American University offers $33k graduate certificate on how to be an 'antiracist' school leader
The School of Education at American University is offering a graduate level certification in a course titled, 'Antiracist Administration, Supervision, and Leadership Certificate Program.'
A private university in Washington, D.C. is increasing its efforts to “create more equitable, antiracist schools” in the United States.
The School of Education at American University is offering a graduate level certification in a course titled: “Antiracist Administration, Supervision, and Leadership Certificate Program.”
Executive-in-Residence, Gregory Hutchings, provides insight in an introduction video, stating that “Race continues to be a social construct that was created specifically to make nonwhite people in our country feel inferior in our society.”
The director of this program, Terence Ngwa, also states in the introduction video that this curriculum will prepare education leaders to “dismantle racist practices and policies in classrooms and schools.”
The 18-credit, 3-semester program for graduate masters students costs up to $33,588, and is a fully virtual format geared towards educational roles in the K-12 level.
In a lecture within the course titled “Antiracist Leadership During the Backlash of Critical Race Theory” from March of 2022, Hutchings discussed educating white people on “equity,” saying: “You gotta get yourself educated on on this work, and you gotta ask some tough questions, and you gotta lean into your discomfort, because nobody has the right to be … comfortable.”
In the same lecture, Hutchings commented on the alleged necessity of having more “diversity” in classrooms: “Kids want to see people who look like them. Not only does it benefit our black and brown children, [but] it benefits our white children too, because there are unintentional biases that white America … have about black people, and we have to change that narrative, the only way it can be changed is by us being in those classrooms,” he said.
The course’s introduction video also features Ngwa holding a book called White Saviorism In International Development. The authors of the work define “white saviorism” as a “tangible power structure founded on the benevolence of whiteness, which elevates people of white European descent as more capable, more intelligent, thus more ‘developed,’ which directs their actions in communities of the global South”.
Campus Reform has contacted Hutchings and Ngwa for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
