‘Problem of Whiteness’ course elicits controversy

Every Wednesday next semester, the students in Damon Sajnani’s class will meet to discuss, in depth, the problems caused by white people.

But the title of the course — “The Problem of Whiteness” — and its description has the University of Wisconsin at Madison mired in controversy before students have cracked open a book or peeked at a syllabus.

The course explores “how race is experienced by white people.” But it also looks at how white people “consciously and unconsciously perpetuate institutional racism.”

The class has injected the university into a decadesold debate about whether taxpayer-funded educational institutions have an obligation to tackle the important issues of the day — or to stay out of them altogether.

The class is taught in the African Studies Department of a university where 2 percent of the student population identifies as black and more than 75 percent are white.

The most vocal opponent of the course is David Murphy, a Wisconsin state assemblyman who expressed outrage last week that taxpayers “are expected to pay for this garbage.”

The legislator, who chairs the assembly’s committee on colleges and universities, took issue with what he calls the underlying premise of the class: “that white people are racist.”

His criticism comes with a not-so-veiled threat: “UW-Madison must discontinue this class. If UWMadison stands with this professor, I don’t know how the University can expect the taxpayers to stand with UW-Madison.”

In a statement emailed to The Washington Post, Murphy, a Republican, said the decision to approve the class makes him question the judgment of university leaders.

Republican Gov. Scott Walker told the Wisconsin State Journal that he didn’t agree with Murphy’s call to withhold funding from the university if it doesn’t drop the class.

Murphy takes issue not just with the class, but with Sajnani’s vocal public opinions. “Even more troubling, the course is taught by a self-described ’international radical’ professor whose views are a slap in the face to the taxpayers.”

Murphy included copies of some of Sajnani’s tweets in his news release.

One tweet is a picture of a CNN breaking news report about police officers being shot in Dallas. “Is the uprising finally starting?” Sajnani said. “Is this style of protest gonna go viral?”

Sajnani didn’t immediately return messages seeking comment Tuesday. He is a Ph.D. candidate in Northwestern University’s African American studies Department, according to Northwestern. In a statement, the university defended the course and stressed that it was elective, not required, and that it was “not designed to offend individuals or single out an ethnic group.”

Greg Bump, a spokesman for the university, told The Washington Post that he didn’t know of any criticism that had come from students.

Several organizations have criticized the class or called for tighter restrictions, including Breitbart, a conservative news site.

Every semester, universities make similar decisions about controversial courses. Among them: “Queering God: Feminist and Queer Theology,” a Swarthmore College course. There’s also Bowdoin College’s “Transgender Latina Immigration: Politics of Belonging and Labor in the United States.”

UW-Madison has a history of wading into racial controversies that goes back decades.

Earlier this year, hundreds of people protested at Bascom Hill after a black student was arrested for spray-painting anti-racist messages on campus, according to the Wisconsin State Journal. At the protest, students taped a list of demands to a statue of Abraham Lincoln.

And in 1964, UW-Madison student Andrew Goodman was one of three activists killed by the Ku Klux Klan while registering black people to vote near Philadelphia, Miss.