UPDATE: Tufts University paused museum ‘whiteness’ and ‘colonialism’ training in 2023
The graduate certificate program is called 'Anti-Racist Curatorial Practice.'
The university required students to take 'Art, Whiteness, and Empire: The Art Museum as an Imperialist Repository' to complete the program.
Editor’s Note: Campus Reform learned through inquiries with a Tufts official that the program “was paused in the fall of 2023 and has not resumed at this time.”
Tufts University previously offered a graduate-level certificate aimed at reshaping how students view art museums by teaching them to dismantle what the university describes as the institutions’ ties to “whiteness” and “colonialism.”
The program, called “Anti-Racist Curatorial Practice,” was housed within the School of Arts and Sciences and required students to complete five courses to receive certification.
Tufts University is a private university in Medford, Massachusetts.
Among the required courses was “Art, Whiteness, and Empire: The Art Museum as an Imperialist Repository,” which claimed museums have historically acted as tools of white supremacy and imperialist ideology.
[RELATED: George Mason University ends office for ‘Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation’]
According to Tufts’ official program page, the certificate “is designed to help art museum professionals develop an anti-discriminatory work ethic, which will sustain and support communities of people who are consistently harmed by systems of oppression both inside and outside the art museum.”
The program emphasized that students would learn to identify how “western art museums developed as cultural repositories of colonialism” and how traditional curatorial practices are “rooted in racist principles.”
The course instructed students to conduct “anti-racist object analyses” and to reinterpret museum collections through “a non-white lens.” Students were also trained to “navigate normative institutional structures and procedures that are rooted in imperialist histories.”
Tufts’ program description added that students “will engage in self-reflection, develop self-awareness, and participate in critical analysis of systems of privilege and oppression.” It further encouraged students to create “personal strategies for becoming antiracist and facilitating change in communities and society.”
The coursework aligned with a broader trend of universities offering explicitly ideological courses as a form of academic study. For example, Southwestern University in Texas recently offered a course titled “Anthropology of Whiteness,” and the University at Buffalo taught a course called “Black Lives Matter: Building Racial Justice and Solidarity.”
