Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) is postponing making racial literacy classes mandatory for the 2023-24 school year, NBC 12 reported.
The two courses that offer the requirement’s criteria – “Introduction to Race and Racism in the United States” and “Reading Race” – alone do not have the necessary seats for more than 4,000 first-year students, VCU officials stated.
“This decision is not a referendum on current courses,” said Dr. Andrew Arroyo, interim senior vice provost for academic affairs. “It is about implementing a university-wide requirement. The two are separate matters.”
This way, VCU can scale course capacity needs and students are not held responsible for courses they cannot take due to demand, Arroyo said.
“We encourage and support the efforts of faculty members to create additional courses and to continue collecting data for assessing the impact and learning outcomes of their courses,” Arroyo said in a statement. “Such data will allow the university to examine implementing this new requirement while ensuring sufficient capacity for our learners to meet the obligation being placed on them.”
