 Thank you for that introduction. But who I really am is my father comes from the state of Arizona. His family was the victim of the Gapston purchase. And when they created Mexico and Arizona, their land was literally divided in two. And they had to choose which side of the border they would live on. My mother's family immigrated following the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to San Pablo. San Pedro, as everybody calls it. San Pedro, California. Because the revolution had made education and other things impossible. No doubt they came over as undocumented. And I turned out all right. So I want to offer, so those are my beginnings. I think it's always important to locate ourselves in these conversations. And I want to thank you all for coming. It's the last item on the agenda. I was hoping for two people, so I'm really glad that so many of you are here. It tells me about your own commitment and the work you're doing. And I have to say I am very impressed with what I've learned the last couple of days here. I think it was a rich agenda. I think the topics were timely and important, et cetera. So I wasn't sure what I was going to say this afternoon. But I do want to thank the planning committee for inviting me to Minnesota, a place clearly where I've spent some time to share some remarks addressing your theme, strategic leadership and diversity, equity and inclusion as it relates to college and research libraries. And I'm very pleased to see the entire conference that is devoted to this particular topic. Especially since libraries, I believe, especially research libraries, are critical hubs of intellectual and cultural engagement. Places where all can come together to discover and share knowledge and create new knowledge. You may be familiar with the concept of contact zones. Spaces in which people from a variety of backgrounds come together to pursue a common endeavor or goal. And in doing so, create affinity spaces where their differences collide or intersect to create something new and also a common ground. A library, a research library, especially an academic research library, is just this kind of space, I think, whether that space is digital or, for lack of a better word, real. And despite the continuing dominance of what we know as the Western canon or Western thought, knowledge is not, nor has it ever been, monocultural or monodisciplinary. Over the past half century or so, this dominance has given way, at least to some extent, to new knowledge and new ways of apprehending and thinking about the world or comprehending and thinking about the world. And yet, much of the slowly encroaching new knowledge has yet to find its rightful place in the academy. Women, LGBTQ, and people of color are still often viewed as outsiders. And still, we must often fight to be seen and heard. That's why this gathering is so important. Moreover, our persistent, our perspectives we bring are still often viewed as peripheral and thus relegated to the margins by saying, well, that's an interesting perspective. We hear as notebooks close and eyes glaze over. They hate it when I walk into her room. Here she comes. Translation, interesting, but not academically legitimate. Rightly understood, of course, knowledge is an inclusive, global, egalitarian term that embraces all human records, all human understanding, all disciplines, all cultural perspectives. It encompasses the ideas, the histories, philosophies, and literature of people, culture, and habitats the world over. And it is never static. Knowledge is always under construction, a work in progress, if you will, especially as new technologies break through boundaries and open up new worlds. Scholars and researchers break out of disciplinary silos and interact more and more with each other from around the globe to bring their stories, their histories, their previously absent cultural perspectives to this storehouse. And in that sense, I think it is fundamentally interdisciplinary and also multicultural. And so our research libraries constituted as repositories and creators of knowledge, our vital and dynamic centers of multicultural learning where all voices are heard. Our libraries are us. They privilege no one and everyone. And for the legitimacy of knowledge, distinguishing it from fake news, for example, that's a determination to be made not by the power hierarchy, but in explorations and searching, open mind ended conversations across disciplinary and cultural boundaries. You know, when I was first invited to speak today, I thought about what I might say. And I went back in my memory to the 1970s at the University of Iowa, where I was the only queer Chicana tackling graduate work. I mentioned this because the library saved me in a very special way. At Iowa, I felt an isolation that I had never experienced before. I was hungry for validation and connection that I went to the library seeking it. There I found solace and good company in my study, Carol, on the third floor and in stacks where I could escape into my research, reading, studying, and writing. It was there that I found some inkling of diversity in the writings of my people, Spanish speaking, as we recall back then. Every 10 years, they call something different. Spanish speaking and native people, those writings were very few and far in between. But they were there, calling to me. In fact, that's where I eventually discovered Gloria Antaldua, the late Chicana poet and writer, philosopher, who had become my lifelong teacher, mentor, spirit guide, and friend. And so in a way, the library became a kind of intellectual and spiritual home for me, a safe space where I could wander through the stacks, as we did back then, and find friends and kindred spirits in all those pages. And I could also discover new worlds driven by my desire to know more and marveling at the wealth of knowledge literally at my fingertips. In a way, it was my first exploration of intersectionality and interdisciplinary study. I also recall spending days at the library as many of you in solitude as a child, dreaming about possibilities, as I read all those wonderful books. Years later, I came to understand how important libraries are in opening up the world to especially young people whose families lack the resources for books, magazines, and today, electronic media. I would argue that the magic of libraries were critical not only to my education, but also to develop me my sense of self and identity. Libraries were both refuge and a guide. They helped keep me rooted and safe while also giving me the courage and the resources to explore the unknown. They gave me a kind of roadmap for the journey for the work I still do today. You know, when I was working on my master's degree and my dissertation about Chicanos, Chicanas, and the education all those years ago, I found nothing about Chicanos in the Midwest or about the US Spanish-speaking population, at least certainly not from a Latino-Latina perspective. The canon was a reflection of the dominant culture, both in and beyond the academy. There were some early work by the late sociologists, Julian Zamora at Notre Dame, and also some work by the historian, Luis Anunuevo Kerr at the University of Illinois, Chicago. But outside of that, there was very little. So I went to the reference librarian to order books buying about Spanish-speaking people, hoping that something out there was about Chicanos. And that search led eventually to section E184M5, where I found a few references addressing Spanish-speaking population, although none to the Chicano-Chicano experience, which had not yet entered the American lexicon. And as I continued requesting books, section E184M5 grew as did related collections on education, demographics, politics, and more. Any book I found I ordered at the library, whether I used it or not, I wanted to build the library. It's a true story, they still remember me unfortunately. Yeah, that's okay. And yet, even as the collections grew, what I found were crumbs by today's standards. The reference materials were only a tiny glimpse of the culture and the history of my people. Even as I wrote my doctoral thesis some years later, I was struck by the continued dearth of scholarly work to draw upon. Of course, there were no writings at all about Chicano lesbians. Those would come much later. At the time, there was only the white feminist discourse that was emerging in the more exclusive spaces of the academic borderlands. Spaces at the time not very open to us or to discussions on race and identity or ethnicity. And so in the few writings that I was able to find, I did find an academic home and a sense of community for my Chicano self. Those writings gave voice to who I was and a powerful language to express what I already knew deep in my heart and soul to be true. They gave expression and focus to my struggles, showed me my path and gave me the courage to follow it. I'm just gonna pause here to say something. This piece that I'm sharing with you is actually part of a residency that I did in Arizona. I've drawn a lot of material there and it's all being, it's going to be in a book, okay? So I just want, I should have said that at the beginning but I was so excited, you know? But now decades later, because some of us now are writing the books we so longed for, the interrogation around the interrogations of identity, race and gender, power and privilege and multiple forms of oppression and resistance continue to create but resistance continues to create new understandings of who we are. And those books are now generally found in most libraries today. In fact, it's the first thing I do when I go to a college campus to review their campus. I go straight to the libraries to see what's there. So we do now have a more inclusive canon. Growing collections and more faculty of color requesting materials from the libraries for their students and their own research. Even contributing their own scholarly and creative work. Something we couldn't even have imagined over 40 years ago. Whether that canon is acknowledged or not is another question. The texts in this canon often seem to be read and studied and shelved only as ethnic studies relegated to the status of other, not woven into the central academic and cultural narrative. And yet I'm happy to say the Academy is a very different place today than it was in my student days and so our libraries. I've been struck by the important conversations of the last two days. Most of them driven by the overarching question that occasioned this conference. Despite all the progress you ask why have we not come further? And how can we develop new strategies for moving forward as we've been talking at our meals? By the way, the food's been great. And I hope to share my belief and I hope you share my belief that libraries which are public repositories of the world's knowledge should be at the very core of our efforts to diversify the Academy and to provide the safe and welcoming and accessible environment to all students, staff, faculty and the community. That a library, bricks and mortar or online is a dynamic and accessible, intellectual and multicultural space as well as a space of sharing and reciprocity with broad interconnections across space and time with diverse communities. As they embark on learning, and academic libraries are often the first places students find themselves as they embark on learning projects whether in solitary reading and research or in study groups. And yet, while there are far more diverse resources in today's research libraries than in my student days, staffing and faculty are less diverse than they need to be as you've discussed here. Why is this important? Let me share a story. When you get to my age, you get to share stories. Some years ago, an original painting by Frida Kahlo. Where are you, Iowa? Ah, they skipped town already. That's okay. You tell them what I said, okay? So some years ago, an original painting by Frida Kahlo was sold back to Mexico for over $2 million. And the money was donated to the University of Iowa where I was a student to create a women's archive. I, of course, was excited. But when I learned the focus was primarily on rural women, African-American women and native women, I was surprised and disappointed at the omission of Chicanas Latinas. Of course, I raised questions as only I can and even at the 10-year celebration in which they courageously invited me to. I mentioned this oversight and told them that Frida Kahlo was turning over in her grave. And it caused much chagrin among staff and faculty. They ignored me. And nothing happened. Fast forward 15 years, I was approached by the archivist about donating my papers to the University of Iowa Women's Archive. I agreed, but only on one condition, that it be part of a larger Chicana Latina collection. I was told that the reason they did not include as originally was a concern that Chicanas generally didn't write books. I took that as a code for not speaking and writing in English, I think. Really? I assured them that we are like all people. We have pens and keyboards. We know births in our Bibles. We write letters, we keep journals, postcards to family, and more. All the things that you find in an archive. And I told them about a student I had been working with who on a special project was interviewing early Latina Chicana settlers who are now in their 80s. And that a graduate student was talking to me about the need to archive the Iowa Latino experience for future researchers because she was born and raised in Fort Madison, Iowa. They listened to me. And the Latina archive has evolved into what is now a rich and vital resource. And I am a proud Hawkeye. My point, of course, is that when you don't have someone on staff or in a leadership position who represents underrepresented voices, those voices don't get heard. Their books and journals don't get acquired. Or if they do, they get squirreled away in a remote corner as other. It isn't for lack of good intentions. It's about priorities. It's about inviting to the table and listening to those with deep insider knowledge and understanding of diverse cultures. It's about reconsidering what we see and think about. It's about having role models for our students. This isn't in my written text, but as you diversify your staffs and your faculty, remember to prepare for them because when we come to the campus, we change the conversation. And it creates discord. So y'all need to talk to me about that later on. You know, without culturally diverse staffing, our library holdings will only be partial and their public spaces can be viewed as unwelcoming, alienating, and even closed to underrepresented groups. They could reflect the structural inequalities that bedevil our institutions everywhere. They will, in short, be biased unintentionally if not by design. And of course, you all know this, which is the very reason for this gathering again. It was such experience and more that spurred me to advocate on behalf of equity and diversity and inclusion in the academy over 50 years ago. In those days, the great movements for social and economic justice had just begun to move from the streets to the academy following the Civil Rights Act of 1960 war and was just beginning to show up on the radar of colleges and universities. At Iowa, far removed from the cultural support I had taken for granted in my California community, I knew that I would need to dig deep within myself for courage and for the anchor of my cultural roots. In doing so, I came to see the power of identity to empower, heal, and connect. I also came to an understanding that would guide me throughout my life that who we are is at the heart of success. Personal fulfillment and community and ultimately of social and educational justice and libraries are and must be the publicly accessible repositories, custodians and purveyors of our stories, our knowledge production, our recorded cultures and heritage. Back in the day, it wasn't just the research libraries of course that were exclusive, of course, higher education generally at mid-century. I never thought I'd be saying mid-century in about the 20th century. That's how old I am. But generally at mid-century, offered few welcoming spaces for people like me. Communities of color and women especially were all but absent from the curriculum and professoriate. We didn't even talk about disabilities and the gay community then. And most of them, we were present on college campuses only in low wages, non-professional positions. And as we struggled to create spaces for ourselves, our relationships with institutional power hierarchies were largely framed as oppositional. I was always told I was a troublemaker. You know, and as we moved in from the margins, we were not only trespassing boundaries but challenging our institutions to be the inclusive and egalitarian citadels of academic freedom and democracy that were constituted to be. We were viewed with unease in part because we were not into assimilating or to fit a pre-existing mode but to create a new kind of academy, one that would include us while leaving our identities, culture, and knowledge and systems intact. And the strict borders that had been constructed to keep us out became fluid and permeable. Our very outsider-ness became a powerful catalyst for change, transforming higher education into the multicultural, interdisciplinary, more inclusive institutions we know today. Housing libraries replete with multicultural narratives because and only because we requested and sometimes demanded them. So where are we today? Our numbers are still too small, our scholarly work still marginalized to an extent, and our influence circumscribed. But we are everywhere, in classrooms, in departments and research spaces, across the disciplines and in decision-making roles, and of course in libraries everywhere, even though there might just be one of us, we're there. And as we struggle against a persistent and growing backlash, the good news is that we don't have to start from scratch. We have laid durable groundwork and develop proven strategies for change, but we also must address some key questions. How do we harness what we know and what we've accomplished? The ideas, the passion, the energy, the alliances, the infrastructure to create something new and vital for the decades ahead. How do we work across cultures and generations engaging everyone in this work? How do we welcome bold new ideas and nurture new and often dissenting leadership without repudiating the best of our work? How do we make ourselves listen to and learn from the emerging youth without feeling threatened and defensive? How do we stay engaged and pass on what we know? How do we make the work sustainable? How do we recognize and measure the impact if we do or don't do this work? These are questions that we must address during these turbulent times on campus' nationwide in both words and actions. For research libraries, it's not just about housing our books and making our histories and cultures accessible in the stacks or online. It's about legitimizing those histories and cultures as central to the academic narratives. It's about foregrounding diversity, making it viable and visible in staff positions, training and hiring staff and leaders who bring multicultural perspectives to the fore and who understand in the deepest sense the need to represent, give voice to and offer safe, vital learning spaces for people whose stories and identities have for so many years been erased, silenced, subsumed or distorted, presented only in passing as other. It's about harnessing the power of libraries on behalf of equity and diversity in ways that both reflect and transform our institutions and our world as it already has. We've come far, but despite our best efforts, transformation remains elusive and resistant strong. Especially in the past few years, we have seen in our institutions an alarming resurgence of hate speech and harassment. And we see persistent discrimination in pedagogies and curricula hiring practices and reward systems. We see, in other words, the persistence of structural institutional bias giving rise to individual and collective acts of discrimination. To anyone who has believed that racism, misogyny and homophobia are rare or are no longer an issue, I merely have to point to the rising tension on our nation's campuses around free speech and so-called political correctness. In fact, just last week, as I said yesterday, two Native American students from New Mexico were part of a group of high school students visiting a Colorado campus when a parent in the group reported them as suspicious because they were late and making her feel uncomfortable and afraid. They were detained and frisked. Let's cut to the chase. They were racially profiled. Of course, their mother is outraged. And so are many others across the nation, and myself included. The college has apologized, but the damage done. Such indignities and affronts and worse happen every day. And what this reflects is a far deeper and more pervasive problem, just like those poor African-American students who are pushed off the stage because they were celebrating as they walked across. You know, whether it's a denial of or indifference to bias and discrimination or outright resistance to diversity and inclusion, the attitudes that give rise to such outrage present enormous challenges to us. We cannot do our work in the bubble of higher education without being affected by the deteriorating national climate. As our country takes a sharper turn right with each passing day, we cannot even think about higher education with each path, we cannot even think about higher education without acknowledging the risks to all that we have achieved and the push to build both literal and figurative walls. The expulsions and deportations of undocumented immigrants, the terrible limbo for DACA students, the erosion of the rights for people of color and other marginalized groups, and so much else that puts at risk so much what we have achieved in the last 40 years. Meanwhile on our campuses, ethnic studies programs which probably have the largest representation of the faculty of color are facing serious challenges. I receive phone calls almost every day about it and many of those that have survived are barely hanging on. Diversity programs are being downsized and cut and even as they continue to fight for change, students, faculty and staff of color and other groups often say they feel unsafe. Fortunately, I think we're all here to say that research libraries again can and must be a part of the solution but we have some tough battles ahead. I don't know about you but my feelings about all of this vacillate between concern and hope, I'm being nice. I know we just can't react with angry words. We need to act with courage and conviction and with confidence that we can make a difference or I wouldn't be standing here. Our libraries and our institutions of higher ed are at a crossroads. They can and must be a bulwark against waves of regressive change that threaten to take us back a hundred years and erase the gains. Our immediate challenge is to reconstruct, rethink and recharge. We need to address not only active resistance and backlash but also complacency which often takes the form of seemingly benign but very destructive complicity in the convenient myth of a post-raised, post-feminist world. The good news, the ferocity of the backlash owes much to the remarkable success of our work. They never dreamt so many of us would come to higher education. They never dreamt the changes that we see in higher education because of this work. Trust me, we have daycare at our universities not because some president or board decided we needed because more women came to the academy and the academy was transforming and I can talk about advising centers in terms of how they were based on minority programs. I can talk about scholarship opportunities because of the diversity. I can talk about all the policies that protect our rights was because of diversity and I'm going off script. And we never get the credit for helping to transform higher education to the benefit of all people. So how do we continue to use equity and diversity as a transformational, as a strategy for continued transformation of our institution? That's what I'm about today but let me go back on script. So, you know, God gun it. You know, on our campuses, one significant source of resistance to diversity has always been the idea that this work is political, not educational. And I'm, you know, I was one of those students back there and said, we have a right to be here and we do. Of course it's political. If by political we mean actions that disrupt the status quo and engage people as change agents. It's also deeply personal to many of us but more than that it is a civic responsibility undertaken for the common good, pointing the way to new avenues of discovery and bringing to bear new and previously ignored cultural and theoretical perspectives. Again, our research libraries are central to this understanding. Without this work would still be studying and teaching history, humanities and the sciences indeed all the disciplines as if they were the exclusive province of Western thinking. One important task ahead of us now is to fundamentally change the prevailing conversation at all levels of our institution. Equity and diversity and inclusion are still far too often framed as problems to be solved or even as a waste of resources peripheral to the academic enterprise. On the contrary, it is central to the educational mission of our institutions. There are educational imperatives and an investment in learning and discovery. We are a value added. We need to focus then on systemic change, infrastructural change with important educational outcomes for the institution and for all who have a stake in higher education. The late Molly Ivan said, the thing about democracy beloveds is that it is not neat, orderly or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion. And that is nowhere more true than on our nation's campuses. As diverse cultures, disciplines, departments including our libraries compete for shrinking resources and openly contest priorities. Scarcity produces discord among disparate groups seeking resources and recognition. Our charge as educators is to help our institutions navigate this contested ground and find solutions that encourage constructive airing of differences. All of us have a stake in this work. Whether in our libraries, our classrooms, in the political arena, in the halls of justice in our communities within and beyond the academy, it's our responsibility to do everything we can to close the gaps, to open the doors to learning and advancement, to make our institutions and our libraries safe and vibrant living and learning spaces for all. What happens to communities of color, the GLBT communities, people with disabilities, people at the bottom of the economic ladder, immigrants, religious minorities happens to all of us. We are all implicated. We all feel the shock waves when someone is assaulted by hate speech, when shooters gun down students or when someone is prevented or discouraged from voting, is unable to work for a living wage, fails to finish high school or is profiled during a campus visit. That is why it is important to negotiate with great care not only the spaces where new ways of knowing and being intersect in class with the prevailing academic culture but also at the intersections within and among ourselves within, with our multiple and sometimes contending identities and priorities. We must understand what we are up against, decades, even centuries of deeply entrenched institutional norms and practices and recognize that our own differences are both a fallout of that history and an opportunity for change. The differences that are at the core of this work make it imperative that we build different institutional and cultural spaces for the very different needs of these groups of people. We cannot expect people of color or women or LGBTQ disabilities to relinquish their ways of knowing and being as if they don't matter. We cannot expect them to negate themselves and disappear into the cultural stew, still a prevailing notion on many campuses. We also must recognize the salience of intersectionality in a world of blurring and shifting borders. One of our challenges is to think in more complex ways about what we mean by identity, both our own and others. And it means thinking of identity, not as fixed and static but as fluid and dynamic. Failure to recognize and respect this, fluidity of identity and knowledge systems and cultural frameworks has caused fragmentation and friction within the communities and between. And in ranking of oppressions, which is what I think that cart over there actually did, you know, how do we move beyond race? And that's a hierarchy. We need to be careful to do those kinds of things. The other way is how can we be more inclusive? Versus saying, we're gonna set race aside and make sure we include these others. Anyway, that was my initial reaction. I wasn't over them, she all did a good job. But we also need to call out those things. We need to sort of say, what does it mean? What is a phrase like that mean? Because then it drives the discussion and the priorities. So the challenge then again is to find ways to embrace all of it, to bring fully integrated self to every interaction and to be able to identify and connect around points of intersection or commonality for the greater good. In our libraries, that means creating safe spaces for people to engage with their singular cultural products and artifacts but also to freely explore and interrogate the boundary less multi-cultural world of knowledge and creative expression that makes us all members of an interactive global community. In her book, Borderlands, La Frontera, the late Gloria Anzaldua conceptualized the borderlands as a place of both tensions and learning. Also of intersectionality, although she didn't use a term. The concept of borderlands is central to my own understanding of how we might successfully approach this work. And it also can be a guide to how we think of and create library collections and spaces. As our libraries, indeed our entire cultural and political landscape continues to be challenged and transformed by the values, languages and cultures of people deemed to be outsiders, we need to ask how do we open our doors to them without expecting them to leave behind their identities? How do we address the mindset that equates Middle East and Islam with terror or Black Lives Matter with violence and the myth of reverse racism, especially at a time when race hatred has regained a foothold in our government and on the national consciousness? How do we follow through on our promise to build bridges, not walls, among all of the marginalized communities of our institutions? Sadly, for far too many, immigration and people of color constitutes an attack on cultural norms that many believe be fundamental to the American way of life. Borders they argue in walls to secure those borders are needed to protect our country from people who are so different from us. Such binary thinking has no place in the borderlands and it certainly has no place in our institutions. It's in the borderlands and in our institutions that we renegotiate norms and hierarchies and work through the inevitable tensions and conflict by engaging each other in the sometimes difficult but necessary dialogue at the intersections of our shifting and colliding identities. As I have done this work over the years, the dominant culture has, however grudgingly, responded to challenges by moving a few feet off-center in a way that recognizes the fluidity of borders and the shifting ground of knowledge. That decentering though never would have happened in the academy left to its own devices. It was women, activists of colors, and others of course who pushed it off-center. Our work has transformed our institutions in ways that would make them unrecognizable today to early activists and that is what's frightening people. Our journey of transformation that began all those decades ago has made us more visible and given us a voice. Here I am standing, whoever thought I would have been a president. All but one that sometimes goes unheard. It has brought into the academy our histories and cultures and it has created a place for academic study and preservation of what we know and who we are. When my few women of color classmates and I graduated from college, we never dreamed of such an academy. We never dreamed, we never so much as considered becoming players in the male world of boardroom negotiations and academic competition and power plays. We had to make it up a whole new set of rules as we embarked on an untraveled road and we found a way around roadblocks and potholes through trial and error. And if this sounds familiar to some of you, it's because it's what we do as marginalized people. We step up because we don't have a choice. We know that no one else is going to do it for us and we find each other and struggle together. A movement is born and so are lives and careers. And that's why it is important not just to have diverse library collections but also diverse leadership and staffing or at least people in key positions who are proven multiculturalists. I hope that everyone attending this conference will recognize and act on the conviction that social and educational justice understood as equity and inclusion in both theory and practice is a core value, integral not only to our scholarly and administrative work but to everything we do and that we will continue to interrogate not only our institutions, disciplines, libraries and social and economic systems but also ourselves. I don't care how you cut it. If you don't deal with this stuff on the personal level the way I do every day we will be having this conversation every year. So we have to examine our own biases. Every person in this room, including myself, has a bias. And we need to start calling it out. And if I didn't make some of you feel uncomfortable in this room, then I failed you. I never believed for a moment I preached to the choir. Never. I never have believed even as a president I was ever at the table. And I have never believed I have ever been a token. I'm a token only if I act like one. This is why my partner didn't want me to get speeches at night because I don't go to sleep. You know. And I think so we have to do these things. And doing it right does not mean just personal gain. In a democracy education is said to be the great equalizer and I believe that. And yet it's not just whether we have equal access to education and services and to prevailing systems of power and privilege. It's what we do with that access. And what kind of institution or society we have access to and what kind of institution in society we create. And of course it's what kind of research libraries we create who leads and staffs those libraries. What kinds of collections and spaces are available and who has access to those collections and spaces. Thanks to work and struggle of many dedicated people. The work of great scholars and artists of color are no longer a rarity as I said earlier. Gloria and Zaldua words are among them. Gloria's concept has introduced the concept of napatla. I think it gives me valuable guidance in shaping an ongoing conversation about institutional transformation. Napatla she said is the only place where change happens. It's an in between space. It's where we come together both affirming and bridging our differences to work in common cause. Embracing the multiple identities hyphenated identities. All of the complex reality of our lives as cultural beings. And this she said is a mark of inclusivity, increased consciousness and dialogue reflecting the hybrid quality of our lives and identities, not assimilation. In my view, napatla is also the perfect metaphor for the transformed institutions that we have been struggling to build in the emerging multicultural spaces of the 21st century academy. Places where we must work and struggle and interrogate and build together across our differences and under the differences are fear. I watch everything we care about go up in smoke. The lesson here is that to create change we must straddle and mediate worlds with one firm foot firmly planted in our own cultural terrain, whatever that might be. Our histories, our heritage and identities as the other seeks to find a toehold on the inside or turf of the dominant culture. And from that rather awkward stance we need to develop the tools and the strategy for excavating and tilling the cultural ground of our institutional knowledge systems. Another important concept Gloria introduced that can be a powerful guide in this work is the concept of conocimiento. How do we know who produces knowledge and is kept from producing it? Who has access to it and who doesn't? These are certainly central questions for the academy and certainly for our research libraries and it's primarily people of color and women who were barred for so long from access to knowledge and its creation in the academy who have been struggling for decades to change how those questions get answered. Recent attempts to return to this pre-civil rights, pre-human rights, pre-feminist time, the draconian court decisions, the rhetoric of hate and division, the proliferation and normalization of alternative facts, the attacks on education, all of this aids and abets what Gloria also calls desconocimiento, a not knowing, a refusal to know, an ignorance that damages miscommunications with irreversible harmful effects that betray trust that destroy. Champions of not knowing have claimed that they're defending democratic institutions against subversion and race hatred by outline ethnic studies programs and bilingual education. Just go to look at Arizona. But doesn't higher education in the 21st century require this very kind of pluralistic thinking that such attacks seek to destroy? Isn't teaching and learning all about, I'm almost done, all about bringing diverse perspective ideas and cultures and identities into a multicultural, multidisciplinary framework to explore and discover what a wonderful alchemy results. Isn't it all about transformation? And what I mean by transformation is institutional change that moves us beyond questions of access, beyond numbers, beyond boundaries, beyond restrictive definitions, beyond traditional structures and conceptual frameworks to create new ways of being, acting, teaching, learning, and knowing. Transformation takes courage, courage to harness the tension. We experience every day and turn it toward change. It means doing away with the pervasive and simplistic false dichotomies that pushes toward assimilation and false consensus. Thinking that asks us to choose between diversity and excellence as if they are antithetical or that forces us to choose between economic prosperity and economic justice, for example, or between gender and race or between books by white male authors and those by women of color. Binary thinking draws lines and formats hate and fear. It kills creativity, innovation, critical inquiry, and searching an authentic dialogue. And it posits assimilation as the only way to build healthy and cohesive communities if they would just be like us, would be fine, says the binary thinkers. As people of diverse identities in the academy, we are by definition living and working in tension as we create this new knowledge, critique existing systems and negotiate institutional voter glance, and that's what academic freedom is all about. It's all of our jobs to help our institutions become unstuck from the organizational models that I believe no longer serve the 21st century academy. Models that keep us isolated in cultural or disciplinary silos. The problems of our world clearly demand multicultural, multidisciplinary approaches and solution. And what does it mean? It means going beyond the rhetoric of equity and diversity and inclusion to truly embrace the work in theory and practice in individual and collective action, in policies and programs, and in climate and attitudes around gender, race and ethnicity, and also around sexual orientation, class, national origin, religion and disability. See, I read it all. Among people with diversity in their job descriptions and also as a shared responsibility throughout the institution. We can't do our most important work in institutional silos surrounded by barricades. It also means that we cannot allow ourselves to be complicit with the system that have rewarded us with positions of institutional leadership and responsibility. It's our job to embrace, even sometimes provoke the tensions that define our work, even to risk being labeled troublemaker. And that means we must constantly be on guard against silencing and erasure. And we must never forget why we are here to negotiate the world of difference as agents of change, and not as guardians of the status quo for those of us who do this work. Yes, research librarians have always been the guardian of certain traditions, acquiring collections, creating archives, preserving and disseminating the literary, scholarly and creative work of the ages. But you are also perhaps more than ever agents of change in the great tradition of academic freedom. Academic freedom has always been disrupted, has always disrupted the prevailing order. And over the years, activists for equity and inclusion have created a new, more intellectually and culturally robust academy that is far more responsive to and aligned with the global challenges we all face in this century. Their counter-narratives, I'm not gonna read that, what the heck. We're gonna move on here. You know, the other thing that I was really glad to see here is that there is a workshop on accountability measures and that is something, how do we know that we're making a difference? And we have to start paying attention to that versus just checking a box, how many are there? And so it has to be deeper and I wish I could have gone to that workshop. And if we don't do it, then somebody else is gonna come in and do it for us and literally erase us. And that is one of the things. So I'm gonna move really quickly through here. And so I also worry about cultural competencies in terms of what do we mean? It's more than just taking one workshop, doing one exercise, et cetera. Because when I review campuses and they talk about cultural competencies, they don't have it as an educational outcome or a learning outcome. I find that really interesting, not in all cases. So one answer is clear. The work is about re-imagining absolutely everything that we do in the academy. And I'm not gonna do all the listing. And it's about re-imagining everything. It's about re-imagining our research libraries. And we need to continue pushing our institutions to acknowledging the legitimacy and the centrality of programs like African American Studies, Gigano Studies, Gender and Queer Studies. After all, these programs have always broken new ground by exploring race, class, gender and sexuality and systems of power and privilege through an integrative scientific, artistic and humanistic lenses. And they were the precursors of and models for the kind of interdisciplinarity and civic engagement that are now staples of academic life at universities throughout the country. Their content, conceptual structures, methodologies and theoretical foundations infuse research teaching throughout the academic enterprise. And it is that reality that makes this work a national imperative. Too often we look at this work only within the context of our institutions, our individual campuses and not as a national imperative. In the same way we look at research about health, which affects the world. We are connected. It matters what happens at the University of Michigan to me. If they're not graduating PhDs, I don't know who I'm gonna draw from for a diverse faculty and staff. So it matters and so we need to start having that. That's why these kinds of national gatherings are so critical to this work. So I would hope that as you, you'll recognize that this ongoing struggle for social and educational justice as a civic responsibility, not just a political action or subject to scholarly inquiry. And I hope that you will agree to advance this educational justice wherever you are and not only in your classroom or in your jobs and offices and libraries, but also in your lives. And I'm gonna leave you with something because what we've done, we've created something new. A good friend of mine, Aurora Levin Morales of Puerto Rican wrote this incredible poem that I'd like to end with. And then I'll take some questions if there's time. Child of the Americas. I am a child of the Americas, a light-skinned mestiza of the Caribbean, a child of many diaspora, born into this continent at a crossroads. I am a Puerto Rican Jew, a product of the ghettos of New York I have never known. An immigrant and the daughter and granddaughter of immigrants. I speak English with passion. It's the tongue of my consciousness, a flashing knife blade of crystal, my tool, my craft. I am island grown, Spanish is my flesh, ripples from my tongue, lodges in my hips, the language of garlic and mangoes, the singing in my poetry, the flying gestures of my hands. I am Latino America, rooted in the history of my continent. I speak from that body. I am not African. Africa is in me, but I cannot return. I am not Taíno. Taíno is in me, but there is no way back. I am not European. Europe lives in me, but I have no home there. I am new. History made me. My first language was Spanglish. I was born at the crossroads, and I am whole. Thank you all very, very much. Can you hear? Okay, good. Or I can bring it around. I forgot to tell you, I am optimistic in spite of the talk, okay? I am optimistic, okay. The dynamics of immigrants, and there is going on around the world. I mean, people have been moving around for millennia, but there is constantly this new wave of we don't want the immigrants. So, especially in the US, where everybody prides themselves for their heritage and coming from a different place, how do you explain this new wave of kind of resistance towards immigrants? Well, I think there's this myth that there's this American way. I don't know what that way is. And so, I think people believe that when we have more immigrants, it's going to somehow destroy that American way of living. And so, there is a fear. I mean, we always talk about the Statue of Liberty as welcoming, the meek and our mild, but we don't have the Statue of Liberty down by Mexico. What does that mean? Or to the East, you know? I mean, symbolically, yeah, I mean. And so, I think there's just a general fear that it'll change too much, and I think that's what this backlash is all about, because I think we have been very successful for the most part. I think they thought a handful of us were going to come to the academy, and that would be it. Well, it didn't stop there. It just kept growing over the years. And I have to say, you know, I don't consider myself an immigrant. You know, many of us are not. I mean, that's the other part. So there's this racial kinds of stuff that's taking place, especially among immigrants of color, whether they're from Africa, China, you know, the East, or from Latin America, you know, the South, the South of the border. You don't hear that about Canada. Hi, so. Now you know why I exercise every morning. You're awesome. Let the record show she's down there every day. So first of all, thank you for everything, but particularly your story about finding solace and intellectual and personal kinship in the library was very moving. It reminded me of why I chose this profession. I often, at my age, I often think, wow, there's nothing left of the work that we did when I entered the profession, but that remains, providing that opportunity to connect with identities and ideas over time is what brought all of us to this work. So obviously, as an educator and a researcher and a writer, you're very familiar with libraries, but I'm wondering if you heard anything in the last couple of days that surprised you about us as librarians of this place and with this passion. What did you hear that took you by surprise? Do I have to confess? Yes. You all disputed my stereotype I had of you. These were very engaging and progressive kinds of discussions that I heard. You all were challenging each other, and that's what gives me hope when you all have these kinds of conversations. So I think it really defied what I know, and that's what I think things are in good hands that I can actually retire one day. So thank you for that question though. Thank you. Thank you. I'm very excited to have heard your talk, Dr. Varsado, and I want to ask you this because on a committee of women of color, the faculty members, and we are now, we have the ear of our president. He's new to us. He will have been here for a year in July. At U of A? At University of Arizona, yes. And so he was interesting because we just got a diversity officer for the campus not more than two years ago and he's leaving. We don't know why. So there's stuff going on. We're not all privy to it. So this last week we had a meeting with him as the faculty of women. We came together very quickly. We've had this ongoing agenda that we've been working on. We recently got the designation of a Hispanic serving institution and we're like, okay, what do we do with this now? Exactly. So I just kind of flew like a mosca, you know? And I said, that's a fly. And I said, because we're losing our officer, right? Diversity and we were just kind of spinning our wheels and I said, you know, I think right now is the opportunity to not just talk about our position and our campus wide diversity office but we have to look at it as an opportunity. And I'm thinking more of a center of research in diversity and inclusion and equity. So can we have that conversation? And the president said, this is the best idea I've heard probably in a long time. So we have him and I want to talk to you whether it's here now or engage with you at some point because the women all of a sudden started like, the emails just blew up. So we need a talk. Absolutely. You know, one of the things as different institutions create these positions on college campuses, oftentimes are poorly resourced and staffed. And they're not given authority, et cetera, to do as much as they need to do. In fact, that's why I'm at Illinois and building them an office. I mean, you know, we're trying to pull things together. And it's an investment for the future. So it's very important that they be resourced correctly. And that'll vary, of course, from institution to institution, given culture, given all many, many factors. But so I belong to a group of national chief diversity officers and this is what we're focusing on. The other part about a diversity research center, I created two of them at the University of Minnesota right here, it's now called IDEA, as well as one at the University of Washington. And what it did, I sent out a letter here in Minnesota to all the faculty, all four or five, how many, a lot of faculty. And I said, and the message was simple, anybody interested in helping me on diversity, please come to this dinner on a potluck dinner, potluck, I said, a potluck dinner on Saturday night. It was minus 30 degrees or 20 degrees that night. And I said, ain't no faculty coming to this meeting tonight. 150 faculty showed up from every college, every department, from every identity that you can imagine, and they came together and they began to create this incredible organization that enhanced interdisciplinary work, somebody doing research on AIDS as a sociologist, AIDS, and a medical person came together to work on these issues together. And they started to have a symposia about their work and what they were doing. And what that center did here and at the University of Washington, it helped in outreach and retention efforts. And I did not, how can I say, superimpose my, and I'm kind of strong, you know, so it was hard for me to stay out of it, but it needed to be organic and it really worked. So I'm a strong proponent of that. In fact, I'm proposing that very thing at the University of Illinois, because it is critical. Because so often we think of this work, not in an academic context, but primarily as a student affairs context. In fact, when I was at the University of Washington, I said, I also need the title of Vice Provost and Vice President so that I can have my feet in both of those worlds. You know that the day that the President appointed me by, added Vice Provost, my phone started ringing from the deans the very next day. It was like some sort of blessing that happened. That's true, it's really remarkable. So thank you for that question. It's a very important one. You know, I know you all need to go and I just want to wish you all well. And you know, if ever I can be of assistance, I stand ready to serve. This is exciting work and I compliment you and commend you all for what you have done for your incredible discussions. You've educated me in a fundamental way and I will take that with me. Thank you all very, very much. Thank you so much Rusty. What a wonderful way to cap off this symposium. Leave us inspired and enthused as we go back to our locations and thank you everybody for all your participation over the last three days. One last piece of business, as you will receive a link to an evaluation from us very, very soon. So please take the time to fill that out. We'd love to get feedback. We don't know what the future, you know, we would love to continue to work with ACRL and to see what sort of programs we might build in the future. Amy, don't tell my boss I said that, is she in the room? So anyway, collaboration is key. Thinking about these issues collaboratively and thinking I guess at scale is the jargon is really the way we need to approach this. So thank you, be safe going home. Thank you for your attention, for your energy. And again, thanks to all of our sponsors and to all of those responsible for creating the content over this experience. Thank you, take care. Thank you.