Anti-Racism 101
A mandatory course for students who've lived it. Taught by faculty who've read about it.
FacultyLeaks.com is an anonymous dispatch from inside higher education. Some identifying details have been changed. The dysfunction has not.
The Wall Street Journal is out with an editorial on how the ABA uses its accreditation monopoly to mandate DEI coursework in law schools. Worth reading. But it’s not just law schools.
My institution requires all students to take an anti-racism course before they graduate. Not as an elective. As a requirement. They’re not alone — a quick search confirms that dozens of universities have identical mandates baked into their general education requirements. Some institutions are reconsidering. UConn’s faculty senate recently voted to put its mandatory anti-Black racism course on hold after the university’s own legal counsel warned it could be considered illegal under current federal guidance. Not because anyone decided it wasn’t working. Because the funding was at risk.
That tells you everything about why these courses exist in the first place.
Here’s the thing: our student body is majority non-white. Black students, Hispanic students, Asian students, international students from dozens of countries, kids from rural plains states sitting next to kids from New York and LA. The genuine diversity of lived experience in any given classroom would make most DEI consultants weep with joy.
And we’re going to have them sit through a lecture from a 55-year-old upper-middle-class white professor who has never experienced what they’ve experienced — but has definitely read about it.
Students tell me privately they hate these courses. They want waivers. They want out. Nobody has ever asked me to get them out of chemistry.
The actual diversity problem on our campus isn’t ideological. Walk into any cafeteria and you’ll find self-sorted tables. That’s not a diversity failure. That’s human nature. Fix the programming. Fund the social spaces. Create reasons for people to actually mix.
The anti-racism class doesn’t do any of that. It’s not education. It’s a credential. It tells the accreditor that something happened. The students know it. The faculty teaching it know it.
Everyone is pretending otherwise.
Time to stop.
More dispatches from the campus that’s lost the plot: subscribe below.