All undergraduates in the 23-campus California State University system will have to satisfy a new ethnic-studies and social-justice course requirement to graduate, under a controversial policy the system’s Board of Trustees adopted on Wednesday.
Administrators framed the shift, the first major change in the system’s general education requirements in more than 40 years, as part of its wide-ranging response to the national uprising against racism.
But even as the trustees cast their votes, they acknowledged that the policy’s future is uncertain. Ethnic-studies faculty leaders oppose what they view as a lax mandate. The curriculum change could soon be superseded by a proposed state law that would force the system to adopt a stricter ethnic-studies graduation requirement.
As student activists nationwide pressure colleges to diversify curricula, California’s struggle is an early test of how far higher-education leaders are willing to go to put substance behind the anti-racist statements so many have made in recent months.
Who should shape what diversification looks like: campus leaders or politicians?
The California fight also raises the question of who should shape what that diversification looks like: campus leaders or politicians.
The bill advancing through California’s Legislature was written by an Africana-studies department chair at San Diego State University who became a Democratic member of the State Assembly, Shirley N. Weber. Her bill, known as AB 1460, would require students to take a course from one of four core ethnic-studies domains: Native American studies, Asian American studies, Latina/o studies, and African American studies.
Weber’s allies, including California State University’s Ethnic Studies Council, its faculty union, and Black Lives Matter activists, see such courses as vital to understanding the systemic racism exposed by Covid-19 and police killings of Black people. The law would also strengthen programs that give identity and community to students of color, they say.
But Cal State administrators and trustees — as well as the system’s academic Senate — say they don’t want the Legislature to interfere in what campuses teach. In their view, that sets an alarming precedent.
Administrators and trustees also say they want to give students more choice. Campuses will determine what courses satisfy the new ethnic-studies and social-justice requirement. A description shared by Toni Molle, a system spokesperson, suggests students could do so by studying other “historically oppressed groups, such as Jewish, Muslim, and LGBTQ populations.” A student might also take a public-health course on health disparities or an economics course on poverty, which would address the experiences of people of color, Molle said.
In a written statement, the system’s chancellor, Timothy P. White, said the new curriculum requirement “lifts ethnic studies to a place of prominence in our curriculum, connects it with the voices and perspectives of other historically oppressed groups, and advances the field by applying the lens of social justice. It will empower students to meet this moment in our nation’s history, giving them the knowledge, broad perspectives, and skills needed to solve society’s most pressing problems.”
Ethnic-studies scholars portrayed the new requirement, and what they characterized as the sidelining of ethnic-studies faculty members in its creation, as a case study in the systemic racism faced by people of color.
A student could conceivably satisfy the new requirement without taking an ethnic-studies course.
They deplored the fact, acknowledged by administrators, that a student could conceivably satisfy the new requirement without taking an ethnic-studies course.
Kenneth P. Monteiro, chair of the council representing ethnic-studies faculty members and a former dean of the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University, called the board’s new policy a “Trojan horse.”
As Monteiro interpreted it, the concept of social justice is so pliable that a student would be able to satisfy the new requirement by taking, say, a science course on endangered species.
What the chancellor created, Monteiro said, is a policy “to ensure that you don’t have to take a class about Black and brown people.”
