A group of DePauw University faculty, staff, and members of the President’s Cabinet will finish up an online course concerning race and equity on Monday.
Participation in the interactive online course, which is part of the University of Southern California Race Equity Project organized by Shaun Harper, was inspired by the on-campus bias incidents of last semester, said Vice President for Strategic Initiatives Cindy Babington.
“One of the things the President’s Cabinet wanted to do after the events of last April was to get more training for us as a leadership team, and so we started to look into different ways of doing that,” she said.
Four faculty members, four staff members and all members of the Cabinet are part of the 8-week online classroom that takes place every Monday from 1:30 to 3 p.m.
The module, that Babington describes as a mix of videos, case studies and breakout discussions, began on Aug. 31 and will finish on Monday before fall break.
However, discussion will not stop when the class ends, said Vice President for Academic Affairs Anne Harris.
“We’re going to move into the implementation of projects, which are how we all can implement the ideas brought up by the course,” she said. “For example, I will look at academic affairs and the current curriculum, and ask what a curriculum that decenters whiteness and centers international authors or authors of colors looks like. Those are the kind of questions we can ask ourselves.”
President Mark McCoy is one of the 20 members participating, and has nothing but good things to say about it so far.
“The quality of the teaching is really good, and the variety of perspectives the professors bring is phenomenal,” McCoy said. “What we’re really learning to do is to build a more equitable society, especially on our campus.”
Babington also spoke to the possible underlying motivations behind the class
“I think that you can never actually know too much about race and racial issues. So in part it was just ensuring that for one thing all of us had similar language and a similar framework from which we were working. That was a piece of it,” Babington said. “And it was also to make sure people are as up to speed on this as they can be.”
As for whether the class will complete this, Harris said only time will tell.
“We’ll see (about the success of the class) when it comes to implementing change. Signs of this to me would be that DePauw has a shared vocabulary about equity work and a shared understanding of identities as shaped by race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and socioeconomic status. That, to me, would be a sign that this is good,” she said.
“The second sign of success would be that we could point to institutional change,” Harris added. “What does it mean to have institutional change? It means looking at the systems that are the deepest and the least examined because they are the most crucial and the most fundamental.”
