Dear Faculty, students, staff members:

We have followed with great concern the recent revelations regarding the actions of former employee Gary Xu. As head of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures (EALC), and Director of the School of Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics (SLCL), respectively, we want to express our condemnation of abuses of power, wherever they may occur, and our full support of victims of abuse who have the courage to come forward. We take very seriously all the allegations, both the specific charges and the larger issues implied by them. We therefore support the ongoing investigation of these issues.

The EALC department has spent the past three years rebuilding the trust of our students and the large and diverse community we serve.  A first and crucial step was helping several of Xu’s former students to successfully complete their programs, under the guidance of other faculty members.   We then hired an outstanding new faculty member in modern Chinese literature, Professor Jingling Chen, who is now starting her second year in our department.  EALC students have made tremendous contribution to a collaborative research project led by Professor Dan Shao on Cross-cultural Understandings of Power Harassment in Higher Education, which is supported by the WGGP and the IPRH and endorsed by former Associate Chancellor Assata Zerai.  We also created an anonymous survey for our students and established an advisory committee to the Head, thereby establishing new and better channels of communication within the department to ensure that such a situation never recurs.

The EALC department and the SLCL are fully committed to fostering a climate of trust, and respect where proper boundaries are respected, and abuses of power will not be tolerated. We are proud of our academic community, the vast majority of which are productive and respectful people. We therefore want to make sure that past errors are addressed through the proper channels, but they do not erase all the scholarly and human achievements of our students, faculty and staff.

Robert Tierney, EALC Head

L Elena Delgado, Director SLCL