When the news of the murder of Michael Brown began circulating prior to the beginning of the 2014 fall term and the Ferguson, Missouri school district was considering canceling classes, the first thought on Dr. Marcia Chatelain’s mind was, “where will these kids go, and how do we explain why they can’t start school today?”

In the wake of the delayed school year in Ferguson, Chatelain, an associate professor of history and African American studies at Georgetown University, began the #FergusonSyllabus Twitter campaign for educators to share tactics for discussing race in the classroom. It quickly became a phenomenon as people in and outside of academia crowd-sourced materials for a multidisciplinary syllabus to address race, policing, African American history and civil rights in the United States.

“It was my attempt at an intervention” said Chatelain, who gave a pair of talks on Thursday, Feb. 4 on DePaul’s campus addressing her studies regarding the experience of African-American women and girls in the face of systematic oppression and the origins of the #FergusonSyllabus. “I wanted to organize the academic community to think about  how the events in Ferguson would affect the new students coming in on the first day of school,” especially at the university level.

There was a need in the educational community to answer what Chatelain defines as the question of Ferguson: “how did we get here, and how is every disciplinary perspective and every personal perspective intersecting? Because this is everyone’s problem”.

“These events have been extremely well attended,” said Amor Kohli, who is the chair of the African and Black Diaspora Studies (ABD) department at DePaul and has organized three similar talk-backs to create conversation around race and social justice.

Nearly 70 people attended the #FergusonSyllabus talk in the John T. Richardson Library. As they streamed out, Kohli continued, “Often, it’s a group of people, concerned students, who might not normally come together to converse about activism. They want a voice.”

“Discussions like this bridge the gap between the classroom and the streets,” said Farrad DeBarry, who is an office assistant for the ABD office and facilitated Thursday’s talk. “We are inspired by icons from studying activism 60 years ago, and it’s important that we do this with the scholars, leaders and builders of today.”

When it comes to the question of how much universities should encourage students to participate in activism, Jelani Newsome-Noble, a junior psychology major said that this is an inherent part of education. “I enjoyed (that) there was a space (tonight) for a lot of students to express their passion and drive for social justice,” he said. 

He said it was comforting that, though sitting against a backdrop of thousands of dusty books, he has access to resources like Chatelain who have done the leg work to conceptualize the complex problems only theorized in classes.

“I’m lucky to have had deeper discussions in classes when they’re usually heavily based in theory,” he said. “I’m glad there are people who have dived into all the literature about these topics, because institutional violence is scary to think about and can be a barrier to people wanting to engage in activism.”

“Our students have to understand that when things around them are difficult, we can use the resource of the university to make us better at responding to the world’s problems rather than isolating us,” Chatelain said.

So are colleges obligated to engage in activism? The answer is tricky on many levels. But for Chatelain and many others, considering this question provides a definition for education. “Colleges have a responsibility to model to students when (the university has) the time and resources to devote to intellectual discovery,” she said. “This isn’t about saying students have to act in the world a specific way, but why are we here if we don’t ensure we can spread thought to a larger world?”