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Diego A. Garcia Blum was only weeks into his first semester as a master’s of public policy student at the Harvard Kennedy School when he found himself unexpectedly taking on the role of a teacher.

One of Garcia Blum’s classes, a course required for all first-year MPP students in fall 2019, launched a debate on the relationship between public officials and law enforcement. The discussion focused on a 2018 decision by a California mayor to warn her city about an upcoming raid by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

But many students were unfamiliar with United States immigration policy and made insensitive remarks on the topic, said Garcia Blum, who immigrated to the United States from Colombia at a young age.

“A lot of things were said that were very triggering to students of those backgrounds,” he said. “The students of color had to become the teachers in the class to ground the arguments in the history of public policy being used against our communities.”

But HKS classes should not count on students with lived experience to educate their peers in order to “have a good policy conversation,” Garcia Blum argued.

Garcia Blum said his first semester experience convinced him the Kennedy School needed to create a course to provide students a shared understanding of how race and racism impact public policy.

Following the police murder of George Floyd in May, the Kennedy School introduced such a course in fall 2020 in the form of a required two-week intensive “Race and Racism” class for first-year MPP students. It was then expanded into a semester-long course for the fall 2021 semester.

“In order for us to have real conversations about the policy, everyone needed to be up to date with this,” Garcia Blum said. “That was why the class was so important.”

‘The Spark That Set Everything Off’

All first-year MPP students were required to take “The Responsibilities of Public Action” during their first semester — the class where Garcia Blum and his classmates were asked to debate immigration policy. And Garcia Blum was not the only student who noticed the course’s shortcomings.

Later in the semester, the course held an activity called the “Bell Harbor” simulation, which was “the spark that set everything off,” Garcia Blum said.

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Nneka O. Onwuzurike, who was assigned to participate in the simulation, said the exercise asked students to role-play a discussion of a fictitious police murder of a Black 17-year-old boy. Some students were tasked with playing characters who would make racist and homophobic comments.

“They were asking Black and brown students, immigrants and children of immigrants, to take on a character that is in many ways anti their humanity,” Onwuzurike said.

Members of the HKS Equity Coalition, a student group advocating for justice and equitable change at the school, met in the aftermath of the Bell Harbor simulation to discuss what improvements were needed to prevent a similar situation from occurring.

During the meeting, students agreed that creating a better classroom environment would require all HKS students to receive a “grounding of knowledge in race and racism,” according to Garcia Blum, who served as the Kennedy School’s vice president of diversity at the time.

Students in the equity coalition believed that an elective class taught by HKS professor Khalil G. Muhammad, could serve as a model for a mandatory, school-wide course on the effects of race and racism on public policy.

“If we are having conversations on Black Lives Matter that see almost Fox News talking points thrown back, then we are not having real conversations,” Garcia Blum said.

The coalition subsequently staged a full-day protest outside the Kennedy School’s cafeteria — the first of many actions by the group to push HKS to “adopt an anti-racist, anti-colonial culture and curriculum” after the Bell Harbor simulation.

“We kept organizing, disrupting various town halls that the University would try to have, emailing everyone and their mother — from the dean to all of the different professors,” said Onwuzurike, a member of the coalition.

In February 2020, the coalition sent an open letter signed by 375 Kennedy School affiliates to HKS Dean Douglas W. Elmendorf. The letter included a demand for a mandatory course on “global racism, colonialism, and public policy.”

Elmendorf responded that though the Kennedy School was “committed” to adding material on race and inequality, he was “not convinced (at least yet) that a required, standalone course is the best approach to doing so.”

Equity coalition members were left unsatisfied by Elmendorf’s response to the open letter, but shortly afterward, they were driven off campus by the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

‘The First Win’

If there was any chance of the pandemic overshadowing the equity coalition’s calls for a mandatory course on race and racism, the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020 brought the conversation back to the center of attention.

Mike Yepes, an HKS alum and member of the equity coalition, said Floyd’s murder was the tipping point for the Kennedy School, resulting in a renewed focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“The sad reality is that while we did play a big role, once the conversation got focused on DEI, it took a series of external tragedies to make HKS reactive enough to be willing to listen to our perspectives,” Yepes said.

On June 8, 2020, two weeks after the murder of George Floyd, Elmendorf announced in a school-wide communication that faculty were working on a “new, required, immersive course on race and public policy for all incoming MPP1 students for the fall.”

“That was the first win we had,” Garcia Blum said.

HKS professor Cornell William Brooks emphasized the “essential, foundational role” that student activism played in pressuring the Kennedy School administration to form the course.

“Our students have done what we admitted them to do,” Brooks said. “We admit them to lead, they insist upon leading — that’s not always easy, but they’ve done it.”

Muhammad, the HKS professor, said he received an email from then-academic dean Iris Bohnet on June 3, 2020, requesting a meeting to discuss “various events and resources on racial justice at HKS, including fall courses.”

Muhammad said the vision for the course “expanded in the wake of George Floyd.”

Muhammad said that during the first three to four years he taught at HKS, he felt that Elmendorf “was not an advocate of making the issue of race and racism as important to the Kennedy School experience for students” as today.

“Unpacking how he got to where he is now is hard for me to do,” Muhammad said. “But from my perspective, the killing of George Floyd and the messages coming from Larry Bacow and senior administrators about Harvard’s commitment to acknowledging systemic racism and white supremacy fundamentally reflected a change of tone that was mirrored in Doug’s own communications to the school community.”

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In an interview Thursday, Elmendorf said two things have changed during the nearly seven years he has served as dean of the Kennedy School.

“One is the attention in this country — and some others, but especially in this country — to issues of race,” Elmendorf said. “That has increased, or broadened, the interest among our students in understanding the role of race in public policy.”

Elmendorf said the Kennedy School has also “deliberately strengthened” its faculty with expertise in racial justice.

“We don’t teach courses that we don’t have faculty strength to teach,” Elmendorf said. “To do what we are doing now required the last five years of focused recruiting effort and was not something that could just have been turned on with a switch.”

Muhammad and fellow HKS professor Sandra S. Smith spent the summer of 2020 putting together a syllabus for the first iteration of the mandatory “Race and Racism” course, which launched that fall.

‘People Are Paying Attention’

After “Race and Racism” appeared on the MPP core curriculum as a required two-week intensive in the fall of 2021, students continued lobbying the administration to turn the course into a semester-long offering. Garcia Blum, who was elected Kennedy School student body president that fall, promised he would work to expand the course during his campaign.

According to Muhammad, school administrators were already discussing how the course would be offered the next fall and whether it would remain as a two-week intensive or take on a longer form.

“The initial conversation after the fall of 2020 when the course finished with myself, Professor Smith and the administration was, ‘What was our sense of what makes the most sense going forward. Do the two-week again, do a module version of it, or do a full semester course?’ Muhammad said.

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He and Smith ultimately settled on a module format for the course, he said, which would split the content taught by each professor into two half-semester classes. First-year MPP students are now required to complete both sessions.

Brooks emphasized the importance of offering the Race and Racism course, saying the Kennedy School cannot “ignore race and do the job it aspires to do.”

“To not teach race or address racism and colonialism is a form of professional malpractice,” he said. “We simply have to do it.”

In the years since the class was added to the MPP core curriculum, other schools of public policy have seemed to agree.

Muhammad said he has spoken about the course with people at public policy schools at the University of California Berkeley, Columbia University, and Princeton University. The fall 2022 course catalog of Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy includes for the first time a class on race and public policy for its MPP students.

“People are paying attention,” Muhammad said.

—Staff writer Miles J. Herszenhorn can be reached at miles.herszenhorn@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @MHerszenhorn.