On Cromwell Day, Nov. 15, 2022, two thousand people attended the keynote upholding the day’s theme, “Ignorance Is Not Bliss: The Necessity of Teaching and Learning About Race.” In John M. Greene Hall, this meant by five minutes before the event, attendees had to make a real effort to find a seat even in the balcony. Like every Cromwell Day since 2009, a Smith student stood and read “Maven” by Nikky Finney, with its truly Smithcore opening line: “When you are a thinking woman neither violence or sugar plums can muzzle the power of thought.”
Shortly before the throng dispersed, Floyd Cheung, Vice President for Equity and Inclusion, offered more food for thought: on Feb. 9, Smith will hold a community meeting to discuss a course requirement on race.
Students emerged, buzzing, into the afternoon light; a course requirement? What does that mean? Will it take effect before I graduate?
The current plan, under discussion by the Committee on Academic Priorities (CAP), would work similarly to the writing intensive: any professor could submit their course as an option to fulfill the requirement on race. In Spring 2023, CAP will either send this proposal back for revisions or endorse it and send it on to a faculty vote.
Envisioning the classroom environment of a required course on race makes some people preemptively wince.
“What does this mean if you start injecting people into these classes who might not want to be there?” asked an anonymous source familiar with the proposal. “It could really change the experience of what it means to be a major in these departments… Smith’s open curriculum creates a certain culture in the classroom that adding a requirement would change, and we’re not sure how it would change, which can be scary… What do students want?”
It’s indeed worth considering whether a large number of students will be angry about this requirement, and the possibility that this anger will be directed towards people of color.
“Im open to discussion but mandating classes on racism will inevitably piss off racist people,” someone wrote anonymously on the Smith Confessional. “and yknow who they target when theyre pissed? Us. like I know it’s good intentioned but these kinds of things always increase harm toward poc.”
An unsigned banner proclaiming “TEACH ABOUT RACE” appeared in the Campus Center the week of December 5. No one registered for the banner space, according to director of student engagement Tamra Bates; it showed up in the banner bucket but shouldn’t have gone up.
The banner was taken down after inquiries were made, leaving a hole like a gapped tooth between banners advertising a dance performance and an a capella concert. However, precisely a week later, the banner reappeared, proclaiming its message to all who passed below.
Professor Loretta Ross, who teaches about white supremacy as well as race and culture, finds that more students want this requirement than people think. “The 50 students enrolled in my white supremacy course are thirsty for this information.”
“It gets kind of funny to me, because there is concern that students will resent being mandated to take a course,” says Ross. “And I’m like, wait a moment, aren’t we a college?”
“Why are y’all scared of the students? The students are students. Aren’t y’all supposed to be the adults, and help them become adults?”
By requiring at least one course on race in a Smith education, the college hopes to produce graduates who understand what race is and how it works; who pay attention to their fellow human beings across racial lines; and who are equipped to analyze and describe the shape of race in their own lives. They will understand methods by which people resist racial oppression. Ideally, Smith graduates will not ignore race to soothe their own discomfort, nor will they silence themselves for fear of sounding stupid or unreasonable.
Per Nikky Finney: they will think and think, again.
Smithies, as they rise to meet these goals, could develop the tools to understand racism on their own campus — a palpable need, considering recent incidents of racial tension at Smith. In the summer of 2018, a janitor called the campus police on Black Smithie Oumou Kanoute — who was eating in a house lounge — in a move that was entirely aligned with Smith’s written guidelines, yet served to terrify and alienate Kanoute. The occurrence incited student protests and launched nationwide conversations about racial bias at Smith.
This year, the Black Students Alliance held a Cromwell Day workshop titled “The Power Behind Your Words,” which educated students about racial microaggressions. The event was packed, with some even having to sit on the floor due to lack of seating — evidently, people wanted to learn about racism.
“As Crystal Fleming said [in her Cromwell address], most of us at least in K-12 education actually internalize all kinds of problematic ideas about race,” Cheung said. “So, is college an opportunity to do some unlearning as well as some learning? I would say: yeah.”
THE PLAN BEGINS
In 2020, the idea was to make IDP 102: Thinking Through Race mandatory for all students. The course, taught by Cheung and weekly guest lecturers, “offers an interdisciplinary, historical, critical examination of race in the United States.”
“What I like personally about that model is that the message should be: ‘Now go do deeper work. Take more classes,’” says Daphne Lamothe, professor and chair of Africana studies, who offered one of the guest lectures. “I get why we didn’t go that way, and went through the other model, but because my questions always start with the pragmatic, I felt like that was a good starting point.”
“We thought it was doable, right? Because it’s a low-credit course; students could fit it in as a night course…and we could find the staffing for it because it would be a load shared by a lot of professors. So,” says Cheung, wryly, “we thought that would be a good proposal.”
To gather community perspectives, the Office for Equity and Inclusion (OEI) opened an online forum collecting responses to their “Toward Racial Justice Strategic Plan” living document. At the time we spoke to Cheung, the forum had 160 responses. About half of the responses were from alums, which, to Cheung, makes sense considering the large number of them. From there, the order from most to least responses went: current students, current staff, then current faculty.
Alums offered mixed responses. Some thought that Smith was going too far, that countering anti-Blackness falls outside the college’s mandate to provide a liberal arts education. These responders would often say, well, why focus on anti-Blackness? Why not antisemitism, or climate change?
Faculty were primarily supportive of the plan, but some articulated similar worries.
Asked if it’s true that a liberal arts education is not about anti-Blackness, Cheung responds: “We know that learning happens best when people feel like they belong. Countering anti-Blackness is one of the most important things we can do…to make people feel like they can belong, number one; and number two, it’s just the right thing to do! It’s the socially just thing to do.”
“Countering anti-semitism, and working on climate change… That is important as well, but we know that the principle of equity is that you put the fire out at the house that’s burning. And in 2020 the house that was burning was that of anti-Blackness.”
Cheung was likely referring to the police killings of George Floyd and others in 2020, which kicked off mass protests and what many called a long-overdue reconsideration of racial relations in the United States.
Some alums thought the “Thinking Through Race” course was too narrow and that the plan should be expanded to include many courses.
Cheung says that student responses tended to be very positive, but some, like the alums, questioned whether there should only be one requirement.
A frequent critique in the community response was that the proposal was not strong enough. Floyd responds, explaining that the plan was then only at its preliminary stage and, for that reason, was not as hard-hitting as it is now.
While keeping the plan focused on anti-Blackness, in 2021 the provost formed a working group to respond to these concerns. The group, chaired by professor of sociology Nancy Whittier, included members from CAP, the SGA Curriculum Committee and the Black Students Alliance.
THE PLAN EVOLVES
That same year, an incident about race at Smith inflamed the national news. After posting a series of YouTube videos denouncing the college for generating a hostile environment for her and other white members of the community, Jodi Shaw resigned from her Residence Life position at Smith in January 2021. Conservative news outlets across the nation joined her in attacking the college, calling out Smith’s unjust “wokeness” campaign.
As Shaw and others condemned Smith’s anti-racist efforts, the working group continued to advocate for anti-racist education.
Around the same time, attacks on the teaching of Critical Race Theory overwhelmed the nation. Since January 2021, “44 states have introduced bills or taken other steps that would restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism,” according to Education Week. “Eighteen states have imposed these bans and restrictions either through legislation or other avenues.”
As folks across the U.S. denigrated the teaching of race, Smith’s working group persisted.
The working group agreed with Smith community members that one course was not enough. Their new proposal suggested a “menu” of four-credit courses on race in the U.S., of which students are required to select one.
This proposal also requested that the college hire eight new faculty members to make this work possible. “That’s just hard,” says Cheung. Changing the distribution of tenure-track faculty this much was declared unfeasible, but the Smith administration saw that the plan had good bones.
Thus, President Kathleen McCartney formed a task force aimed at “finding a sustainable path forward,” as Provost and Dean of the Faculty Michael Thurston put it.
This task force kept the “menu” format introduced by the working group, borrowing the writing intensive’s opt-in course designation process to form the proposal now in CAP’s hands.
Unlike the working group, the task force’s plan relies on existing faculty labor to teach these required courses. It urges the college to hold workshops where more faculty can learn to teach about race skillfully, effectively — or at least better than they could before, step by thoughtful step. This plan aims to interrogate race not only in the United States, but globally.
There is hope that through this plan, professors who’ve wanted to teach how race affects their disciplines will feel empowered to do so, while others will explore whether and how an understanding of race could enrich their subject matter.
President McCartney recently approved three Target of Opportunity hires to expand the faculty teaching these courses. Target of Opportunity hires don’t require the typical lengthy hiring procedure and instead function by way of nomination, making the process much shorter.
RISKS AND CONCERNS
Some have expressed concerns in response to the plan’s heavy reliance on current Smith professors’ labor.
“What is actually doable in terms of staffing within the college?” an anonymous source familiar with the plan remarks. “One of the really hard things about this requirement is the physical demands of it; about 650 students would have to complete this requirement every year. If there are 20 students in a course, that’s 30+ courses.”
Junior faculty of color would likely experience pressure from the college to teach these courses — a pressure that may be difficult to ignore, since such untenured faculty may fear failing to secure tenure if they don’t comply with the college’s requests.
If junior faculty of color feel unwelcome or unable to do the work they’re passionate about here, Smith could lose real progress.
Lamothe, who has worked at Smith since 2004, reflects that she’s seen a significant change in composition of the faculty, since Smith under President McCartney has hired many faculty of color. “I think it shifts the conversation,” she says. “The challenge becomes retention of junior faculty.”
“I reflect on the fact that I was a junior faculty member of color when I first arrived in 1999,” said Cheung, when asked how he and colleagues will address this expected pressure. “I understand those pressures really, really well. So there are many ways to address that, right? One of the ways is to reward it when somebody chooses to do it.”
Since work on race often feels unrewarded and invisible, rewarding professors who opt in to teach this course requirement would encourage them to participate, Cheung explained.
For instance, the yearly faculty record sheet now shows a drop-down option to record service for equity and inclusion, aiming to solidify previously invisible work into a faculty member’s record with the college.
Smith’s associate dean of the faculty Hélène Visentin “has been working with departments about how to be better mentors towards junior colleagues of color,” Cheung says. “Some of that has to do with not pressuring them and helping them manage visible and invisible workload.”
Promoting junior and adjunct faculty would also be essential, notes Ross, who is on the task force.
In particular, some fear that, due to racial bias, faculty of color teaching the courses may receive harsh student evaluations — supported by research on bias in student feedback. Those evaluations could impact their chances of attaining tenure.
Recently, the college has been trying to combat such bias. In this fall’s email encouraging students to complete course feedback questionnaires, the Office of the Dean of the College exhorted students to avoid “unconscious and unintentional biases about the race and gender of the instructor.” Biased evaluations are nevertheless a realistic possibility, especially for a required course about race.
As a solution, Ross says the task force has considered bracketing off evaluations for the first couple of years of teaching the course — this way, the feedback can’t impact faculty’s careers.
MOVING FORWARD
On July 1, 2023, Sarah Willie-LeBreton will be taking President McCartney’s place in office, making her Smith’s 12th president. Willie-LeBreton will inherit the course requirement project from McCartney, meaning that she will bear the burden of criticism for this change — criticism that may come from people across the nation, as it did in response to the Oumou Kanoute and Jodi Shaw incidents. This presidential transition is important to keep in mind as this proposal continues to develop.
The plan has come a long way from its beginnings, but it also has a long way to go.
“I feel like we’ve made some good progress and there’s a lot more to do,” Cheung says. “Some of it will take money and some of it will take will.”
On Feb. 9, a panel describing the history of a request for a required course on race — starting from the first coordinated Black student action to include Black Studies in the curriculum in 1968 — will be held. Ahead of the panel, Ross wants the Smith community to keep some things in mind.
“We have to learn to trust each other,” she says. “I fundamentally believe that the student body, the faculty, and the administration want this plan to work. But there is a lot of distrust that has accumulated over the years.”
Faculty point out how much students have to gain, in terms of their understanding of the world, through such a requirement.
“If we begin with the idea that anti-Blackness is a foundational construct of the modern world, right?” Lamothe says. “From the beginning of the Enlightenment Era, and imperial expansion — then there’s no question, through any discipline, that can’t find a way to reckon with that fact.”
Those two thousand people in John M. Greene Hall for the Cromwell Day keynote, along with the three hundred who watched the livestream, might well agree.
Update: The Feb. 9 event has been canceled. According to Floyd Cheung, “The Provost, Dean of the College, and I welcome students and faculty to discuss the latest version of the proposal on 2/13 at 4:30 in the Carroll Room.”
