The building hid in plain sight. No signage marked the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration department’s space at 82-90 Wall Street. Only a granite breezeway distinguished the building from its neighbors, Stoeckel Hall and Common Grounds. Apart from that and a few signs marking Yale property, unsettling reminders of the University’s low-profile incursions into New Haven spaces, very little announced the department’s presence. Unsure if I’d found the right place, I hesitated outside for several minutes before stepping in.
I took a narrow staircase up to the second floor, where a portrait—one of a girl wearing a foil covering, torch in hand—greeted me, a decolonial spin on Lady Liberty: already evidence of customization in a new space. From there, I wandered over to the office of Assistant Professor of ER&M Tarren Andrews (Bitterroot Salish, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes), a scholar of the early medieval North Atlantic and one of the department’s latest hires. On her door hung a bulletin board, where she pinned poetry: “This is a difficult place / to hold ground,” reads Jenny L. Davis’s “Gifts Between Ghosts,” inches away from an Anglo-Saxon beekeeping charm. Inside her office, unlikely shelfmates packed her bookcases: books on the Vikings stood alongside Sarah Hernandez’s We Are the Stars: Colonizing and Decolonizing the Oceti Sakowin Literary Tradition, a work recovering the literary record of Oceti Sakowin (formerly known as the Sioux) women. Her dog, a gentle Great Danoodle, greeted me even before she did.
“Brecon!” Professor Andrews called. She’d named her dog after the Brecon Beacons, a Welsh mountain range. I found similar signs of Professor Andrews’s intersectional scholarship everywhere in her office decor: I let my gaze linger on an illuminated manuscript on her wall, just beside a photograph of a Native dwelling.
Sunlight streamed through two floor-to-ceiling windows, warming the room on an otherwise chilly day. Brecon trotted up to where I sat opposite Professor Andrews and began to curiously sniff my arm as if examining a stranger in his territory. I laughed, catching sight of a Manjula pothos’s leaves snaking toward the shelves below. In her freedom to decorate, I could tell that a new office—like any new room—meant a new energy, a psychological as much as a physical change.
***
To understand the significance of the building in the wake of widespread protest, institutional neutrality, and a national shift toward curricular conservatism, we must look back nearly six decades to the ER&M’s origins in student resistance. Student demands for ethnic studies began with the Third World Liberation Front, a student-activist coalition that formed at San Francisco State University (SFSU) and the University of California, Berkeley in early 1968. Following the November 1968 dismissal of SFSU’s George Murray—a Black graduate student, English lecturer, and the Black Panther Party’s Minister of Education—the Third World Liberation Front struck for an ethnic studies program, complete with hiring power and total control over its curriculum. Its global, “Third World” vision cut across racial and national boundaries, part of the Front’s broader anti-imperial ambitions. Strikers at UC Berkeley rallied for a similar program, though they pushed for a “Third World College” rather than simply a department within the existing institution. According to the original proposal, the “college” label would grant the ethnic studies program necessary autonomy—without it, a “white majority” could control and sanitize any attempt at a “Third World studies” program. Violence erupted through both schools: Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, called in the National Guard to defuse strikes at Berkeley. Helicopters dropped tear gas canisters on protesters, leading to mass arrests and hospitalizations.
SFSU and UC Berkeley responded to this pressure by creating an ethnic studies college and department, respectively, in 1969, and the movement spread eastward. After other schools in the University of California system, the University of Washington, and the University of Colorado Boulder adopted similar programs, Yale founded its own.
The push for ER&M to become an official program at Yale began in 1992, after Yale students passionate about decolonizing the University’s humanities curriculum approached Michael Denning, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American Studies, with a student-designed Asian American Studies syllabus. As the number of proposed curricula expanded from one to six, Yale began to reach out to scholars for part-time professorships, positions that developed into more formal appointments as interest grew. In 1998, along with designation as a double major, Yale gave its ethnic studies program a name: Ethnicity, Race, and Migration.
“Ethnicity” and “race” sound somewhat similar, perhaps more in line with the “ethnic studies” or “critical race theory” at the forefront of familiar debates in public education. Their connection to “migration” may seem tenuous at first glance, but including “migration” globalizes the major’s concerns. ER&M imagines and grapples with indigeneity, ethnicity, nationality, and race around the world, inevitably leading to questions surrounding how entire populations move, change, and diversify. In this way, ER&M calls for an interdisciplinary approach, one that also considers how “disciplines” themselves emerge as products of empire in academia.
ER&M’s interdisciplinary (maybe antidisciplinary?) spirit, however, received little attention from Yale. ER&M acted as diversity insurance against negative publicity, and the University often relegated it to the margins of its academic landscape—a neglect that took on a geographic dimension as much as a scholarly one. Before moving onto Wall Street, some of the faculty worked out of a few offices at 35 Broadway. Resembling a warehouse, the former program building sits behind Toad’s Place, an active nightclub. Sandwiched between that and the Off Broadway Theater, the building’s near-inaccessible location spoke volumes about Yale’s attitude toward the program: even scouring Google Maps produces no images of its actual entrance.
Given that most instructors also held joint appointments with other departments, many chose to work in separate, more appealing spaces. Only now can faculty work alongside each other—a welcome change, and a crucial one, at least for Professor Andrews. “At any institution, having a dedicated space is a signal of institutional enfranchisement. I think that’s hyper-true at a place like Yale, where space is at such a premium,” she said.
Though the difference might seem minor at first, ER&M’s lack of departmental status stunted the major’s growth for years. Designation as a department comes with a host of privileges, most notably hiring power—up until recently, Yale required ER&M to appoint faculty jointly, with no slots exclusively for the major. Most problematic of all, the lack of a dedicated space signaled the University’s apathy toward ER&M’s future—a source of frustration for many of the program’s faculty. Especially given ER&M’s increasing popularity with undergraduates, questions surrounding departmental independence and hiring power grew more urgent by the year.
Tensions peaked in March 2019, when 13 professors withdrew their labor from the program, citing a lack of administrative support for ER&M’s work. ER&M’s lack of departmental status meant faculty from other disciplines “volunteered their labor” to support its work—a model “unsustainable” for ER&M’s future, as professor of American Studies and then-chair Alicia Schmidt Camacho put in a press release. It took an outpouring of support from student protestors and scholars nationwide, many from fellow Ivy League institutions like Brown and Dartmouth, for the University to re-evaluate ER&M’s departmental status. With the review came plans for five new tenure-track positions: in fall 2022, Professor Andrews joined the program, along with Hi‘ilei Hobart (Kanaka Maoli),who teaches Indigenous Food Sovereignty (ER&M 316), Deb Vargas, who teaches Latine feminist and queer studies (ER&M356), and Leigh-Anna Hidalgo, who teaches Latinx studies. Most recently, Gana Ndiaye joined ER&M as an Assistant Professor, teaching Race, Religion, and Transnational Mobilities (ER&M 444).
Even now, several victories into a decades-long fight, uncertainty lingers: protests in defense of ethnic studies erupt regularly at colleges nationwide, and legislative controversies over the field’s pedagogical necessity rage even in the most progressive states. When conservative challenges to its scholarly merit threaten its place at Yale and beyond it, ER&M’s status now depends on more than any defense the department can sustain alone.
Though Professor Andrews began work as a postdoctoral researcher in 2022, years after ER&M gained its independence, the program’s history echoed through our interview. Questions of space came hand-in-hand with questions of institutional recognition and Yale’s attitude towards ER&M students and faculty.
Space signals support: not only an acknowledgment of presence, but a sign of approval, maybe even appreciation. Moving into its own space puts ER&M on equal footing with the older, more singular disciplines it draws from—literature, history, sociology, and more. At the same time, moving into a new space also raises weightier questions surrounding land use and dispossession. “Yale [is] a ‘land grant’ institution, but we are on land that Yale has because of Indigenous disenfranchisement and genocide,” Professor Andrews said. “In that sense, it puts the question of ‘land’ in a complicated relationship not only with ER&M but with the institution at large.”
***
While participation in Yale’s own colonial legacy further complicates the paradox at the heart of the department’s goals—to challenge the University while also integrating itself into it—Professor Andrews considers ER&M’s self-awareness one of its greatest strengths. In fact, she describes this tension as “productive,” sharpening the department’s ability to both reimagine and work within the University’s power structures. Spatial enfranchisement only streamlines this process, enabling the department to conduct this critical work with greater ease.
New offices also come with more practical benefits. Most offices at ER&M’s previous home, 35 Broadway, lacked windows—a striking, unappealing contrast to the new building’s glass exterior. Adequate lighting, far from a convenience, proved crucial to so much more than the program’s rigor. Scholarship, though an intellectual project, demands that a healthy body support it, and what seems like an inessential ergonomic comfort contributes so much to productivity and general well-being. Beyond these necessities, however, Professor Andrews sees spatial unity—as simple as sharing an office—as essential for developing a departmental culture. “What does it mean to have an office?” she asked me, drawing attention to a reality so mundane that I’d often missed its radicality. Not just an office—what could it mean to share a space? To work across the hall from a colleague, to physicalize a departmental or disciplinary association?
“What does it mean to have an office?” she asked me, drawing attention to a reality so mundane that I’d often missed its radicality. Not just an office—what could it mean to share a space? To work across the hall from a colleague, to physicalize a departmental or disciplinary association?
“I’m on leave this semester, but I can still come here and join a rigorous, compassionate intellectual community even while I’m gone. I’m still interested in this question of what it means to be in a space together, as a department,” Professor Andrews said. Literal proximity helps form and enrich a departmental identity—even when one spends time away from it.
Describing these connections as “unnameable,” she pointed out how the possibility of sudden encounters could enrich her work. Trips to the printer and stops by the coffee machine turn into chances to tap into an intellectual community: “These small moments you can’t quantify, that you can’t put in a proposal for what it means to have a space—these add so much to ER&M’s intellectual rigor.”
***
For Deb Vargas, Associate Professor of ER&M and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale’s institutional support signals respect for ER&M’s origins in student activism—the work of young people who wanted to reshape what higher education looked like. I spoke with Professor Vargas in an interview just a few doors down from Professor Andrews’s office. Both co-taught Introduction to Ethnicity, Race, and Migration (ER&M 200) in the spring of 2024, and I noticed a near-telepathic harmony between their academic philosophies, even in interviews I conducted separately.
“It’s important to see these programs as the result of young people’s charge to the academy—a call to universities to open up to new methods, alternative histories, new approaches to thinking about power,” Professor Vargas said.
Professor Vargas’s diverse research interests engage a range of fields: queer studies, feminist studies, Chicana/x, and Latina/x Studies—work that inhabits both the core and periphery of what ER&M seeks to accomplish. In her office, framed posters of Latinx musicians, the largest one of Selena, the “Queen of Tejano Music,” rest against the wall. On her door, an inverted image of South America that reads “Another world already exists”—perhaps interrogating the Eurocentric latitudinal biases even cartographers act on—occupies the poster’s center, a message bolder than the brushstrokes that outline it. From her door frame hangs a chain of origami cranes, patterned according to the Palestinian tricolor. “When I think about space, it’s important to see that genealogy [of students], the possibility of transformation in academia,” Professor Vargas told me.
Traditions of student resistance and calls for curricular reform also sustained ER&M at key moments in its history: from the start, undergraduates played a crucial role in shaping the curriculum they hoped to study. Even following the faculty resignations, student and alumni protests—most notably at a gala dinner for the Asian American Student Alliance’s semicentennial conference in 2019—proved instrumental in prompting administrative review. Five years later, I am struck by how students—who belong to the institution they aim to reform—continue to reshape Yale from within. The ER&M building is the latest victory in a fight spanning decades, rather than just a solution to a new problem. Each square foot the department has won draws on a legacy of resisting academic marginalization.
At the same time, Professor Vargas believes in treating ER&M’s project as not just historical, but also current and ongoing. The building marks a major milestone for the department, but the push for recognition continues: “We’re very familiar with historical moments that seem very dark and that have also produced the most beautiful literature, art, and theory. In addition to teaching this work, it’s also critical for us researchers to continue producing new questions and theories.”
Such moments demand mobilization—an uncomfortable and inglorious duty, only heroic in hindsight. In this sense, ER&M’s ambitions extend beyond academia. Professor Vargas considered these moments opportunities for beauty—at least, opportunities to find meaning in ugliness. At the same time, I couldn’t help but also think of art that disgusts and scholarship that horrifies, all the more necessary in a historical moment so set on polarization yet so afraid to take a side.
Such moments demand mobilization—an uncomfortable and inglorious duty, only heroic in hindsight. In this sense, ER&M’s ambitions extend beyond academia. Professor Vargas considered these moments opportunities for beauty—at least, opportunities to find meaning in ugliness. At the same time, I couldn’t help but also think of art that disgusts and scholarship that horrifies, all the more necessary in a historical moment so set on polarization yet so afraid to take a side.
***
ER&M’s new building arrives in the wake of increasing public scrutiny toward freedom of expression in higher education. On October 30, 2024, Yale President Maurie McInnis released a statement recommending that faculty “refrain from issuing statements concerning matters of public, social, or political significance.” She declined to comment on Donald Trump’s reelection in the following week. Her removal from external politics continues a broader trend among peer universities in the wake of the Israel–Hamas war: hours before President McInnis’s email announcing a Committee on Institutional Voice, the University of Pennsylvania’s interim president announced similar intentions. Columbia University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Connecticut, among other schools, began reviewing comparable policies as well. Though phrasing varies across institutions, “neutrality”—a label that originates in the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report—underlies almost every public comment. Oddly enough, the original Kalven Report intended to open up space for dissent and contrarianism, rather than refuse responsibility for it.
Yale’s new stance—or lack thereof—on what breaks out in the “real world” feels complacent, even cowardly, post-election. Now more than ever, the University needs to stake out clear positions and priorities to support the community it houses, educates, and oftentimes intrudes on. Yes, President McInnis’s communiqué clarifies that the University intends to comment on public issues pertinent to its mission, but the institution’s silence on other issues complicates this selectivity. Especially for ER&M, whose scope covers topics both within and outside the policy’s protections, the announcement guarantees no easy future.
Trump’s reelection lends these uncertainties much greater urgency. Trump’s campaign—and the policy proposals it outlines as part of Project 2025—confirm his intentions to continue his attacks on free speech; pull funding from “divisive” curricula; and resuscitate the widely discredited, ahistorical 1776 Commission that pushes for reductive, “patriotic” scholarship at the expense of scholarly integrity and at-risk public schools. What exactly a second Trump administration means for ER&M, Yale, and private institutions at large also remains unclear, especially following the 2023 repeal of affirmative action in college admissions. Recognizing the precarity of the department’s newfound independence, Professor Andrews considers the power shift a reason for concern.
“We often put departments like ER&M under the microscope for such questions because of the perception that ER&M and DEI are one and the same,” she said. Conflating the two diminishes and corporatizes the intellectual standards that ER&M holds itself to, reproducing a logic reductive of ER&M’s confrontational mission. On top of this, it risks dismissing ER&M as performative rather than systemic—a label especially damning as universities turn to nonintervention for relief from protest.
With academic freedom under fire across the board, institutional neutrality—or institutional silence—seems contrary to the University’s mission. On one hand, academic freedom demands a kind of neutrality: professors produce scholarship for public, not private interests. Their work, rather than benefiting a politician or a corporation, benefits the public. In exchange, the public permits academics the privilege of isolation. ER&M, however, proves that this separation is impossible, and that public engagement cannot come from a place of isolated neutrality. “Institutions are made up of actors, and those actors are not neutral,” Professor Andrews said, pressing for not just academic freedom, but scholarly responsibility.
Even with this in mind, both Professor Andrews and Professor Vargas find reasons to believe in ER&M’s vision. At the very least, they intend to maintain a cautious optimism: “[The] election certainly gives us an opportunity to revisit everything—the ways we teach, what the vision of our program will be, our accountability to communities outside of Yale,” Professor Vargas said. Questions that the incoming presidency already raises—regarding immigration, historical amnesia, and nationalism in a multiethnic world—call for the expertise that ER&M, for decades, has provided.
Though a setback in some regards, both professors consider the election a reason to fight even harder for a “multicultural, multiethnic, and multiracial” world that the program espouses and the scholarship that advances it. Professor Andrews, a language revitalization specialist as well as an Indigenous Studies scholar, sees President McInnis’s new policy as an opportunity to shift institutional priorities: “We sometimes rely too much on language to do the work of solidarity, when in fact solidarity—while it starts with language—is fundamentally an act of labor.”
Pledging in words means nothing without action. Just as President McInnis’s report takes care to mention, Professor Andrews stressed the difference between “neutrality” and “silence.”
“Even if neutrality is just silence,” she said, “the institution can still take the work of support in multiple directions, even if it doesn’t say anything about doing that work.” Labor happens with or without a public announcement. Especially for ER&M, scholarship extends beyond the academic vacuum and participates in a world external to Yale: community organizing, public advocacy, and awareness of a space that ER&M both borrows and creates—these all remain at the forefront of the department’s mission. Especially for ER&M, scholarship extends beyond the academic vacuum and participates in a world external to Yale: community organizing, public advocacy, and awareness of a space that ER&M both borrows and creates—these all remain at the forefront of the department’s mission.
Especially for ER&M, scholarship extends beyond the academic vacuum and participates in a world external to Yale: community organizing, public advocacy, and awareness of a space that ER&M both borrows and creates—these all remain at the forefront of the department’s mission.
***
Several days after the interview, I spent hours familiarizing myself with the space I wanted to write about, switching locations every hour or so. I memorized the emergency floor plan. I wrote bits of an overdue essay in an empty seminar room. Just before dark, I stopped by Senior Administrative Assistant and Registrar Tatjana Cisija’s office and noticed a sign in her window: “Ethnicity, Race, and Migration.” It was the first departmental identification I’d found on the entire floor. Marking presence, existence despite erasure—it was a more radical assertion than I’d ever given any window graphic credit for.
It took me back to Professor Andrews’s office decor, marks of an academic niche that ER&M occupies. Only in this space could I expect antique copies of the New Oxford American Dictionary to touch covers with Paul D. Kroeber’s The Salish Language Family, both at home even in different languages. With a location to return to—at once a home and a landmark—comes a sense of belonging, itself a form of permanence.
“Now that we have this space, hopefully we’re harder to get rid of? If a department doesn’t have a space—” Professor Andrews stopped, as if contemplating the possibility. “Well, once it ceases to exist on paper, it ceases to exist entirely.”
It’s easy to feel cynical. Professor Andrews, however, wants to believe in space: expanses to share, not necessarily to occupy; staircases that reveal more stories, narrative as well as architectural. It helps to think of “building” as a gerund, not just as a noun: always in progression, not quite complete. Between “building” and “built” entire histories change hands. Like the verb that never finishes, ER&M looks upward. Even while creating space, it acknowledges the space that it still needs to fill.
