Tufts Now Handing Out Certificates in Dismantling Museums

MEDFORD, MA —

Tufts University has officially launched a 5-course graduate certificate in “Anti-Racist Curatorial Practice,” where students are trained to treat art museums not as places of culture — but as front-line outposts of whiteness, colonialism, and imperialist ideology.

Among the required classes?

“Art, Whiteness, and Empire: The Art Museum as an Imperialist Repository.”
Which sounds less like a syllabus and more like a rejected Indiana Jones sequel.

In this bold new world, students won’t just admire a Monet — they’ll conduct an “anti-racist object analysis” of it, reinterpreting it through a “non-white lens” while navigating the museum’s “normative imperialist structures.”

(Translation: You’re gonna need a DEI glossary just to hang a painting.)

Curriculum buzzwords you’ll master:

• Conducting “anti-racist object analyses”
• Reinterpreting museum collections through a “non-white lens”
• Critically examining “imperialist histories” of art institutions
• Developing “personal strategies for becoming antiracist”

(Yes — these are real phrases from the actual program description.)

The goal?

To reimagine the museum not as a place for art appreciation, but as a battleground for “personal antiracist strategies” and critical analyses of systemic oppression.

Because nothing says liberation quite like a 45-minute seminar on the imperial symbolism of The Birth of Venus.