Students at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst already have to fulfill a diversity requirement, but they’ll be exposed to even more of it in Professor Amanda Ruth Waugh Lagji’s classes.
Lagji is a graduate student and doctoral candidate in the English department.
As Campus Reform reported, Lagji’s website contains a diversity statement that describes how she strives to achieve diversity. It includes a “safe space” promise.
“I strive to make diversity a perspective as well as a methodology in the classroom by considering the assumptions and values we (myself, and my students) bring into the classroom space, and I try to make the classroom a safe space for these conversations,” her statement says, though she also notes that safe “does not necessarily mean ‘comfortable.’”
“My commitment to diversity is not limited to the subject or objects of study, but rather extend to the very approaches we take to ‘diverse’ texts themselves,” she continued.
The racial makeup of her classes, “which have tended to be predominantly white,” affects Laji’s experiences. For those classes, they “discuss how whiteness is constructed as a tacit reference point for difference in dominant discourses, as well as the way that race over time has been inflected by religious and biological discourses.”
When Lagji worked with “different student populations,” she described how she needed to adjust her teaching, which included “develop[ing] extensive strategies for facilitating class conversation” with those who didn’t do or understand the readings. Her goal is to “design my syllabi with this less visible, or marked, diversity in mind.”
Lagji acknowledged her aim to change how students read texts. “I intend to fundamentally alter the ways in which students interact and read all texts, as narratives that engage with the world they inhabit. I am committed to shifting the focus of my classes to engage with the timely: race and policing in America, narratives and theories of refugees, war and state failure,” she wrote with original emphasis.
In closing, Lagji wrote that “I firmly believe that diversity, in all its manifold manifestations, should be at the forefront of course design rather than attended to or accommodated as an afterthought.”
The university’s diversity requirements were increased after some students could not handle having speakers such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Steven Crowder, and Christina Hoff Sommers on campus. The requirements have been criticized by FIRE board members.
