Student activists at Oregon’s Reed College are demanding that the school’s Humanities 110 course not include any work by white or European authors.
A student group called “Reedies Against Racism” made the demands in an April 11 Facebook post.
“In short, we’re calling for the Humanities 110 faculty to pick different cities from the old syllabus for the first two semesters,” the post states. “We feel that these cities should be outside of Europe, as reparations for Humanities 110’s history of erasing the histories of people of color, especially black people.”
According to an article in The College Fix, students have been fighting the “whiteness” of this particular course for a year and a half now. In fact, their protests — which included class interruptions and sit-ins, and sometimes even caused professors to cancel their classes — were successful in getting the initial curriculum changed. But the changes didn’t go far enough in the eyes of the activists who’d called for them.
In the revised curriculum, which is divided into four modules, students are supposed to learn about Athens and Rome in the first semester and then Mexico City and Harlem in the second two modules, which the activists say is racist. Why? Because learning from European authors first apparently sends “the message that learning about white culture is more urgent and foundational to a college education.”
“The rationale behind moving non-white texts to the latter half of the syllabus is that professors need time to develop new coursework,” the post explains. “This is totally understandable.”
“We agree that it is reasonable that the first two cities be cities that were covered in the original Hum syllabus,” it continues. “But Humanities 110 already contains some limited content on people of color that is just as important as Plato or Aristotle.”
The students want the first and second modules to be changed to be based on the works of authors from Jerusalem and Cairo. The post also asks students to sign a petition to support the group’s efforts.
Now, I’d say it’s obviously important for school curricula to cover works by a diverse group of authors. Diverse authors, after all, bring diverse perspectives, and a diversity of perspectives is certainly key to any student’s education. But what Reedies Against Racism is demanding goes so, so far in the opposite direction that it would hurt students by keeping them from learning about objectively important and influential works of literature. Like it or not, Plato and Aristotle are objectively important and influential authors. It would be wrong to deprive students of the chance to learn about them just for the sake of political correctness.