CSU faculty under fire as students allege “hostile environment” in anti-racism course

By: Emma Pettit | The Chronicle of Higher Education

After taking a social-work course at Colorado State University in 2023, one student had striking words to share in a course evaluation: “I don’t feel safe in this classroom,” they wrote, adding that “judgment and rejection” came from the two instructors. “This makes me shut down.”

One of those instructors was Quinn Hafen, then a Ph.D. student at Colorado State and now an assistant professor at the University of Wyoming. Hafen, who uses they/them pronouns, was surprised by the comment. Their counterpart, a senior instructor named Marie Villescas Zamzow, was not. She receives this sort of comment every semester.

“I can actually predict who’s going to write that it’s not a safe learning environment,” she said, according to a recent paper that she and Hafen wrote called “Exposing and Disarming Whitelash to Advance Anti-Racism: A Collaborative Autoethnography on Interracial Co-teaching.” “And the reason that it’s ‘not safe’ is because it’s actually not a safe environment for hate.”

In the article, which was accepted for publication by the Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research, Hafen and Villescas Zamzow prominently featured their experience running two social-work courses. They draw on classroom interactions and student feedback as evidence of defensiveness exhibited by white students in response to instruction about racial injustice.

When those students felt guilty, or sad, or angry, they “lashed out” to “re-establish white comfort,” Hafen and Villescas Zamzow concluded. That, in their view, is something to be embraced. “[We] want the tension, [we] want the discomfort among people who hold privilege,” Villescas Zamzow is quoted in the paper as saying. (A primary data source for the study is 10 recorded “processing sessions” between her and Hafen. Neither responded to my interview requests.)

If we had flipped Black to white in this situation and imagined Black students being made deliberately uncomfortable, I think we all agree that would be unacceptable.

For the two instructors, unsettling their white students’ biases is a necessary condition of an antiracist education. What they call “white emotional hegemony” must be disrupted, to support the learning of all students. But to critics and skeptics, what Hafen and Villescas Zamzow depict is not only ideologically stifling. It’s potentially discriminatory.

After learning of the paper, Fair for All (FAIR), a nonprofit dedicated to “overcoming identity politics,” per its website, alerted the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. It alleged in a September complaint that the teaching methods deployed by Hafen and Villescas Zamzow amounted to a hostile learning environment based on race as well as sex.

“If we had flipped Black to white in this situation and imagined Black students being made deliberately uncomfortable,” said FAIR’s executive director, Monica Harris, in an interview, “I think we all agree that would be unacceptable.”S

Several years ago, Colorado State’s School of Social Work, like many other schools, assessed where it needed to improve on fulfilling diversity, equity, and inclusion principles and standards. The review found deficiencies — chief among them that the school centered “whiteness,” according to a report provided to me. Among other data sources was the work of a team of master’s students who asked students and employees about their experiences in the school, relying on a framework that taxonomizes “characteristics of white supremacy,” such as “perfectionism,” “objectivity,” and a “sense of urgency.” (That the grievance policy was frequently brought up as the avenue for raising concerns was also evidence of white-supremacy culture, per the report. It reflected “worship of the written word.”)

The report, which Hafen helped write, identified problems with the curriculum. The vast majority of textbooks for the bachelor’s-degree program were written by white people, and only one core assignment within the program required students to engage with racism and antiracism specifically. “There is a need for all courses to address dismantling white supremacy in some form,” the report says. That goal aligns conceptually with the field’s education policy and accreditation standards. As of this summer, all baccalaureate and master’s programs accredited by the Council on Social Work Education are expected to “recognize the pervasive impact of White supremacy.”

Hafen and Villescas Zamzow’s courses, as described in their study, fit that bill. One was geared toward freshmen; the other was for juniors in the social-work major. The paper does not describe specific lessons but says that students tackled content on settler colonialism and genocides of indigenous populations, chattel slavery, mass incarceration, and police brutality. They also discussed “social work’s role in perpetuating whiteness.”

While teaching this content, Hafen and Villescas Zamzow used the “pedagogy of discomfort.” First conceptualized by Megan Boler, now a professor in the department of social-justice education at the University of Toronto, the methodology maintains that students and professors should challenge their previously held assumptions and self-conceptualizations and grapple with negative emotions that follow, which can be indicative of unexamined bias. According to Boler, some are better suited to that process than others, particularly when it comes to issues around race. “The invitation to question cherished beliefs is not one all students readily accept,” she wrote in a chapter of her 1999 book Feeling Power: Emotions and Education. “A number of my white students’ responses explicitly stated they felt ‘angry and confused and blamed.’”

That’s how at least a few of Hafen and Villescas Zamzow’s students felt, too. According to the paper, white students would attempt to “derail the class from content about racism and white supremacy.” When Hafen, who is white, and Villescas Zamzow, who is Latina, “doubled down and set a firm boundary that we would not defer to white emotional comfort,” students, in turn “lashed out in an attempt to relieve negative emotions and ease feelings of shame and guilt.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION