#BoycottHarvardJobTalk

Harvard graduate students training in Latinx Studies and allies will boycott all Latinx Studies candidate meetings. This boycott will start with Prof. Tomás Jiménez’s events on November 17th and 18th.

We write as graduate students invested in Ethnic Studies, and particularly as scholars of Latinx Studies. After pausing its cluster hire in “the areas of ethnicity, indigeneity, and migration,” Harvard has resumed its job talks and interviews with short-listed candidates. As graduate students working in Ethnic Studies, we are incredibly disappointed with the manner in which this search has been conducted. To be clear: the short-listed candidates do not meet the needs of Latinx Studies graduate students, many of whom require mentorship that centers Black Latinidad and Caribbean History and Literature. By last count, Harvard has twenty-four graduate students pursuing a Secondary Field in Latinx Studies. We raised these concerns with the Deans of FAS and GSAS in spring 2020, but Harvard ignored them — and selected candidates who are unable to advise current graduate students.

Moreover, this search’s events have been heavily censored and surveiled. Alongside job talks, Harvard usually holds informal student sessions with finalists: ostensibly, so that candidates and students can chat openly and respectfully in a smaller setting. This year’s sessions were not held in that spirit. For the first time in our memory, we have not been able to speak to candidates without a faculty chaperone present. We were told which kinds of questions we could and could not ask of our future mentors and teachers. The Zoom chat function was disabled, despite several accessibility requests to keep it open. We have also found candidates unwilling to meaningfully discuss Black Latinidad, the limits of colonial archives, or gender analysis. In fact, our knowledge in these areas has been disregarded.

In light of these issues, we call upon graduate students to boycott all future job talks in Latinx Studies. We will not be attending the November 17th job talk or graduate student session because we consider this search — by its very design — unable to to meet our needs. We have, time and again, articulated our concerns to administrators and attended all previous talks, in the hope that we would recognize future mentors. We have not.