The NDMU Faculty approved the following message by majority vote.

We work actively, especially in our local situations, to eliminate the root causes of injustice in order to realize a world of peace, justice, and love.

You are Sent: Constitution of the School Sisters of Notre Dame

In the spirit of the mission of Notre Dame of Maryland University to create inclusive communities, and the SSND commitment to eliminate the root causes of injustice, the faculty of NDMU affirms its unequivocal opposition to racism against Black and Brown people and to end discrimination against all people of color in all of its forms.

We have witnessed with horror the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Daniel Prude, Walter Wallace, Jr., Deonte Wright, Adam Toledo, and many other Black and Brown Americans in acts of racist violence, acts that leave others maimed, like Jacob Blake, and communities terrorized. We have seen Brown families torn apart at the southern border, denied the right to apply for asylum, and left in life-threatening circumstances. We have watched a frightening rise in violence against Asians and Asian-Americas, most recently against the victims of the Atlanta spa shootings, targeted for being Asian and for being women. We recognize with grief the pervasive influence of structural and institutional racism throughout our society, acknowledging that higher educational institutions share in the history of injustice.

The legacy of the SSNDs reflects their efforts to end racial injustice through “education to transform the world,” a purpose that we as a faculty have in common with our university community. With hope and admiration, we have witnessed the call to protest police brutality, end violence against communities of color, and affirm that Black lives matter. We stand united in mission, solidarity, and allyship with movements for racial justice, and recognize that ending racism and advancing the position of women must go hand-in-hand.

In this historic time of racial reckoning in the United States, we affirm our commitment at NDMU to take action against racism by creating systems and programs that promote racial equality at our university and beyond. We seek to empower our students and to work collaboratively with staff and administration to further this collective goal for justice. With the aim of universal inclusion and equity, we commit ourselves to making anti-racism a fundamental part of the life and culture of NDMU through our curriculum, pedagogy, policies, programs, and practices, weaving anti-racism efforts into all that we do as a university. We believe that our work will be successful if it is based in our community and centered on our students.

As a faculty, we stand united and committed to:

  1. Affirm explicitly our pledge to anti-racist work, and to take action that promotes racial justice at our university and beyond.
     
  2. Reflect on and acknowledge conscious and unconscious biases and individual complicity in racism, in addition to recognizing the role these biases play in supporting white supremacy.
     
  3. Acknowledge the problem of institutional racism in higher education and take substantive steps to dismantle systems that create racial injustice.
     
  4. Continue to strengthen and promote an inclusive university-wide culture that supports all faculty, students, administrators, and staff of color.
     
  5. Further the hiring and retention of Black, Brown, and other underrepresented people of color as full-time tenure-track faculty in order to create a professoriate that better reflects the racial and ethnic make-up of our student body to the end of enriching student learning. Encourage the appointment of diverse Board members and administrative leadership.
     
  6. Advocate for and support equity in salary and benefits for all faculty, understanding that fairness in compensation promotes racial, as well as gender, justice.
     
  7. Infuse anti-racism into the curriculum and the classroom of all NDMU schools and programs.

A Faculty Anti-Racism Task Force (ARTF) has been formed to join with NDMU students, administrative leadership, and community to work collaboratively in order to ensure that our university is an anti-racist institution. Our task force continues to gather lived experiences of racism and hear ideas on how to bring about justice from students, faculty, staff, and administrators. The task force will support faculty and administrative committees at NDMU to advocate for significant innovation and change in faculty hiring and compensation in order to encourage greater faculty diversity; inventory current curriculum and teaching to assure it supports systemic justice; develop anti-racist programs of study and pedagogy for all schools and programs; and create, nurture, and continue to prioritize culture and structures of support for people of color at our university.