Hunter College Believe It Or Not — A Rough Draft of a Work in Progress

Sometime around the Black Lives Matter – George Floyd Murder Protests in New York City – Floyd’s murder catalyzing “The National Reckoning With Racism” — several grad students in the IMA-MFA graduate program of Hunter’s Department of Film and Media Studies demanded that the grad program hire full-time Black and other ethnic minorities to improve the diversity of the program.

“A senseless massacre can be painfully clarifying about the state of a country. As the killing of George Floyd and countless other African-Americans have made clear, structural racism has become simultaneously mundane and pathological” — By Jiayang Fan, The New Yorker

IMA-MFA faculty are made up of full-time faculty who teach in the undergraduate program of the department. There is one Black tenured assistant journalism professor in the department, me, who lost interest in teaching in the grad program years ago when it was being configured because of — primarily but not exclusively — the race politics of the department. There also is one full-time nontenured Distinguish Lecturer, Black, who also teaches journalism in the undergraduate program but not in the graduate program.

The demands for more IMA-MFA faculty diversity became topical on the department’s graduate listserv and, in the course of discussions, sexual harassment allegations emerged…