Voices of Solidarity

UC Davis Inclusive Excellence is refreshing its anti-racism and anti-discrimination resources, including the 11 Suggested Actions Towards Anti-Racism, as part of a broader effort to update resources for today while preserving the history that shaped this work. Originally developed during a period of intense national and campus reflection, the resources brought together guidance for individuals and organizations, opportunities for learning and professional development, and examples of how members of the university community responded.

One important part of that history is the university’s response in 2020, when the killing of George Floyd prompted grief, protest and a national conversation about fairness, dignity and public responsibility. The resource pages ultimately documented 50 ally statements, along with additional faculty, staff, student and community voices.

Revisiting that record offers more than a snapshot of what people said at the time. It provides a window into how a university community responds when events beyond campus deeply affect the people who learn and work here — and how an institution decides when its own values call for a public response.

Our campus, our world

George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020, amid other highly publicized killings of Black Americans and during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. His death became a tipping point for public attention, prompting protests and conversations across the country and around the world.

Those events did not stop at the boundaries of a university. Students, faculty and staff brought their experiences, concerns, grief and questions with them into classrooms, workplaces, laboratories and meetings. Black members of the community in particular were confronting events that felt immediate and personal. Others were asking what it meant to be supportive colleagues, teachers, classmates and leaders.

For UC Davis, the moment therefore raised questions that went beyond responding to a news event. What does a university owe its students and employees when events in the wider world deeply affect them? When should leaders speak? When does silence communicate something of its own? And how should a university’s response connect to enduring commitments such as nondiscrimination, academic freedom and the Principles of Community?

The Principles of Community provided an important point of reference. They express expectations for how members of UC Davis treat one another and connect the university’s educational mission with dignity, respect, mutual understanding and a responsibility to confront discrimination.

When should a university speak?

In 2020, UC Davis and many of its schools, colleges, departments, programs and organizations made the decision to speak. They did so from different perspectives and with different responsibilities, but many connected their response to values they already understood themselves to hold: supporting students and employees, educating their communities and putting university principles into practice.

Research by Brian Soucek, Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at the UC Davis School of Law, offers a useful framework for looking back at that decision. Soucek studies free speech, equality law and academic freedom. In his 2026 book, The Opinionated University: Academic Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth of Neutrality in American Higher Education (University of Chicago Press), he examines whether universities can realistically separate themselves from questions of institutional values.

Soucek challenges the premise that a university avoids expressing values simply by declining to issue public statements. Universities make consequential choices every day about what they teach, whom they admit and hire, how they establish policies and how they create the conditions for teaching, research and campus life. Those choices are connected to institutional purposes. His framework therefore shifts attention from whether a topic can be labeled “political” to a more practical question: Does speaking about it advance the university’s mission? 

That is not an argument for universities to comment on every controversy. Institutional speech can carry particular weight, and academic freedom requires room for students and scholars to question, debate and disagree — including with the university itself. Rather, Soucek’s work offers a way to think about when speech may be appropriate without assuming either that institutions should always speak or that silence is always neutral.

In 2020, those questions became immediate at UC Davis. Events taking place far beyond campus were affecting students, employees, classrooms, workplaces and families. The university and its many units had to consider what it meant to support people who were grieving, how the Principles of Community should guide a response, who was speaking and on whose behalf, and what institutional words were intended to accomplish.

The statements that followed provide a record of those choices.

Across the statements, a few themes came through again and again

Although the statements came from different parts of the university and reflected different roles, responsibilities and experiences, they shared a striking degree of common ground. Read together, they show how the campus community was making sense of the moment and what people believed a meaningful response required.

1. Grief was named openly. Many groups began by acknowledging sorrow, anger, fear and exhaustion in response to George Floyd’s killing and other acts of racial violence.
2. The moment was understood as part of a longer pattern. The statements repeatedly pointed to a longer history of unfair treatment, unequal burden and repeated injury that many communities have carried for generations.
3. Solidarity mattered. Many groups named support for Black students, staff, faculty, alumni and community members as a responsibility.
4. Words alone were not enough. Several statements emphasized the need for action, follow-through and meaningful change in university practices, policies and culture.
5. Learning and self-reflection were part of the response. Many contributors urged people to educate themselves, listen carefully and examine how bias shows up in everyday decisions, routines and institutions.
6. Healing and care were also central. The statements repeatedly pointed readers toward counseling, racial trauma resources and community support as part of what the moment required.
7. The response reached beyond UC Davis. Voices came from campus units and organizations as well as UC systemwide bodies and regional community partners, reflecting the many communities to which a public university belongs.

Taken together, the statements show an institution and its broader community trying to do several things at once: acknowledge what people were experiencing, offer support, create opportunities for learning and make clear that shared values carry responsibilities. That combination of reflection, care and action would also shape the resources and practices that followed.

From statements to practice

The response did not end with public statements. The period also produced resources intended to help people translate concern into learning and action. The 11 Suggested Actions Towards Anti-Racism offered practical steps for individuals and organizations and was developed with contributions from UC Davis constituent groups. Completely updated for a second edition to be published formally in 2027, the resource is being released as a working draft in 2026. Inclusive Excellence is inviting community feedback to help shape the final edition.

Across campus, departments and centers also created opportunities for professional development, discussion and continued learning. The anti-racism resources that developed during this period reflected an effort to move beyond a one-time response and give people ways to continue the work within their own classrooms, workplaces and organizations.

The period also sharpened questions about institutional communication itself: when an individual leader speaks personally and when they speak for a unit; what kinds of events call for an institutional response; where such statements should appear; and how public messages should connect to standing university policies and values.

Those questions continue to matter. Public events still enter university life, affecting students, employees and communities in different ways. Universities still have to consider when supporting their communities calls for communication, education, resources or action — and how to do so while maintaining space for inquiry, dialogue and differing perspectives.

History matters

Refreshing these pages does not mean starting over or removing the context in which they were created.

The Transformative Justice in Education Center in the UC Davis School of Education, founded by Maisha T. Winn and Lawrence (Torry) Winn, grounds its work in five pedagogical stances developed through the Winn’s scholarship: History Matters, Race Matters, Justice Matters, Language Matters and Futures Matter (Winn, 2018, 2019). Together, the stances offer a framework for helping educators shift practice toward justice. “History Matters” offers an especially useful principle for revisiting this material.

Resources created in response to a particular moment may need to change. Links become outdated. Language develops. New research and practices emerge. But the history that explains why the work began remains important.

For the Black community and for communities that continue to be treated unfairly, singled out or made to feel unsafe, history may also remain very present. Preserving it recognizes both what members of the university community experienced and how the institution responded.

At its core, that is also the continuing challenge of this work: to ensure that nondiscrimination is more than a passive commitment, and that values such as dignity and respect are practiced through learning, dialogue, reflection and the everyday work of community.

Sources

Soucek, B. (2026). The opinionated university: Academic freedom, diversity, and the myth of neutrality in American higher education. University of Chicago Press. 

Winn, M. T. (2018). Justice on both sides: Transforming education through restorative justice. Harvard Education Press.

Winn, M. T. (2019). Paradigm shifting toward justice in teacher education [Working paper]. TeachingWorks, University of Michigan.