Reed College Students Demand Removal of White Authors from Humanities Course

Students at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, are demanding the removal of white and European authors from a mandatory humanities course at the college.

Reed College caved to student protesters in April after they demanded that white authors be removed from the college’s Humanities 110 course. Now, the course will focus primarily on ancient Mediterranean authors.

Reed College professors have responded with confusion at the allegation that the Humanities 110 course is “too white.” “The idea that Hum 110 is a ‘white’ course is very strange to me,” Jay Dickson, a professor of English, recently said in a comment to the college’s magazine. “It presupposes that our contemporary racial categories are timeless.”

Despite the changes, the student activists are still concerned that the presence of Greek and Roman works will suggest that those works are superior to all of the works that follow.

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