With race relations hitting the headlines nationally and on campus, it is more important than ever for UK to graduate students who can talk comfortably about race.

Black and African-American students who met with President Eli Capilouto advocated for a mandatory class on race and ethnicity for all students. More than 100 faculty, staff and graduate teaching assistants echoed this call in a letter sent to Capilouto on Friday.

Capilouto should implement this recommendation. College is more than preparing for employment or learning how to write research papers. When students graduate from Kentucky’s flagship university, they should graduate as well rounded, thoughtful members of society.

Race will likely be one of the most important issues our generation must tackle. Progress has been made since the civil rights movement in the 1960s, but not enough. Students need to know how to talk about fixing the problems still present in Kentucky and the nation.

“How you have the conversation can be just as meaningful as the outcome,” said Melynda Price, a law professor and director of the African-American and Africana Studies Program.

UK would not be alone in creating this type of course. The University of California at Los Angeles voted to create a mandatory diversity class that will be implemented in the fall of 2017. The University of Oklahoma announced a similar program.

The mural in Memorial Hall is the low-hanging fruit of race relations at UK when compared to issues like a lack of black and African-American professors on campus, as shown in the letter to Capilouto and the black and African-American students’ list.

The class could help expose and solve those problems.

“I think a lot of the problems come from not understanding, it’s a lack of knowledge,” said Kaelin Massey, vice president of UK’s chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists and one of the black and African-American students who met with Capilouto. “In a class, you’re starting to talk to other people, getting a little more comfortable talking to people who don’t look like you.”

If students were able to gather once or twice a week in a classroom and talk about the issues minorities face, it would create a kind of widespread discussion about race that students may otherwise never have.

With faculty from the African-American and Africana Studies Program, the Department of Hispanic Studies, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Jewish Studies Program, the Appalachian Studies Program, and the Arabic and Islamic Studies Program, the course could be about much more than black and African-American issues.

If Capilouto wants to produce the best students in the Commonwealth, and some of the best in the country, a mandatory diversity class is a must.

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