Editor,
The Nov. 17 letter by UNM student Corey S. Davis suggests that Joy Harjo "found it unbearable to work in an environment that promotes personal freedom." The "personal freedom" Davis refers to is the freedom for tenured faculty to act unprofessionally, to participate in unhealthy and unethical faculty-student interactions and to endanger students' well-being. These actions are not "personal freedoms"; they are abuses of power that set dangerous precedents for other tenured faculty and remove protections for students that student activists struggled for 30 years to achieve.
Harjo made an ethical decision to stand up for what she believed in to the entire UNM administrative apparatus. She resigned because the administration refused to budge. I applaud her courage. Harjo has devoted a lifetime to fighting for genuine and authentic freedoms, such as the freedom for Native and oppressed people everywhere to speak out and to live in dignity.
In losing Harjo, UNM has lost our country's foremost Native poet, an irreplaceable voice that celebrates the most profound of human freedoms.
Lucy DuPertuis
UNM student
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