Open Letter: This Emerita prof Supports Divestment

Dear President Shepard,

I would like to thank you for the generous offer to attend a dinner with retired faculty from Western: it is an important gesture to remember former professors and our contributions. Normally, I would be looking forward to seeing familiar faces and reminiscing with colleagues about our days on campus.

However, under the circumstances, I must decline your invitation. 

It is impossible for me to enjoy a celebratory meal with Western colleagues when our Palestinian colleagues in Gaza are enduring a brutal famine deliberately imposed by an occupying power which is actively supported by your Administration. How can we gather on our beautiful, peaceful campus while ignoring the fact that Israeli occupation forces have deliberately destroyed all of the Universities in Gaza? Some of our colleagues at Western have lost family members in Gaza, and we know that many of our Palestinian colleagues, their students, families and communities have been killed, maimed and displaced by a military occupation in which your Administration continues to invest UWO funds. Israel’s military occupation deprives our Palestinian colleagues of any semblance of academic freedom: how can we support academic links with Israeli institutions that participate in their oppression?

As an academic who was once a child refugee from fascism in Spain, I must draw the line at supporting scholasticide and genocide. I cannot in good conscience join you while your Administration maintains economic and academic support for Israeli apartheid.

Some of my friends and colleagues will attend your event on June 18, and while I will miss seeing them, I hope some of them continue to raise these important issues with you and your Administration. Hopefully one day soon you will sit down with the students, faculty and other UWO community members who care deeply about these important issues to agree on ways to eliminate Western’s complicity with war crimes against Palestinians. 

Until then, I remain, sincerely,

Dr. Mireya Folch-Serra, Ph.D.

Professor Emerita, Geography and Environment

Mireya Folch-Serra taught in the Department of Geography and Environment from 1994 until retiring in 2003. After retirement taught undergraduate and graduate courses for several years, until 2018.

Her research and teaching focussed on Geopolitics, the Geography of Gender and the Geography of Western Europe. Her graduate courses at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism focussed on Contemporary theories of Fascism and Counter-Fascism, Theories of Spatial and Dialogical Memory, and Communist Hypotheses for the 21st century.

She did her doctoral research in Spain and Mexico. Her publications highlight issues of diaspora and exile, as in “Linking repression and exile: A Geography of the Spanish Republican Diaspora, 1939-1975” in the Special Issue of Treballs de la Societat Catalana de Geografia

She remains involved in several community groups.