Faculty teaching about race do so in a moment when public scrutiny of higher education is heightened, federal policies are shifting, and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are being dismantled. Even as the stakes continue rising, the instructional support for teaching race remains thin. Classroom missteps become fodder for political commentary, investigations and legislative action, not because DEI is failing—but because higher education has not prepared faculty for the instructional demands of this work.
In recent years, a series of classroom incidents has sparked social media outrage and press coverage questioning whether faculty can responsibly teach about race and racism. This past fall, a federal civil rights complaint filed against Colorado State University objected to how two social-work instructors were teaching about race: The instructors reportedly detailed in a journal article how they treated discomfort as a measure of instructional success, characterizing student dissent as “whitelash” or an attempt to maintain “white emotional comfort.” And, in November, Texas A&M University adopted sweeping new rules restricting professors from advocating for “race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity” after an instructor’s lesson on gender identity drew political scrutiny.
Similar conflicts, large and small, have surfaced at other institutions where comments, assignments or facilitation missteps around race have escalated into campuswide crises, legislative attention, or national media backlash. For critics of DEI work, the story is a familiar one, each conflict another example of what they believe is a misguided and coercive approach to discussing race in the academy.
But these cases are not evidence that DEI is failing. They’re evidence that higher education continues to position instructors to teach about race without adequate preparation, support or instructional training. The result is predictable. Classroom conversations break down, students withdraw or react defensively, and faculty fall back on reductive frameworks that flatten complexity instead of deepening understanding. When the inevitable conflict arises, external critics seize on those moments as proof that DEI itself is the problem.
As someone who has spent more than two decades teaching courses on race and racism, preparing PK-12 educators and school leaders, and facilitating difficult conversations across racial, political and socioeconomic contexts, I recognize many of the dynamics described in recent reports.
I have seen classrooms fracture when conversations about race are mishandled. I have also seen classrooms strengthen and deepen when race is taught skillfully, developmentally and with transparency about the learning process—not with the goal of making certain students, based on their race, feel uncomfortable.
Why Higher Ed Keeps Getting This Wrong
Too often, instructors are left to navigate high-stakes, emotionally charged conversations with little guiding them beyond readings and good intentions. They confuse discomfort with learning or treat identity categories as complete explanations for how students respond. They assume that naming systemic racism is enough to foster insight. They treat emotional reactions as confessions rather than data. And they interpret dissent as avoidance rather than inquiry.
Teaching about race is not the same thing as talking about race. It is not sufficient to have strong convictions, an antiracist syllabus or a set of readings that challenge dominant narratives. Teaching about race effectively, humanely and rigorously is adaptive work. It requires attention to the meaning-making capacities adults bring to the classroom, the emotional and cognitive demands of confronting unfamiliar histories, and the complex identity threats that discussions of racism can activate.
Unfortunately, many college instructors are asked to lead these conversations without any formal preparation in adult learning theory, without much practice facilitating difficult dialogues, and without much exposure to exercising racial literacy skills. Graduate programs rarely include coursework on how adults learn, how to hold tension productively, or how to differentiate instruction for learners at different developmental stages. Faculty development programs typically focus on instructional tools, strategies or course design, not the psychological and relational capacities required to teach race well.
The result is that many faculty default to one of two equally ineffective approaches: avoidance, in which the fear of mistakes or conflict leads instructors to sanitize discussions about race or eliminate them entirely; or overcorrection, in which instructors push students into discomfort prematurely, recast struggle as resistance or treat identity categories as proxies for understanding. Both approaches undermine learning. And both approaches, ironically, feed the narrative that DEI is coercive, dogmatic or intellectually fragile.
Misinterpreting Discomfort
A common misstep in teaching about race and racism is treating discomfort as the goal rather than the byproduct of learning. Discomfort emerges when students confront unfamiliar histories or grapple with the implications of structural racism. But causing discomfort without further reflection is not instructive. In fact, adult learning research shows that when learners do not understand why they feel discomfort, or when they interpret it as a personal indictment rather than information, they often shut down, deflect or retreat into defensiveness.
Barbara Larrivee’s work on reflective teaching practice emphasizes that adults deepen their reflective capacity not when they are emotionally overwhelmed, but when they can connect feelings to meaning. Tyrone Howard is especially clear that reflective practice around race is emotionally demanding and must be scaffolded, particularly for students who have had limited or no prior engagement with racial analysis.
Deborah Helsing, Annie Howell, Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s research demonstrates that adults grow when they can safely examine their assumptions, not when they are forced into emotional exposure without a supportive structure. Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Martin Linsky’s concept of a “holding environment” underscores the importance of creating a space strong enough to contain tension and flexible enough to meet learners where they are developmentally.
When instructors lack this grounding, discomfort can be misread as resistance, and resistance can be treated as evidence of fragility without further inquiry. The learning process collapses.
Identity Is Context, Not Destiny
Another pitfall revealed in some cases that escalate into public controversy is the assumption that a student’s response can be fully explained by racial or gender identity. While identity informs perspective, it does not predetermine it. H. Richard Milner IV consistently argues that classroom discussions of race must be deliberate, contextual and connected to students’ lived realities, structural inequities and institutional power.
Treating students as illustrations of demographic categories rather than as complex thinkers with varied histories and meaning-making capacities undermines trust and flattens what should be a nuanced dialogue. It also discourages dissent and the kind of intellectual engagement that we are meant to cultivate. Students deserve classrooms where questions are welcomed, disagreements are examined rather than punished, and identity is treated as a lens, not a verdict.
The Real Risk: We Are Handing Evidence to DEI’s Critics
Faculty who teach about race are working in a political climate where the stakes are extraordinarily high. White House executive orders and state laws across the country have restricted what can be taught about race. Public trust in higher education is declining. DEI offices are being dismantled.
In this landscape, when classrooms fall apart, the consequences extend far beyond a single course. They reinforce public misconceptions about DEI, embolden efforts to roll back equity-focused policies, and weaken institutional commitments to preparing students for democratic citizenship in a multiracial society.
Conservative media has built a profitable outrage economy from these incidents, some real and some exaggerated. Every time a classroom implodes, the anti-DEI movement grows stronger with a new case affirming a preexisting narrative: DEI is dogma, DEI is coercion, DEI is emotional manipulation, DEI is identity reductionism.
But these explanations are not the inevitable outcomes of teaching about race; they are the avoidable consequences of poorly designed learning environments and instructors’ unexamined assumptions. They describe the worst of DEI as if it were the whole of DEI. And colleges, by failing to teach race well, continue to hand DEI’s critics the evidence they need.
Making the Pivot
Adults do not grow when they are humiliated, cornered or shamed into silence. They grow when instructors make their reasoning visible, invite critique and create structured environments where difficult emotions can be examined rather than weaponized. Students learn when they are challenged in ways that help them make meaning of their experiences, not in ways that reinforce fear or defensiveness.
Through trial, error and learning alongside colleagues committed to adaptive adult learning, I’ve found that effective teaching about race requires several related commitments:
Instructional transparency: making our own assumptions, reasoning and uncertainties visible so that students understand the purpose and process of the learning.
A shared framework for inquiry: establishing norms that distinguish exploration from accusation and help students make sense of emotional responses without weaponizing them.
Developmentally aligned challenges: recognizing that students arrive with different capacities for complexity and designing learning opportunities that meet them where they are, while nudging them forward.
Treating dissent as data: understanding pushback not as avoidance, but as information about what needs clarification, probing or more practical contextualization.
When faculty practice these commitments, difficult conversations are not something to endure—they are opportunities for insight. Discomfort emerges organically rather than being imposed. Identity becomes context, not destiny. And students stay in the work long enough for significant learning to occur.
If colleges and universities want students to think critically about history, identity, power and inequality, they must invest in preparing faculty for that work. That means faculty development centered on adult learning, racial literacy, adaptive teaching and facilitation of complex intergroup dialogue, not just compliance training or lists of “dos and don’ts.” It means recognizing that teaching about race is sophisticated instructional work, not a box to check.
Without institutional support from university leaders, faculty will continue to be underprepared to teach subject matter deemed too politically controversial—despite its importance to preparing civic-minded, informed citizens capable of productive dialogue with people who have entirely different viewpoints and life experiences.
A Call to Higher Education
The recent controversies at Colorado State, Texas A&M or those yet to be reported should not discourage colleges and universities (or PK-12 schools) from teaching about race or lead them to abandon the faculty committed to doing so responsibly. If this moment helps us move toward a more rigorous, developmental and humane approach to teaching about race and racism, it will have done something important. It could challenge us to teach race far better than many of us do.
John Pascarella is a professor of clinical education at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education and chief academic officer of the USC Race and Equity Center.
