Email sent to diversity-allies, 3/31/2022
I sent the following email to the diversity-allies mailing list in CSE:
From reges@cs.washington.edu Thu Mar 31 14:57:24 2022 Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2022 14:57:23 -0700 (PDT) From: Stuart Reges <reges@cs.washington.edu> To: diversity-allies <diversity-allies@cs.washington.edu> Subject: land acknowledgement list I have put together a resource that people might find valuable. I have made a list of all of the winter and spring courses in CSE that include an indigenous land acknowledgement. It is interesting to see the variety of courses that include this and the variations in wording across courses. The list is available here: https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~reges/land.shtml As I mention on the page, it's likely that I haven't found all of the courses that include a land acknowledgement. If people know about other courses that do this, please let me know so that I can add them to the list. --Stuart
They took a long time to decide what to do with this message. I sent it on a Thursday and they hadn't resonded as of the next Monday, so I sent a message asking whether there was a problem. They didn't answer that for over 24 hours. The response said that, "Your message was deemed inappropriate by the moderator." I then wrote:
Could you explain in what way my message was inappropriate? It is a resource that helps instructors to understand who is using a land acknowledgment and how they are using it. This is recommended in the Allen School's diversity best practices document. How is this inappropriate?
About 15 minutes later I received this message from the director of the Allen School:
Dear Stuart, The Allen School Executive committee reviewed your post to diversity-allies and decided to reject it. The post fails to meet the moderation guidelines, specifically the part about growing as allies to underrepresented groups: The goal of this list is to encourage the exchange of ideas that work toward informing us, educating us, and helping us to grow as allies to underrepresented groups of people in computer science. Additionally, we noted that the page you created is formatted differently from your website. It is designed to appear as an official Allen School page. It is not. I ask you to remove the UW and Allen School logos from that page.
They did not explain how my page fails to grow allies. I assume it was because the page included my version of the land acknowledgment that has drawn fire from some individuals.
But I agreed with the point about the style of web page I was using. I was careless in setting up the page and borrowed a web form that I have used for other work at the Allen School. I agreed with the desire not to include the Allen School logos, so I immediately changed the form of the web page to make it clear that it comes from me personally and not from the Allen School.
last updated 04/07/2022