Amidst a growing national debate over whether institutions of higher education are doing enough to prepare students for the workforce, one college in Michigan has begun offering a graduate degree in social justice for the 2018-19 academic year.
Marygrove College in Detroit, Mich., will now offer a Master of Arts in Social Justice to eligible graduate students for the upcoming school year. According to a description of the program, students will be exposed to new ways of reflection and thinking with the overall goal of developing a “more just society.”
“It provides for analysis and reflection in the ways of thinking, including the values, assumptions, and the actions that maintain the economic, political, and cultural structures that shape our lives,” the program description reads. “It also seeks to build competencies and skills to transform these structures toward a more just society.”
The program requires 36 credit hours of coursework, the majority of which appears to be centered on grooming students into becoming liberal crusaders for social justice.
Included among the courses featured in the program is a seminar titled “The Role of Psychology in Social Justice,” where students will focus on topics such as materialism and emotional intelligence. Additionally, they will critically examine topics of race and racism through “the lenses of Colonialism, Post-Traumatic Slavery Syndrome and the dysfunctional side of white privilege.”
A separate course, titled “Campaigns and Elections,” will require students to devote significant amounts of time to studying the various factors that influence the outcome of elections, such as voter turnout and grassroots organizing. Throughout the course, significant attention will be devoted to educating students about the role of money and media in political campaigns with a “special focus on the potential for reform.”
While it is unclear how many students will enroll in the program, Marygrove College has struggled in recent years in their efforts to recruit students to attend their institution. In 2017, following years of poor enrollment, the school was forced to abolish their undergraduate programs entirely, and fully transition to solely offering graduate degree programs.
