Ground Rules

My wonderful friend and colleague, Max Lahn, has put together a set of “Ground Rules” for creating a more just, equitable, and inclusive academic culture. With their permission, I have posted it here as well. But you should check out their website, too!

The academic mathematics community, both in this country and abroad, has a reputation for being inaccessible, exclusive, and demographically homogeneous. In my experience, this reputation is largely well-deserved. Below are some basic ground rules for conduct that I commit myself to strive to uphold, in order to make mathematics a more just, inclusive, and equitable academic discipline.

Recognize, respect, and honor people's differences.

We all (both mathematicians and non-mathematicians, and people in between) come from different places, place ourselves within different communities, and bring different experiences to the classroom. This means that we must all be cognizant of how our actions affect each other in ways that they don’t affect ourselves. We must agree to:

• Hold ourselves and those around us accountable to confronting our implicit biases. Interrogate and repudiate the false but prevalent idea that some groups of people, whether based on race, gender, or other identities, are better suited to or more deserving of doing math than others.
• Be aware of and work to repair the extensive history of systemic exclusion of non-white and non-male people from mainstream academic mathematics. Recognize that this practice of exclusion thrives in math departments around the country, and act accordingly by advocating for and supporting members of un(der)represented groups in mathematics.

Craft safe, positive, and inclusive learning environments.

Both in our roles as teachers and as students, we must:

• Actively listen to and believe our students, peers, and mentors when they speak to their own experiences. If our own voices are given preference over others, interrogate this practice, and use our privilege to benefit those whose voices are not being heard and/or listened to.
• Foster a culture of embracing and encouraging productive failure as a healthy part of the learning process in our mathematics classrooms. Work together to create an environment in which those who are having difficulty are comfortable admitting this and are eager to seek help.

Here are some examples of how I will try to implement the above guiding principles in my classroom:

• In the spirit of open, communicative dialogue, I will be as clear and up-front as possible about my expectations for my students, and I will seek out and listen to my students’ expectations for me.
• Because students who need to work one or more jobs in order to maintain their position on campus are as deserving of my time and attention as those who do not, I will try to schedule office hours, recitations, and review sessions often and at different times in order to ensure as many of my students can access these resources as possible.
• With the goal of normalizing a classroom culture of welcoming and affirming queer and trans students, I will share my pronouns (he/him) with my students, peers, and mentors, and I will respect and use others’ pronouns.
• In order to honor the effort my students have invested in their courses, I will never refer to a problem, exercise, or verification as “trivial,” “obvious,” or “clear.”

These kinds of ground rules work best for a community when their specifics are co-created by those who seek to implement them. As such, I welcome suggestions about ways to improve and augment this list. I am also totally open to criticism of the specifics of what is written above, including any suggestions I made for positive actions. However, the moral imperatives of justice and equity on which these ground rules are founded are not up for debate; if your words or actions deny the humanity or experience of a person or group of people on the basis of identities they hold, they will do so from my trash folder.