BUZZ
Will use interim to focus on ‘care’ — protecting faculty, staff, students, ‘and Bates as an institution from federal attention and targeting’
Bates College faculty have decided to postpone its “Race, Power, Privilege, and Colonialism” requirement for three years due to fear of the Trump administration’s “targeting” of educational institutions’ DEI measures.
The original plan was to begin the mandate (which would require all students to take “at least two courses related to race, power, privilege and colonialism” in order to graduate) with the next school year’s freshman class (class of 2030); it now will take effect with the class of 2033, according to The Bates Student.
At the November ad hoc RPPC Committee meeting which made the decision, academics noted the delay would serve to “center care” — to protect “faculty, staff, students, and Bates as an institution from federal attention and targeting.”
The committee noted this care is “especially” relevant for “professors who are at increased risk of unwanted federal attention […] due to their own marginalized identities among other reasons.”
Gender and Sexuality Studies Professor Ian Khara Ellasante (pictured) highlighted the care aspect, saying “By caring for those of us who are multiply [sic] marginalized, who are teaching this, and our students and our staff. I think that is the true hard [sic] and the true spirit of what we’re trying to do with the RPPC.”
Ellasante, who according to “their” faculty page teaches the courses “Poetry and Resistance Beyond the Gender Binary,” “Queer and Trans Reproductive Justice,” and “Race, Ethnicity, and Feminist Thought,” added that further development of RPPC should be discreet so as not to attract “unwanted attention”:
“Maybe we don’t want to be the tallest blade of grass, but we can still do the work in the subterranean level.”
Therí Pickens, who teaches English and Africana with specializations in “African American, Arab American and disability literatures and theories,” said she liked the focus on care for faculty “who are at risk of various kinds of violences,” but added she was saddened Bates cannot “fulfill the conceit of its stated mission.”
Some of the original proposals from those working on the RPPC mandate included intertwining race, power, privilege, and colonialism into Calculus I (“situate [them] centrally and attend to them throughout the course”), requiring a biology course to cover “the fact that there is nothing biological supporting [social construction of race] hierarchies and historical injustices,” and requiring a statistics course to cover how the field was “a driver of the eugenics movement.”
Two years later, faculty debate on the requirement offered a fascinating look into the small, private, deep-blue-Maine liberal arts school.
Professor Lisa Gilson had noted it “wasn’t enough” for her “to have students leave the college knowing that race, power, privilege and colonialism has been influential in the world more broadly” — she wanted them to know that whatever field of endeavor they chose post-college was “shaped” by those four forces.
Gilson chided colleagues who did not agree with her on the mandate, saying that at the national level “where the interrogation of race, power and privilege have been frontally attacked as illegitimate sites of inquiry, the unwillingness of the faculty as a whole to participate in the realization of this curriculum reads as an abdication.”
Another pro-RPPC requirement faculty member called opponents “intellectual cowards,” and the then-president of the student government said “I don’t want to be in a chemistry class where the chemistry teacher doesn’t think that race applies to that discipline, because it’s just not true.”
Bates College has a student population of just under 2,000 with a total cost of attendance (tuition, housing, meals) of $90,000 per year. Its endowment is valued at just under half a billion dollars.
MORE: Bates College eyes revamping calculus, other math courses to focus on ‘colonialism and privilege’
