The theme will be a graduation requirement for all undergraduate students beginning Fall 2021.
By Jasmine Snow and Samantha Hendrickson
Keith Mayes, a University of Minnesota professor, returned from a Sabbatical in January only to be launched into a years-old conversation with a new urgency.
University administration wanted to change its approach to its liberal education requirements; after the killing of George Floyd, that approach needed to include race.
“The window of opportunity is something that only comes around when tragedies happen,” said Mayes, who teaches in the University’s African American and African Studies department. “That’s an unfortunate situation, but we do have to seize the moment and take advantage of that opportunity.”
Two years after the University Senate rejected a proposed major redesign of its Liberal Education (LE) curriculum, it voted in late February to replace the Diversity and Social Justice (DSJ) optional LE theme course with a theme titled Race, Power and Justice in the United States (RPJ), which will be required for all students starting with those admitted in the fall of 2021.
According to the RPJ requirement’s official wording, such courses must teach students how to “wrestle explicitly with the complex interactions of diversity, especially race, power, and justice in the United States, and the persistent structural inequalities embedded in those relationships.”
The new requirement will bring a racial focus to the theme, replacing the previous one’s broader approach to diversity. For example, while the DSJ theme offered explorations of different “forms of diversity” and the “multi-layered operation of social power, prestige, and privilege,” the RPJ theme will require courses to explicitly use race as a means to explore embedded inequity in the U.S. across a range of disciplines.
Mayes said such courses will seek to emphasize how race, power and justice operate in different spaces, such as public health, the medical school or theater arts. Courses will exist across all of the University’s colleges and majors.
“It’s intersectionality in terms of identity, and interdisciplinary,” Mayes said. “When it comes to race and health disparities, for someone in public health, they may have that expertise [on race] and say ‘I can create a course with this.’”
Beginning in the fall of 2021, RPJ theme courses will be a graduation requirement for all undergraduate students. Students were previously required to take four of the five available courses, of which DSJ was one — making it technically optional. Roughly a quarter of all University students avoided a DSJ theme when it was not required, according to the Office of Undergraduate Education.
The University is one of the first Big Ten universities to establish a liberal arts graduation requirement that deals exclusively with racial inequities in the U.S. Almost all schools have some sort of diversity or ethics core requirement that offers a much broader scope of similar intersectional issues. The University of Michigan is the only Big Ten school to require a course explicitly on race.
Although the requirement will go into effect right away, it could be several years before all RPJ theme courses will be forced to adopt the new guidelines. The certification process is slow-paced due to a variety of factors, including the extensive consultation and design stages required before a course can be submitted for review.
The 18-member Council on Liberal Education must approve each LE course according to a set of criteria for each theme or core, a process that can sometimes be rigorous.
Once the council approves a course for an LE designation, those courses do not have to be reviewed again for several years. That buys time for existing Diversity and Social Justice courses that will have to be recertified under the new Race, Power and Justice criteria.
In the meantime, those courses will automatically meet RPJ standards without any recertification until their normal review time comes. The University has asked that faculty incorporate the RPJ changes into those courses in the meantime on a voluntary basis.
“It’s an improvement on what we have,” Mayes said of the RPJ requirement. “We have to allow the period of new courses to be created …There’s going to be a lot of lag time.”
The vote for the new requirement was not unanimous: 67 members of the senate voted aye, while the 23 others either opposed it or abstained. Some faculty members said the document did not reflect discussions about “extremely biased political language.”
Michael Kyba, a medical school professor and Faculty Consultative Committee member, objected to the proposal during the presentation last month. “If you can design a set of course requirements that requires certain faculty to teach it, then by definition, you’re telling students what to think, and not engaging with them on how to think,” he said during the meeting.
Mayes pushed back against Kyba’s comments during the forum, saying that to call the language outlining the new requirement politicized is to “marginalize the issue.”
“In other areas of study, you could make the same kind of case,” Mayes said. “We’re educating folks on what’s going on in the world. It’s unfair to single out the disciplines of ethnic studies, particularly those that study race.”
In an interview following the meeting, Mayes reflected on Kyba’s suggestion that the RPJ theme is “telling students what to think.”
“I don’t know what that means in a higher ed space. I mean, it’s just laughable,” Mayes said. He emphasized the importance of professors in all disciplines to teach students to grapple with subjects like race, power dynamics and justice. “What are these people teaching, if they’re not teaching students how to think and grapple with issues?”
Several students and faculty at the meeting expressed concerns about who would be deemed qualified to teach these courses. Mayes had a rather straightforward answer.
“It will be who has research qualification and background expertise to teach it,” Mayes said. “It’s not like we got to take people off the streets to teach this.”
Mayes also said that this theme is about preparing students to “go out into the world” and talk and think about important issues within the culture.
“Ageism, racism, sexism and classism,” Mayes said. “They have a responsibility to understand these issues not only as it pertains to other people but also as it pertains to themselves.”