Dan invites Dr. Natalie Byfield, Dr. Raj Chetty, & Dr. LaToya Sawyer to talk about the creation of The Institute for Critical Race & Ethnic Studies (CRES) at Saint John’s University in Queens, NY. To best set the tone for this episode, here’s a quote from Dr. Natalie Byfield, the Founding Director of CRES:

“I was looking for something this morning on my computer and I just came across all these things that students had sent me that I’d been collecting about things they were experiencing, and I thought it was just so important that that always be remembered because what came out of that, very clearly I think, in the student space and in the activism that was taking place among the students was that they wanted to do something to make Saint John’s a safer space for students of color. They wanted to do something to ensure that even after they left, structurally and institutionally, there would be programs and there would be parts of the structure of the university that would be more welcoming to students of color. And so I do want to go back to that and keep that in mind because I think a lot of time transformations that take place in university spaces do come from students or at the impetus of students and I just think that in general terms there’s a long history of it so I’d like to also place the work of the students at Saint John’s in the context of that history.” –Dr. Natalie Byfield