In fall 2024, the doors of Georgetown’s Intercultural Center (ICC) Auditorium swung open to let through a stream of new students for the inaugural lecture of its latest course, Race, Power, and Justice at Georgetown (RPJ). This marked the end of nearly a decade of faculty meetings, student activism, and test runs working towards the course’s successful creation.
RPJ can be traced back to 2015, when former university president John DeGioia established the Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation. The group aimed to investigate the university’s historic involvement in the slave trade, focusing especially on the GU 272+, which refers to the 272 enslaved people who Georgetown sold in 1838 to keep the university financially viable.
Following the working group, students and faculty collaborated to rework the university’s diversity course requirement, establishing RPJ, a new, required class for all incoming students centered around the subject of racial and social justice at Georgetown. RPJ started last fall and is now a requirement for all new students, beginning with the class of 2028, as well as all new transfers enrolled since fall 2024. The course is a one-credit, pass/fail course, and is part of three Pathways to Social Justice courses required to graduate.
One year in, RPJ has evolved to emphasize the discussion-oriented aspects of the course. These changes are aimed at providing an environment for students to have intentional conversations with their peers, but some students feel that these changes have eliminated valuable sections of the original course. Nevertheless, both students and professors spoke to the need to continue the course and maintain dialogue about diversity, equity, and inclusion at Georgetown.
Adam Rothman, a professor of history and director of Georgetown’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Its Legacies, participated in the Working Group and played a large role in the original planning of RPJ. This year, Rothman continued his involvement in structuring the course, helping to form the class’s syllabus and new schedule. Rothman currently teaches a section of RPJ and taught the course’s lectures last year.
“We made some substantial changes in the course from last year to this year, mostly just for logistical reasons to make the course run more smoothly,”Rothman said. “It’s an ongoing experiment.”
This includes changing the original course structure of twice-weekly meetings that included one lecture and one discussion section. The course is now condensed to one weekly discussion section. Additionally, large lecture sessions in the ICC Auditorium are no longer part of the course. Some students expressed disappointment at this change, citing the insights of guest speakers during lectures as one of the most valuable parts of RPJ.
Last year’s guest lecture format included a Q+A session with GU 272+ descendant Melisande Short-Colomb, a panel discussion with Georgetown employees hosted by the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, a panel discussion with Campus Ministry interfaith leaders, and a conversation with two formerly-incarcerated speakers from Georgetown’s Prisons and Justice Initiative.
“I would definitely always attend the lecture,” Alessia Turner (CAS ’27), who took the course last year as a transfer student, said. “That’s really what you get the most out of because they really did have some great speakers come.”
Specifically, Turner mentioned the speakers from the Prisons and Justice Initiative as being especially meaningful to her.
“That story was really moving to me,” Turner said. “It made me realize that I was actually interested in [social justice] as a career path.”
Others saw removing the lecture as potentially exacerbating some challenges that the course already faced. Gabriela Martinez (CAS ’26), who elected to take RPJ during its trial program in the spring 2024 semester, said she noticed the potential downsides of the discussion sections even before the course was required for first-year students.
“What students are going to take away from this class depends on which professor you get a discussion section with,” Martinez said. “And that doesn’t feel like that’s how the class should be led. Every student should go away with the same amount of valuable information.”
Professors teaching the course have a diverse array of research experience and expertise. This year’s course features professors from five of Georgetown’s schools, with nine professors from the College of Arts and Sciences, four from the Walsh School of Foreign Service (SFS), three from the McDonough School of Business, two from the Berkley School of Nursing, and one from the School of Health.
RPJ professor Robert Bies, who teaches management in the McDonough School of Business, says he agreed to teach the course after Rothman reached out to him. Professors like Bies teach from a common list of readings and course materials, but have considerable freedom to run their own discussion section in the ways they see fit.
“I think there’s some fundamental issues that all first-year students need to take,” Bies said. “[The course] needs to explore the history of Georgetown, but also other issues.”
While some expressed concern that professors from such different backgrounds could lead to varied experiences in a discussion-only course, some former RPJ students preferred the discussion groups to the lecture.
“I think the discussion sections were better,” Imani Haney (CAS ’28), who took the course in fall 2024, said. “My discussion section was very talkative, so just hearing everyone’s different insights and perspectives was really interesting.”
Similarly, RPJ professors emphasized the importance of peer discussion and of fostering dialogue among students with varying backgrounds.
“I try to create an environment where people can raise, and feel comfortable raising, different perspectives, different points of view, even if they disagree,” Bies said. “I want those experiences shared and understood.”
However, the lack of student engagement remains an issue in fostering honest dialogue.
“Because it’s a pass-fail class, I noticed that a lot of students will just go there and just be on their computers and doing their work the whole time during lecture,” Turner said. “I was a little disappointed to see that from the students.”
Despite the course’s current challenges, students agree that RPJ is a step in the right direction for Georgetown. Rachel Zhang (SFS ’26) emphasized that the course has allowed Georgetown to begin taking responsibility for the university’s role in slavery, in tandem with the GU 272+.
“I think that’s one of the few things I can confidently say I’m proud of my university for doing,” Zhang said.
Zhang came to Georgetown before RPJ was established as part of Georgetown’s reworked diversity requirements, but is engaged in student activism through the Leaders in Education, Advocacy, & Dialogues, which seeks to facilitate dialogue about diversity and identity.
At the same time, despite RPJ’s connection to the GU 272+ and its origins in committees such as the Working Group, the course aims to address broader topics of social justice beyond slavery and race. The current curriculum includes texts concerning employment and a living wage, mass incarceration, and “faith that does justice.” These contemporary issues are designed to prompt students to examine the ongoing impacts of slavery nationwide, as well as current events where race and social justice are relevant to Georgetown.
“If you know something about the history of slavery at Georgetown, it might help you look at the campus differently today,” Rothman said. “Understanding the history of slavery can make one more attentive to the problem of mass incarceration.”
RPJ’s relevance to the present day was one of the reasons Martinez volunteered to participate in the pilot program. Outside the classroom, she was previously involved in the pre-orientation program Total Hoya Readiness: Intro to Vocation and Excellence (THRIVE), then known as YLEAD. Martinez said that the program first exposed her to conversations surrounding Georgetown’s history with lower-income or racially diverse people, issues that RPJ also seeks to cover.
“One of the big things that was really important to me is to learn this history, but also to then enter spaces where this history is continuously being told, and other people like me get to have access to this history, because we can’t just erase it,” Martinez said.
In fact, the RPJ curriculum includes texts covering current events as recent as interim president Robert Groves’s July testimony before Congress on Georgetown’s response to antisemitism.
In addition to global and national issues, RPJ’s subject matter includes recent events on campus. In Bies’ class, he brought up recent student movements calling to protect GUTS drivers’ employment as an example of turning ideas related to the course into tangible action.
RPJ’s evolution comes as racial diversity efforts, particularly on college campuses, have grown into a national news topic. In March, Georgetown was one of 45 universities subject to a federal investigation for its partnership with The Ph.D. Project, a nonprofit that seeks to increase diversity in business education. The Department of Education alleged the universities’ partnership with the nonprofit violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
Georgetown interacted with the federal government again in March when the Department of Homeland Security detained Georgetown researcher Dr. Badar Khan Suri and sought to revoke his visa. SFS dean Joel Hellman’s statement responding to Suri’s detention was also featured in the RPJ course materials this semester as part of the course’s week on “Global Georgetown.”
These federal policies have led to concern among students that the future of RPJ at Georgetown could be jeopardized.
“I definitely think it’s important that they continue to teach this course,” Turner said. “A lot of the time when people, or the government, is saying negative things about DEI, there’s this notion that it’s persuading people in one direction or [it’s] propaganda. Really, this class just gives you the basic facts and shares stories of people in the environment.”
Others don’t foresee the course ending completely, but still see the prospect of more change to the structure and curriculum as a possibility.
“I don’t necessarily think the course will go away, but I could see it becoming diluted if this sort of attitude towards DEI stays for the next few years,” Zhang said.
Ultimately, however, students and professors agree that, regardless of any changes to the course structure, the existence of RPJ is essential for Georgetown to live up to its mission.
“It’s really important for Georgetown to stick to its own values, because there’s going to be a lot of pressure on Georgetown and other universities and other schools to reshape how they teach, what they teach, to fit the political demands of the day,” Rothman said. “We can’t let that happen. We have to teach what we think is important for people to learn, and if we give that up, we should just close up shop.”
