University of Pittsburgh announces required course on racism for incoming students

The University of Pittsburgh will require first-year students to complete a new course on anti-Black racism.

In a letter to students Wednesday that also clarified updated covid-19 procedures, Provost Ann E. Cudd said the course, which will be free of charge and count for one academic credit, is part of the institution’s pursuit of an anti-racist university. The course is called Anti-Black Racism: History, Ideology and Resistance.

The course will be scheduled for one hour per week and graded on a satisfactory/no-credit basis. All first-year students will be automatically enrolled for the fall term.

“This summer, we have also spent considerable time reckoning with societal injustice in the form of police brutality and systemic anti-Black racism throughout society,” Cudd wrote. “We have heard from our Black students, as well as Black faculty and staff, that our campus is not the safe, inclusive and equitable place for all that we are committed to creating.”

The announcement was no surprise to senior Morgan Ottley — it came after a summer packed with late nights of brainstorming, conversations with Black student leaders and other student groups and meetings with the university’s administrative leaders.

“This is something that should already exist,” said Ottley, president of Pitt’s Black Action Society.

Following protests over the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was killed by a Minneapolis police officer on Memorial Day, several Pitt student groups looked to the administration for changes in curriculum and campus culture.

A group of students in the School of Medicine wrote a letter demanding change at the university and within the School of Medicine, specifically. Their proposals, which they suggested be implemented or planned for within two months, included accountability and transparency with campus police, a better system for reporting and mitigating racial bias, greater financial support and public recognition of Black students and several other demands.

Another letter from a coalition of several Black student groups included more than 20 “action plans” in several areas — including curriculum adjustments, diversity and bias training for faculty and mental health support for minority students. Student leaders drafted the letter after holding a town hall with students of color, listening to grievances that included “microaggressions” and racial biases from faculty and fellow students.

“With all of the murders and constant trauma and heartache that was going on, everyone just said, ‘No, something needs to change,’ ” Destiny Mann, vice president of the Black Action Society, told the Tribune-Review in June.

Ottley said the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and countless other Black men and women sparked the letter — but the message itself is one that Black Pitt students have been advocating for years.

“This work is not new,” Ottley said. “Our presenting the demands is just a continuation of everything that’s led us to this point.”

Activism was widespread. One petition from a Pitt alumna received more than 7,300 signatures. Sydney Massenberg created the petition and wrote a letter to administrators calling for all undergraduate students to be required to take at least one course focusing on Black experience.

Massenberg said she was driven to write the letter and petition after four years feeling like race theory was overlooked in class discussions, “despite its relevance to essentially every topic one can study.”

“I wholeheartedly feel that knowledge is power, and no university can truly consider the education it offers well-rounded when important discussions like these are left out of the mandatory curriculum,” she said. “I think all students should have to learn about the reality of the racial hierarchy that we all live and operate in, and while I wish this education started in grade school, I felt as though I could start by using my voice at my alma mater.”

Margo Shear Fischgrund, a university spokeswoman, said the course will be required for first-year students on the Pittsburgh and Bradford campuses. It will be available for students on all Pitt campuses.

“Student leaders at Pitt absolutely played a role in the activism that resulted in the development of this course,” Shear Fischgrund said. “This course came out of conversations with Black student leaders on campus.”

Cudd said the course, designed by a committee of “expert faculty,” will be asynchronous, consisting of a series of lectures by faculty, staff and activists.

“The course is designed to inform us all about Black history and culture, about the multiple forms of anti-Black racism, and about how we can be anti-racist,” Cudd wrote. “This course is a deposit on our commitment to transform our institution and our society, beginning with education and focusing our future through the special Class of 2024.”

Yolanda Covington-Ward, chair of the Department of Africana Studies, led a committee of students and faculty to design the course. She said the course incorporates historical context and examines national and local struggles against racism.

Ottley said she is pleased the course has been created, calling it “a step in the right direction.”

She is optimistic that having a class for freshmen and first-year students will create meaningful, cultural change in the community of 35,000 students.

“It’s forcing you to rethink your own habits and your own behavior, the things you’ve come to view as normal,” said Ottley, a neuroscience major. “Students take history classes; they take culture classes. That doesn’t always mean they’re looking at how colonialism affected you, how history has transcended and repeated itself.”