From Senior Staff
Thoughts About Community, Post-Election
Nov. 13, 2024
Dear Colleagues,
Now that we have all had some time to absorb the results of the presidential election, we wanted to be in touch. We know that many of you — and certainly our undocumented students, our transgender students and so many other marginalized students — have strong emotions around the outcome of the election.
And yet, if we ran into any of you and asked what you were doing today, your answer would be some form of the following:
I'm teaching our students.
I'm serving students in my area.
I'm counseling our students.
I'm cleaning the classrooms for our students.
I'm tutoring our students.
I'm planning a student event in a Village.
We must continue all of this. We will continue to serve and support students of all backgrounds, as our mission statement so deliberately says. We will teach about diverse cultures. We will teach women's and gender studies. We will teach the sociology and economics and history that show us how we arrived at this point in time. We will teach the political science that will prepare students to advocate, to work for social justice, to engage with our civic institutions, to run for office.
We will continue our daily work toward equity and inclusion. We will continue to foster welcoming spaces for all, including those who are targeted outside of De Anza.
Again, we understand that many of you are discouraged. Many of you feel deep sadness; many of you are emotionally exhausted. The words of professor and cultural critic Roxane Gay in 2018 are significant still — and significant again — as she responded in a New York Times column to a woman who said she was outraged, and at the same time apathetic:
We try to find ways to balance taking care of ourselves and our families, with caring about the world we live in and the greater good....Most of the time, we do the best we can....[M]any of us get overwhelmed because we think we have to care about everything all the time, as if that's even possible....The grand thing about collective effort is that we can generally trust that someone is out in the world, doing important social justice work when we are too tired or burned out to join in.
If students need help at this time, please make sure they are aware of our many resources, including mental health and undocumented student services. If you yourself need to talk to someone, please find help through the Employee Assistance Program.
Gay's comments speak to community. We are so very grateful for our De Anza community — and our collective commitment to our students, to each other, to equity. We work toward that in our different capacities and roles. And when some briefly need to step back, others keep that work going. For the many of you who have told us of your feelings — and others of you who we know have the same emotions — there is hope in our community, and in our country. There are always cycles; there is always opportunity; there is always change. The arc, as the great leader Martin Luther King Jr. said, bends toward justice.
In community,
Christina Espinosa-Pieb
Lydia Hearn
Marisa Spatafore
Rob Mieso
Sam Bliss