BU Today: Prof. Davis & Other Faculty Say Antiracist Hub Unit at BU Is Imperative
The Boston University (BU) Hub provides all students with an interdisciplinary general education. However, students and faculty across the university are calling for an antiracist requirement to the curriculum. While the Hub has taken some steps to incorporate racial studies into BU’s undergraduate education, Prof. Ashley Davis from the School of Social Work and her BU colleagues wrote an op-ed outlining next steps to fully integrate an antiracist requirement.
Excerpt from “Where’s Antiracism in the BU Hub?” by Assoc. Director of ELL Christina Michaud, Prof. Ashley Davis, Lecturer Alexandra Dobie, and Research Assist. Prof. Melisa Osborne:
The Hub has a ‘Diversity, Civic Engagement, and Global Citizenship’ capacity, a logical home for an antiracist Hub unit. But the three Hub units there—The Individual in Community, Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy, and Ethical Reasoning—refer to race sparingly, mentioning it only as one of several options in a single learning outcome. The framing language there also mentions race, but in a dated, ‘multicultural’ way, referencing the past rather than the future and centering ‘BU’s founders,’ while continuing the practice of othering BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, people of color] students. Overall, the Hub stays in the white university’s comfort zone, starkly avoiding the direct antiracist language of BU’s own Center for Antiracist Research (‘Our Mission: To build an antiracist society that ensures racial equity and social justice’).
The problem here is the flipside of the advantage of the Hub itself: if a concept, or ‘capacity,’ is present in the Hub, we know that students will graduate having at least been exposed to direct instruction and in-depth engagement with it at least once. Conversely, if something is not present in the Hub, though some students may encounter it in their studies, others graduate without any exposure whatsoever.
Some faculty might object that they don’t have the expertise to teach antiracist courses in their discipline, but there are resources on campus to help.”