According to The Dartmouth, Dartmouth University's aptly named student newspaper, professors from Dartmouth's Geography and African and African Studies departments will come together to create a new course for students this spring called "10 Weeks, 10 Professors: #BlackLivesMatter."The Dartmouth reports the course will address "race, structural inequality and violence in both a historical and modern context."
The initial idea to create this class came from a Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning workshop, which suggested that professors address the events that occurred in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 throughout the duration of their courses. A group of professors decided that maybe the events warranted a class of their own, since so many professors were already incorporating them into their curriculum.
Dartmouth Geography professor Abigail Neely told the school's paper, "The faculty hope to not only place Ferguson in a temporal context, but also to highlight that it was not an isolated incident in the United States or around the world." English professor Aimee Bahng added, "We hope students will be able to understand that Ferguson is not just an event in 2014, but something that's tethered in time to a long history and still-emerging ideas about race in the U.S. and how policing works in an age of social media and distributed surveillance."
Perhaps now that Dartmouth has created a #BlackLivesMatter course, other prominent universitites will follow suit and choose to dedicate a class to based on the racial climate of our nation, both historically and in the present.
