Difference and Intersectionality Requirement for Graduate Students
Fordham’s English Department instituted a Difference and Intersectionality Requirement (DI) for graduate students in Fall 2017.
All MA and PhD students are required to take one course treating categories of difference and their intersectionality. The requirement was instituted to expand the department’s treatment of literary and aesthetic works by BIPOC and other authors underrepresented in the study of English.
A course that would fall under the requirement teaches students how to engage in theoretically rigorous, historically informed, and ethically responsible discussions and scholarship about difference, power, and their relationship. It would also encourage students to formulate connections between their scholarship and broader issues of social justice, whether in acts of research, teaching, or service.
Courses being offered in Spring 2021 that would meet the requirement include Professor Leonard Cassuto’s “From Slave Narratives to Black Lives Matter,” Professor James Kim’s “Asian Diasporic Literatures,” and Professor Robb Hernández’s “Exhibiting Latinidad: Curation/Display/Intervention.”
The Diversity and Social Justice Committee (DSJ) and the Graduate Program Committee (GPC) recommended the new requirement because of events and calls for curricular change at Fordham about five years ago. "The impetus for the Difference and Intersectionality requirement came from discussions within the department and on campus about the need to incorporate issues of diversity into the university’s curriculum in more substantive ways,” reads the original proposal for the requirement.
In 2015, several incidents of racism, bigotry, and intolerance occurred on campus at Fordham. In response, student leaders called for university faculty and administrators to respond to these incidents and combat institutionalized racism.
In response, a President’s Task Force on Diversity was established in Fall 2015. In 2016, the Task Force on Diversity issued a report, which stated that “The curriculum should include a required, credit-bearing course that helps students address racism and exclusion and grasp issues surrounding diversity...The University’s goal of developing ‘women and men for others’ provides a strong and clear foundation for a diversity course requirement, to focus on issues of racism, marginalization, and exclusion of persons and groups deemed ‘other.’”
Subsequently, the President’s Office issued a response, including a “Diversity Action Plan” that contained the following recommendation: “all of the University’s deans will work with their faculty members to ensure that courses include discussions or treatment of issues of diversity as often and as richly as possible.” Two of the outcomes of this process in the English Department were institution of the Difference and Intersectionality Requirement for graduate students and the Race and Social Justice Requirement for undergraduate students.
“Both the DI proposal and the RSJ proposal are part of one longer push by the department to rethink its curriculum to be more representative of all aspects of literary history,” says Professor Julie Kim. Professor Kim was the Director of Graduate Studies when the requirement was proposed.