Correction 2/19: Sections of the original article that described a Q&A section at the meeting have been removed.
On Feb. 13, Vice President for Equity & Inclusion Floyd Cheung, Provost Michael Thurston and Dean Alexandra Keller held an open forum on race and antiracism education at Smith. Students and faculty discussed the current plan for possibly requiring education on race and antiracism for students. The plan has been in the works since 2020, but similar ideas have been popping up at Smith since the 1960s.
The Carroll Room was packed with around 125 interested faculty, students and staff. As Cheung stood and directed folks to open seats, Thurston and Keller sat quietly at the table facing the audience, microphones in front of them both.
Many students only became aware of the event after receiving an email from SGA President Leela de Paula the same afternoon. There was no other publicization of the event from the college to the student body.
During the open forum, Cheung presented slides, followed by some words from Provost Thurston. Cheung then moderated a Q&A with the audience. Dean Keller remained silent for the duration of the event.
Cheung opened the forum, shortly reflecting on the long history of this plan at Smith.
“This is an iteration of a project that has been going on for perhaps 50 years. As many of you know, ideas about how to educate all Smith students about race and antiracism have been proposed in the past. All previous proposals have failed. So we have an opportunity this year to…do something different.”
He ended his introduction by extending thanks to those who have worked on the evolving plan: the initial 2021 working group which created a proposal later deemed unfeasible by the Committee on Academic Priorities (CAP); the Task Force, formed by President Kathleen McCartney and chaired by Cheung that replaced the working group; CAP, which provided feedback on the two previous proposals, effectively preventing them from moving on to a faculty vote and other groups including the SGA Curriculum Committee, SGA leadership, Unity organizations and the Inclusion Council.
Moving to the next slide, Cheung went on to explain why Smith is working on this plan in the first place.
“We have a racial justice action plan that the college has committed to, beginning in 2020… It’s a living document. Principle 1 of the Toward Racial Justice plan that the college has signed on to is that there are really no colleges our age — except for perhaps historically Black colleges and universities and tribal colleges — that are designed for the diversity of staff, faculty and students that we have here today. So that calls on us to reflect on our past in order to build a more just and inclusive future.”
He highlighted that, while education is not going to solve all issues, “It can help.”
“There’s actually some research that shows that it can help,” he noted. The “Marley Hypothesis,” he remarked, asserts that “the less one knows about the history of race, the less likely one is able to recognize present-day racism.”
Cheung summarized the long history of demands for racial education at Smith, displaying a timeline on the screen.
From 1968-69, the Black Students Alliance (BSA) demanded the establishment of Black Studies, which is now called Africana Studies at Smith.
In 1989, “concerned students of all colors demanded a mandatory four-credit class required in order to graduate, dealing with racism in and of the United States.” Cheung says that this proposal never got written, and was just an idea that eventually faded away.
In 2002, a students grassroots organizing group demanded that all students be required to take a class on race and ethnicity; they also demanded a race and ethnicity designation on Latin Honors. This, too, eventually dissolved.
In 2019, BSA and the Pan-African Students Association demanded that “all Smith students should be required to take at least one class on race relations to account for the writing intensive credit and/or Latin Honors.”
“I would humbly say that Alex, Michael and I are currently working on a way to meet the 2019 demand,” Cheung said in a low tone.
Clicking to the next slide, he prepared to, for the first time, publicly announce the newest version of the proposal.
“This is probably the drumroll moment,” Cheung said, prompting a hum of chuckles from the crowd.
The “three-pronged proposal” contains the following objectives:
- The Smith Reads program focus each year on a book about race and its intersections in a US or transnational context
- All academic departments determine how education about race and antiracism is best integrated into specific majors
- Race and Antiracism (R&A) become the eighth major field of knowledge for students who wish to qualify for Latin Honors
This shifts away from previous proposals, all of which promoted a clear goal, though in different ways: a course requirement on race for all students.
de Paula, who has been involved in the behind-the-scenes proposal process, said that she and leaders of BSA were unexpectedly notified of the revised proposal in January.
“There was no clear reason why they took a step back from the required course on race,” she said.
de Paula also said that, over J-term, the Office of Equity & Inclusion (OEI) claimed that SGA and BSA signed off on the new version, even though they never even read or gave input on it. de Paula states that “upon confrontation, the OEI retracted its claim.”
Originally, de Paula remarked, the open forum was not supposed to be hosted by the OEI and College Hall, but instead by the “Roundtable Group,” a group of “concerned members of the community” (including students) led by Valerie Joseph, the administrative director of AEMES Programs. This changed after the release of the revised proposal.
Thurston offered some context for the revisions. Referring to Objective #2, he explained that, over three years of conversations with faculty, CAP found “disciplinary specificity” important. By allowing departments to choose how to infuse racial education into their curriculums, Thurston hopes for students to learn what race has to do with their specific majors.
At the start of the Q&A, I asked Cheung for some insight on how they decided to move away from the course requirement.
“We’ve got lots of input from mostly faculty about the desire to move from something compelled to something you could decide,” he clarified.
Provost Michael Thurston added on:
“Incentivizing and inviting into these conversations seems to be really important for the faculty who are often going to be the ones who are constructing these conversations and trying to engage in them productively. It’s also something that we’ve heard very much from students about. The commitment to the open curriculum at Smith is a high priority for many,” he explained.
“In part because the open curriculum ensures that the experiences that a student has are ones that are chosen… Those seem the best ways to preserve the really productive engagements we’ve seen.”
Faculty are projected to continue discussion about this plan throughout the Spring.
