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Reckoning: Race, Memory and Reimagining the Public University was a shared learning initiative in the College of Arts & Sciences that took place in fall 2019. It was designed to support student learning and discussions about heritage, race, post-conflict legacies, politics of remembrance and contemporary projects of reconciliation. The classes allowed students to understand what comparative cases reveal about Carolina’s own experiences and provided opportunities for faculty to discuss how to realize the promise of what it means to be a public university in 21st-century America. UNC’s research centers and institutes augmented course-based learning with events and allied research opportunities.

Courses, Topics, Readings, Projects

• The initiative incorporated two types of courses:
  • Foundational courses included those with a focus on race, U.S. racial politics, the history of truth and reconciliation processes, the South and civil rights and similar issues.
  • New Directions courses engaged the same topics from diverse perspectives across multiple fields, sharing relevant lessons from comparative cases.
• Shared readings: Each course allocated three class sessions to common reading assignments so that all students participating in the initiative had meaningful intersections amid diverse academic terrain.
• Gathering: Faculty and students participated in a Student Reckoning Forum in November that featured a speaker discussing one of the readings. The gathering provided an opportunity for students to connect with the wider learning community and to propose ways to extend the effort.

Outcomes

The initiative had three stated outcomes:

• Practice difficult conversations: an ability to enter discussions about contentious topics in ways that lead to mutual understanding.
• Gain a vocabulary for engaging this moment: a chance to study terms such as heritage, reparations, memory, story, racial justice, reckoning, truth and reconciliation, inclusion and other words that let us grapple with what this moment raises for us.
• Connect diverse fields to current issues, learning how to provide new frames of understanding for contemporary concerns.

Fall 2019 Courses

For more information about each course, visit the Course Descriptions page.

Foundational Courses

New Directions