A UF professor and her students want more than UF President Kent Fuchs’ condemnation of recent hateful events on campus.
After multiple acts of hate speech at UF, including a man wearing a swastika-emblazoned armband on Turlington Plaza and racist writings on whiteboards, a class of about 15 students is sending a letter to Fuchs asking him to take action.
Shelby Boehm, who teaches the course Examine Race, said she and her students came up with the idea for the university to add courses that teach minority issues as an alternative option to What is the Good Life, a mandatory humanity course.
Boehm’s one-credit class normally evaluates literature and current events about race, but after seeing multiple race-related instances on campus, she changed the material.
She printed every article she could find about the occurrences on campus and UF administration’s responses.
“We all collectively agreed that these responses, while they’re appreciated, they’re not enough,” she said.
Boehm will deliver the letter the class wrote to Fuchs at the end of Spring.
Boehm said she wants the university to consider offering multiple classes for students to choose from about minority issues such as race, gender and sexuality. This would teach students to be more empathetic, she argues.
“These are conversations that need to happen at the university level,” she said.
It’s unclear if UF will include classes about race issues in its updated mandatory-course program for Fall 2018: UF Quest. It’s a four-part program that will require students to take What is the Good Life, a social-science or natural-science course and other work outside of the classroom requirements, according to Alligator archives.
Sophia Eikenberry, a UF neuroscience freshman in Bohem’s class who’s currently taking What is The Good Life, said she noticed the course doesn’t include many sections about race. When it does touch on the topic, she said she thinks minority students don’t feel comfortable speaking up.
But in Boehm’s class, the small, diverse group of students are comfortable discussing taboo topics and thinks every student should experience that, Eikenberry said.
“I’d like to think that we represent a good amount of the demands of the students of the University of Florida,” the 18-year-old said.
Contact Paige Fry at pfry@alligator.org and follow her on Twitter at @paigexfry
