Colleges are wrestling with the financial havoc and technological logistics of a hellish year. But 2020’s Covid-19 pandemic and increased racial strife are also prompting revisions in college curricula. The nation is traumatized, and the content of academic programs, not just how they are delivered, must reflect that reality, said college leaders, students, faculty members, and higher-education experts who spoke with The Chronicle.
“We need not just mourn with our students but empower them to understand the context of the moment, the history of their community, and ways they can be active agents in improving society,” said Melanye Price, a professor of political science at Prairie View A&M University, a historically Black institution in Texas.
“You can’t be in the truth business and avoid these conversations,” said W. Joseph King, president of Lyon College, in Arkansas, and a founder and principal of Academic Innovators, a consulting company.
Colleges are offering new classes on racial history and social justice. They are infusing those themes into existing courses, strengthening bridges across disciplines in the sciences and the humanities, starting new minors, creating equity-and-justice centers, and hiring ethnic-minority specialists in neglected topics. Those measures are intended to deepen students’ understanding but also, in concert with co-curricular and extracurricular study groups and clubs, to offer students in underrepresented minority groups a deeper sense of belonging. Many of these initiatives were in the works before Covid-19, the death of George Floyd, and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed, but they have been energized, accelerated, expanded.
Experts caution, however, against empty virtue-signaling, or offering fare that’s poorly thought out and might prove superficial and fleeting. “No more tokenism,” insisted Prairie View’s president, Ruth J. Simmons. “Only engage if you are deeply engaged.”
Whitman College, in Walla Walla, Wash., has made “Race, Violence, and Health” the theme for the entire 2020-21 academic year. That encompasses “Introduction to Race and Ethnic Studies” and a course about the U.S.-Mexico border, but also “Before Germs and Genetics,” which explores how “ideas about bodies from the century before ‘germ theory,’” when white elites obsessed about heredity, race, and human variation, “can challenge our 21st-century notions of ‘science’ and ‘modernity.’” The course “Death and Afterlife” has been refocused this year, with “death by Covid-19 and racial and other forms of violence in our contemporary moment” serving as “the touchstone for readings and assignments.”
Whitman’s global-studies center will feature guest lectures and workshops, like one led by Anna Taft, of the Tandana Foundation, on how racial disparities affect community development and public-health projects in Ecuador and Mali. The college’s academic theme permeates even fundamental science courses, in which a unit on protein analysis might use the coronavirus as an example, and mathematical modeling can feature Covid-19 infection rates and patterns.
Whitman’s department of art history and visual-culture studies was already thinking about its courses with an eye toward “decolonizing” them, and the pandemic and racial reckoning accelerated that trend, said Lisa Uddin, the department’s chair and an associate professor. “You can’t bracket that anymore,” she said. “That is not a week in the syllabus. That is the syllabus.” If students are examining the architect Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus designs, for example, they should consider how race factors into who is exposed or surveilled.
Sometimes it takes a calamity to move scholars out of their silos, and the intense interdisciplinary collaboration in this year’s efforts might be a silver lining to an awful period. Montclair State University, in New Jersey, is offering three five-week courses related to Covid-19 and inequities. A course on historical perspectives draws on faculty members in history and medical humanities, said Jeff Strickland, chair of the history department. A course on public-health perspectives draws from medical humanities, biology, and applied mathematics and statistics. And the third course covers social, economic, legal, and political perspectives from faculty members in religion, political science, law, psychology, sociology, and anthropology.
Preparing for Battle
At many colleges, the pandemic and racial reckoning have added urgency to academic-program updates that were underway. Prairie View A&M was already planning a required course on the history of race and class in America. It was also introducing elements of African American studies into the overall curriculum and had proposed a Center for Race and Justice named for the university’s president, Simmons. Prairie View produces engineers, architects, teachers, nurses, and other skilled professionals. But recent events underline the need to better train students to battle “a world of systemic racism and sexism,” said Price, the political-science professor.
This year’s crises have spurred research programs too. In addition to a Black-thriving initiative and a course sequence exploring anti-Black racism, the University of California at Irvine is putting $300,000 into 18 studies under the heading “Advancing Equity in the Age of Covid.” Participating are researchers in biology, education, computer science, nursing, social ecology, and public health, and directors of student-resource centers. Indiana University established a Racial Justice Research Fund that will distribute a half-million dollars to 40 projects. Among proposals is a study of how various kinds of anti-violence messaging affect gun incidents, how race influences the outcome of studies of chest pain and anxiety, the impact of the Trump presidency on American militias, and how faith changes Black women’s self-image.
Public-health experts and first-responder care givers have been valorized since March. But while some health subfields continue to see the gains they did pre-pandemic, academic interest in health over all is not markedly rising, said Lauren Edmonds, a director at the higher-education consulting company EAB. “We are seeing interest from schools in building up their health programming,” she said, “but the demand isn’t necessarily spiking like they assume.”
With a world of possibilities and drastically limited resources, how should colleges decide which programs to pursue, especially if their priority is to help low-income and minority students? A new Chronicle report, “The Crisis Curriculum: How the Pandemic and Racial-Justice Movement Are Transforming Academic Programs,” describes why this is a moment of distinct urgency in helping students understand, cope with, and eventually improve their turbulent world. It shows how colleges are bringing issues of racial equity and justice into a variety of disciplines, among them criminal justice, public health, art and design, and even esports. And it explains why assumptions about what fields are likely to boom or go bust amid today’s crises could be very wrong, and what strategies work best in navigating turbulent times.
