The College of William & Mary
Memorials and Their Significance on College Campuses
June 10th-14th, 9am-12pm
Summer 2019
Meg Jones, Matthew Thompson
Course Description
This one week, discussion-based, summer course offers a deep dive into memorials on college campuses and their significance. With the current development of the Memorial to Enslaved Labor at William & Mary underway, attention is being drawn back to the racism and cruel disregard for human rights, formally known as the transatlantic slave trade. The College is one of many institutions exploring their historical involvement and taking steps towards apologetic restoration, but what exactly does this journey towards justice entail? This course will explore the meaning and importance of memorialization in its various mediums and challenge students to think critically about the actions being taken by William & Mary and its academic peers.
Course Goals:
Students will…
- Discover how and why memorials and monuments are used on college campuses
- Understand William & Mary’s current memorial plans and connect the College’s attempts to apologize to other universities
- Look at the importance of memorialization, reparations, and apologies in an institution’s journey towards reconciling its past
- Be able to understand why a community may react negatively or positively to different types of memorial
- Explore universities’ possibilities of continuing the rectification of their involvement in slavery beyond memorialization
Course Skills:
After completing this course, students will be able to…
- Communicate academically about collegiate recognition, apologization, and rectification surrounding the academy’s historical use of slave labor.
- Communicate non-academically about the social significance of memorialization and the institutions fueling both the support and opposition of its implementation.
- Read, analyze, and interpret secondary sources surrounding the topic in order to convey and gather the selections’ central topics and themes.
- Use class discussion, personal experience, current events, historical documents, and scholarly works to think critically and form their own strong, substantiated arguments regarding class material and the implications of actions being taken.
Assignments
- Create plans for your own memorial and write a 2-5 page paper explaining its meaning and how a community of your choosing may react to it. This memorial may represent any historical event of your choosing, but also must integrate themes and topics that we have discussed in class.
- Extra Credit – American Vandal: After our discussion on vandalization, you may choose a historical monument or memorial and show how you would vandalize it in a meaningful way. A recent example was a student placing blood on the hands of the Thomas Jefferson statue here at William & Mary.
Schedule
| Date | Topics and Assigned Readings | Assignments
(due the following week) |
| 6/10 | Main topic: Understanding why a monument may be built and looking at our own institution as a case study Read https://www.wm.edu/sites/enslavedmemorial/about/index.phpBe prepared to discuss the significance of this memorial and why you think it is being implemented |
|
| 6/11 | Main Topic: Looking at other examples of memorials on college campuses Read: Each of the different colleges on this page’s efforts as well as UVA’s |
|
| 6/12 | Main Topic: Community Reaction to memorials and monuments Read: CNN article, point out examples of what you see as “meaningful vandalism”, perform additional research for examples of “meaningful vandalism” |
Begin work on American Vandal |
| 6/13 | Main topic: The importance of apology and reconciliation Read: Weyeneth’s paper on the power of apology, pay specific attention to parts concerning memorials and monuments. |
|
| 6/15 | Main topic: What are the next steps an institution can take to apologize for its past? What comes next? Begin work on the final project |
Final Project due next week |