Dear Students and the UCR community:

The Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Riverside fully supports the UCR Demands to Administration – Call to Action sent to Chancellor Kim Wilcox and members of the UCR administration by the Black Student Union, SASI, ASUCR, the Queer Alliance, and more than 60 other campus communities on May 31, 2020. We strongly condemn systematic racism and we stand in solidarity with all who endorsed the Call to Action in grief, pain, and frustration with anti-black police violence. Staying silent and inactive is not an option. We accept that we must take immediate action to reflect on our behaviors and examine the existing structures that have worked against the best efforts of underrepresented individuals. We commit to growing an anti-racist academic community in our department, on our campus, and in the field of Earth and Planetary Science research.

We are currently engaged in developing a set of actions we, as a department, need to take to thoughtfully confront issues of inequity and underrepresentation. We will report these in the coming weeks.

Sincerely,

The faculty of Earth and Planetary Sciences