A Framework for Confronting Racism

Committees Report Progress to McCourt Faculty, Discuss Recommendations for the Future

The Confronting Racism Committee Chairs presented their year-end reports at the McCourt School May faculty meeting, detailing their accomplishments over the academic year and their recommendations for moving the initiative forward.

Most notably, the McCourt School is thrilled to renew our partnership with the National Urban Fellows program, and looks forward to welcoming our newly-recruited class of Fellows to the Hilltop later this summer. In January, the McCourt School deepened our partnership with the National Urban Fellows by committing to fund full tuition for the Class of 2022 Fellowship cohort. 

Our Partnerships Committee will soon meet with leadership of the office of the Provost at Howard University, to explore ways in which we can expand the formal partnership we announced earlier this year. The committee is also considering a survey of our community to identify opportunities where greater representation may benefit from the support of a partnership.

During the same meeting, the faculty voted on and approved adding “engaging with bias” as a McCourt School foundational skill, as recommended by the Confronting Racism Teaching & Learning Committee. In adding this skill, faculty recognized as a core competency the benefits of understanding the contributors to, and implications of, structural and individual biases in current policy and research, the ability to recognize and engage with these biases, and how to create strategies to address them when designing policy and research. The addition of this skill will provide a mechanism to further embed strategies for identifying and engaging with bias across more McCourt School courses. 

The Impacts Committee discussed the future of the committee, including the creation of a vision statement to guide their work, and conducting research into collaboration opportunities outside of Georgetown. 

After an incredibly successful admission season, the Committee on Creating Inclusive Environments will study the effects of waiving the standardized testing requirement for incoming students, in an effort to determine whether the requirement should be permanently waived as a part of the McCourt School admissions process. This is one recommendation among a host of other ideas to increase equity and diversity at McCourt.

The McCourt School looks forward to carrying this critical work through the summer, and to providing an update on the structure and direction of this initiative, and the work of our committees, in the fall.