicated to imagining more livable, more supportive, more equal, more sustainable environments—this is a reminder that we must be persistent in eradicating the prejudice and intolerance that cuts across access to these environments in cities around the world.

We must ask ourselves: Have we done enough to undo the systemic racism that is at the foundation of our disciplines and practices? Have we done enough to register the biases we all carry? While we have strived to be better and to do better, we must persist and be resolute in doing more.

We must stay present in this moment to recognize its specificity, to resist the urge to reduce it to yet another episode of repeated history, and to speak not empty words of change but take in what is being asked of us in this moment of intense racial trauma.

We must listen to what is being demanded in the loudest of gestures and spoken in the softest of silences—for this act of listening is and must be at the foundation of our ongoing work as architects and educators.

In solidarity,

Amale Andraos

Dean