Middlebury College in Vermont is requiring all first-year students to take a course covering topics like inclusivity, identity, privilege, and inequality.
The social justice-focused seminar is the product of JusTalks, a student group founded at Middlebury in 2011 in order to “create a space where all students could engage with issues of identity, power, and privilege,” according to a May 2 press release.
During the for-credit seminar, students will discuss subjective experiences of “power, privilege, identity, and inequality.” A keynote speaker and “organized time for reflection later in the week” will supplement the seminar.
The full day course, which will take place at the college’s Bread Loaf campus 20 minutes away from the main campus, will give students a safe space to “practice vulnerability and resilience,” part of the JusTalks mission statement. It will also fulfill JusTalks’ goal of sparking a “courageous dialogue that confronts privilege [and] engages with difference.”
The administration said that the course would not emphasize any particular social justice-related case studies, and underscored that it was a “student-led” initiative that had been in the works “for a couple of years.”
“JusTalks is largely built around student-led, discussion-centered workshops, and as such doesn’t have a specific curriculum,” Bill Burger, Vice President for Communications at Middlebury, told THE WEEKLY STANDARD. “I’m not sure there’s a story here that fits any broader narrative.”
Members of JusTalks argued for making the weekend course compulsory on the grounds that it was necessary to “equip all students with the tools for self-reflection and open dialogue” in addition to those “already thinking critically.” Previously, the seminar was available as an optional one-day event during January term and as a First Year Seminar discussion section.
The group will also offer a January term course titled “JusTalks: Facilitating Social Change,” in which students design a curriculum for the mandatory seminar and learn how to be “student facilitators,” according to Burger.
Per JusTalks, participants in the winter term course will also develop conversational skills, described as: “the theory and practice of dialogues and forms of conversation that are more likely to create the conditions for genuine and complex conversations.”
The move to make the course mandatory has been met with criticism from students, while faculty declined to comment due to “prudential constraints.”
One student, who wished to remain nameless, told THE WEEKLY STANDARD that she was not looking forward to “an education where questioning the norm of liberal thought is written out of the realm of possibility the first … week of freshman year.” Still, she said that perhaps “some of it will be really helpful.”
Another student penned an opinion editorial in Middlebury’s student newspaper, The Middlebury Campus, titled JusTalks is Totally Not a (Mandatory) Cult.
“Everyone knows that the most important part of college is (at least creating the public perception) that you care about marginalized, oppressed people,” Zak Fisher, a fourth year student at the college, wrote. “In 2016, Socrates can’t teach us about justice. What does he know about being persecuted?”
Fisher denounced the administration for making the course compulsory, seeing as one can graduate Middlebury without ever having taken a course on ancient and modern thinkers.
“I guess maybe a few classes will still teach those sort of authors, but it’s nice to know that those classes are totally optional and avoidable. JusTalks will be mandatory, so everyone will have at least some exposure to the Truth™,” he wrote.
JusTalks members have fought past criticism that their initiative is “an exercise in political correctness” or “a day for social justice activists to pat themselves on the back.” Rather, they claim that the course is a way to engage in “communal self-reflection.”
