The Last Campus-Wide Email

After I submitted my resignation letter to my chair and received the “got it” from administrators, I sent one last email out to our faculty and staff listserv.

To the faculty and staff at SUNY New Paltz,
It’s finally here: my official last post on the fac/staff listserv.

In 2014 I became the first Puerto Rican woman to be hired in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department. I was told I was hired to “diversify” the department and remained one of a handful of women of color to teach in the department since its founding as the Women’s Studies Program in 1974. And effective 3/21/25, I’ll become the first tenured Puerto Rican woman to resign from the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department. 

While it is tempting to list the harms I’ve endured and survived over the last decade at the hands of too many “colleagues,” a “mentor,” and two administrations (from dean, to provosts, to presidents), I am simply too tired. You can probably search the messages sent via this very listserv and find more than enough evidence of how the anti-racist, queer, feminist interventions I led or participated in were received on a campus that touts itself as progressive. As the founder of the once robust and active People of Color Network, it pains me to admit that the network we built to help us navigate the toxic white liberalism rampant on this campus was simply not strong enough to hold us. In my years here, I’ve watched far too many of my women of color faculty colleagues be pushed out and then have their departure treated as if they were willfully leaving. I have always been struck by the quiet of these exits, because many of them were not quiet women. 

I may be tired, but I’ve never been quiet. 

Over a year ago, our president and his subordinates chose to comply with orders based on a categorically incorrect definition of anti-semitism that villainized the pro-Palestinian and anti-colonial teaching, advocacy, and activism efforts on campus. After months of surveillance, public admonishment, and repeated breaches of the academic freedom that faculty are supposedly entitled to, President Wheeler chose to approve actions that would inflict physical and emotional violence on a peaceful group demonstrating what a queer feminist decolonial world might offer. 

I suppose being ripped from my student’s arms and dragged off campus in cuffs by state police dressed in riot gear as fellow faculty members watched from the sidelines is a fitting end to my time at this university.

[Content Warning: I wrote about that experience here: May 2, 2024]

In response to my beloved colleague (now retired) Karl Bryant’s question posed on this listserv—“Is this SUNY New Paltz now?”—I say, this has BEEN SUNY New Paltz. Perhaps because our community holds the current (gay, Black) President to standards they certainly did not hold the prior (straight, white) President to, more people are willing to see the repugnant and regressive character of campus culture.

I have been on medical leave trying to recover, working to rebalance my nervous system in hopes that I could find a healthy way and a solid reason to return. But I have also watched as the situation at SUNY New Paltz has become evermore repressive. Returning is not an option.

I hope that those of you who stay are able to find each other, hold on to each other—things are going to get a lot worse in the days and months to come. 

Free Palestine. Free Puerto Rico. And may our efforts toward liberation begin with accountability, transparency, and solidarity. 

Pa’ Lante, Siempre Pa’Lante!

~Jess