VCU may have racial literacy requirement after years of petitioning

Andrew Kerley, Audience Editor

VCU is making final preparations to implement a racial literacy course requirement starting in the fall 2024 semester, according to an update the provost released last week.

If implemented, students would be required to take a course about understanding institutional race and racism, ranging from justice and equity in visual arts to racial literacy in analytics, according to the provost. It would apply to incoming first-years and transfer students.

Mignonne Guy, Ph.D. and former chair of the African American studies department, first posed the requirement to a panel of Virginia college and university presidents in 2019. President Rao was the only panelist to imply the idea could come to fruition and asked Guy to start the conversation.

Students in VCU’s Committee On Racial Equity made a petition calling for the creation of the racial literacy requirement in 2021. The course “CSIJ 200: Introduction to Race and Racism in the United States” was first offered in the spring 2022 semester, but students and faculty continued to push for it to be a requirement, according to previous reports by The Commonwealth Times.

The requirement was delayed multiple times over the years, according to previous reports by The Commonwealth Times. VCU garnered public backlash after the provost indefinitely postponed its implementation three weeks before the fall 2023 semester, saying there needed to be “more courses and more course sections” fulfilling the requirement for VCU’s largest class ever.

CSIJ 200 and another course teaching racial literacy were still taught that semester but were not required as promised, according to the 2022-23 bulletin.

Amy Rector, Ph.D., who co-chaired the group developing the courses, said she didn’t believe the provost’s reasoning in a previous report by The Commonwealth Times.

“If those reasons were true, then we had two years to come up with solutions for those particular problems,” Rector said. “The fact that those didnʼt seem to come across the provost office as real concerns until three weeks before the start of the semester is an indication that they’re not real barriers.”

The team behind the requirement never intended for every first-year student to complete it that year, according to Rector. The idea was to increase class availability each year. The group came up with a plan to train any professor wanting to teach the course, to which 60 to 70 professors expressed interest.

The NAACP chapter at VCU protested the postponement in October 2023, marching from the Student Commons to Monroe Park, according to a previous report by The Commonwealth Times.

Anesia Lawson is the chapter’s vice president. She took CSIJ 200 as a first-year student and said it “opened her eyes” to institutional racism in the United States. After the protest, she began serving on the student advisory group helping to develop the racial literacy courses.

Lawson said students aiming to become doctors and lawyers — students aiming to do big things in corporate America — need to think critically and understand racism in society.

“You have people thinking, ‘Oh, you just need to work harder,’” Lawson said. “You have to look at it from this bigger lens of like, ‘Why are there more black people in jail? Why are more people of color subjugated to these types of living conditions? Why do they live in these areas?’”

The workgroup developing the racial literacy courses is wrapping up work on 15 new courses, bringing the total number of courses fulfilling the requirement to 17, according to the provost. The courses will have to meet the required number of seats and be approved by the University Undergraduate Curriculum Committee.

Just yesterday, George Mason University shared syllabi for their own diversity, equity and inclusion requirement with Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, which his administration called a “thinly veiled attempt to incorporate the progressive left’s groupthink on our students,” according to a report by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The teams developing VCU’s racial literacy requirement fear they may receive similar sentiments from Youngkin, who appoints the members of VCU’s board of visitors, Lawson said.

Ana Edwards is the course coordinator for CSIJ 200 and serves on the racial literacy work group. She said the group is excited about the update, but concerned about the language used in the announcement.

“There’s a lot of ‘ifs,’” Edwards said. “In particular, continuously referring to ‘if’ the requirement is implemented, which is different than ‘if these courses are approved.’”

The workgroup still feels encouraged by the interest coming from departments that have introduced courses for the requirement, Edwards said. Students are opting to take the class despite it not being required.

Edwards said she believes students need to take the class because they will eventually encounter the issue of race.

“They will say, ‘I don’t know enough to respond, or even when I should respond,’” Edward said. “That’s a kind of social illiteracy. They are finding this class helpful to them.”