Students at Harvard Now Required To Check Their Privilege

If Tal Fortgang, the Princeton freshman who refused to check his white male privilege ever wants to go to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, he’ll have to go through a complete change of heart.  Or at least spend a lot of time contemplating it.  As it turns out, the university has created a new mandatory orientation class for students - “Checking Your Privilege 101.”

From New York Magazine’s the Cut: “in response to growing demand from student activists, adminiestrators committed Friday to adding a class in power and privilege to its orientation program for incoming first-year students.”

Reetu Mody, a first year masters student in policy, was the one responsible for arranging the class. Mody recently told the Crimson that she started HKS Speaks Out due to her courses “not really addressing race at all” with regards to policy issues. The group’s first session attracted about 80 students last fall, and a recent petition attracted more than 300 signatures — about a fourth of the school’s student population — to push the administration to offer “mandatory privilege and power training.”

Sounds a bit like some sort of Orwellian dystopia, doesn’t it?

A recent 80-person demonstration, which attempted to illustrate the invisible but omnipresent power advantages that people of dominant races, classes, sexual orientations, or genders benefit from, drew positive attention and constructive dialogue with the school’s administration.

Mody was quoted as saying

“We’re at one of the most powerful institutions in the world, yet we never critically examine power and privilege and what it means to have access to this power,”

“If you don’t have an understanding of sociology, political science, critical race theory, feminist critique and revisionist history,” Mody explained, “it’s going to be very difficult to talk about certain groups’ experiences, and why these other groups continually have this advantage in society.”

Though Mody has been critical of her institution, she also expressed sympathy for students who might only just be realizing that they are privileged. “If what you’ve been told all your life is you’re really talented and you deserve what you have, it’s going to be really hard to find out ’Maybe I don’t deserve it, and all these other people equally deserve it but never even had a shot,’” she stated. “Schools are not giving students a space to manage that loss of identity.”

According to Mody, the new course is giving students with privilege a chance to gain some self-awareness that may have eluded them so far.  What do you think?

 

Students at Harvard Now Required To Check Their Privilege