PSYCHOLOGISTS FOR SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

Editorial by PsySR Member Anita Barrows PhD April 24, 2025 Dear Fellow Psychologists for Social Responsibility, We are facing, as we all are witnessing, a crisis in the constitutional democracy we have been taught to believe was unshakable. The road to this has been paved for some time now, but the current government is certainly rolling it out with what the poet Yeats called “passionate intensity.” By consequence, we are also facing a crisis that is landing hard on the young people in our institutions of higher learning. We have all heard of the complicity of Columbia with the Trump administration, which has resulted in the incarceration of Mahmoud Khalil. Likewise, we have heard of the young Turkish Fulbright scholar, Rumeysa Ozturk, who was brutally seized on the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts, near Tufts University, where she had been studying. Many of us are professors or instructors in professional psychology training programs. I know that the fear these programs have of their federal funds or their students’ federal loans being cut or eliminated is not trivial, not easily overcome or dismissed. Many of us teach at schools that have had a commitment to issues like DEI, social justice, anti-racism, or — indeed — free speech! These and many other values of ours are under attack. I firmly believe that if all these schools came together and resisted abandoning policies it has taken years to develop and set in place, we would have a chance of success that we don’t have as individual institutions. Our students are the future standard bearers of our profession, as well as our future colleagues. If the face of our field is to reflect the vast diversity of students studying psychology and the vast diversity of the society that accesses our services, now is the time to stand up for those who are in danger of being hurt, disappeared, rendered invisible; and I believe we are ethically bound to protect them. If we who teach at these institutions came together as a kind of consortium, we could begin to figure out alternatives to federal funding if indeed we risk losing that. If we came together, we could exchange information about avenues of legal protest and ways to shield our students from being seized, deported, expelled, assaulted or otherwise harmed for being immigrants, being members of marginalized groups, and for expressing views against injustice and genocide. If we came together, we could have each others’ support in opposing biased and cowardly actions and policies laid down by our schools’ administrations — support in choosing to dissent. If there ever was a moment for those of us committed to social responsibility to stand up, it is now. We are witnessing the destruction, at the hands of our government and those who are willing to cave to it, of everything PsySR stands for, and we must not avert our gaze, cower in fear, or assume we are helpless to stop it. Can we begin a discussion about standing together to resist our graduate training programs conceding in anticipation of outrageously repressive mandates? I truly believe we can succeed. All we need is courage and solidarity. Sincerely, Anita Barrows, PhD.