(Name-mce) ListServ Next Generation Diversity

[Anselmo Villanueva]

Next Generation Diversity

http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/27/williams

In the 1980s, many colleges adopted diversity requirements, typically
telling students that they had to take at least one course about a
non-Western culture or about an American minority group. These requirements
frequently set off heated debates, with proponents talking about the need
for diversity, and critics shouting about political correctness.

Williams College is in the process of changing such a requirement — with far
more civility than characterized many of those '80s discussions. In the
process, faculty members have managed to be quite critical of the old
requirement — while coming up with a new way to require study of a broad
range of groups.

The old system at Williams was pretty basic. Students had to take a course
about a minority group or a non-Western group. Anything that met that basic
criterion could count, and got a "people and cultures" asterisk. "It was a
good idea. It grew from nice liberal white guilt," but it stopped being
effective some time ago, according to Christopher Waters, a history
professor who is overseeing the new system. The requirement was so vague
that it didn't have any real meaning, he said. Further, the idea that
students needed to study a non-white group to represent difference doesn't
make sense when the college has attracted a much larger share of non-white
Americans and of international students.

"This requirement was seen as a joke," Waters said. "We were sticking things
with the asteriskwithout a solid intellectual justification. I think a lot
of our international students wondered what on earth this was about, and
many of our non-white students viewed it as tokenism. Why would our minority
students need to take such a course?" (A series of articles and editorials
in The Williams
Record,<http://www.williamsrecord.com/wr/?view=article&section=opinion&id=7103>the
student newspaper, reflect widespread student frustration with the
requirement — regardless of students' ethnicity or politics.)

So after a year of deliberation, the Williams faculty voted to do away with
all the asterisk designations and to instead require that the diversity
requirement be about more than some "other" group. The "exploring diversity"
courses can't just be about another group or culture, but must "include an
explicit and critical self-reflection on and immersion in a culture or
people," according to the college's new policy.

Courses could do that in several ways:

   -

   Through comparative study of cultures and societies.
   -

   Through curriculums that encourage "empathetic understanding" of
   diverse groups by "recreating the social, political, cultural, and
   historical context of a group to imagine why within that context, those
   beliefs, experiences, and actions of the group have emerged."
   -

   Through study of "power and privilege."
   -

   Through "critical theorization" in which students explore the ways
   scholars analyze cross-cultural interaction.
   -

   Through "cultural immersion," which could involve study abroad or
   through foreign language courses that "explicitly engage in the
   self-conscious awareness of cultural and societal differences, traditions,
   and customs."

The new approach is at once more demanding (a course can't just be about a
group) and much more broad. Courses about gender and sexuality could
qualify. Courses about various Western societies could qualify. Courses that
are critical of the groups they explore could qualify.

Edward Burger, a professor of mathematics who was chair of the Committee on
Education Policy, the faculty body that led discussion of the changes, said
that the old system was premised on the idea that Williams students were
white. "It identified us. It said, 'we're white guys who are now taking
courses to learn about people of other colors.' At its core, that's very
racist if you think about it."

Burger said that he is particularly pleased with the way the change shifts
the goal away from learning some facts about another group to learning to
understand other people's ideas and approach to life. He said, for example,
that a course might qualify that explored the antebellum South in which
students would learn, among other things, why white farmers might have
backed the Confederate cause. "We'd want students to actively engage that
mindset — suppose you were a farmer in Georgia. How would you feel about
people in the North telling you about slaves?"

These courses aren't going to focus on agreeing with groups, but
understanding them, and that's why it's possible to give an example of a
group of ideas (pro-slavery) that students and professors certainly wouldn't
endorse, Burger said. He said that the "empathy" component was especially
important in light of the way the world is changing.

"When we hear that halfway around the world, people are burning down stores
because of cartoons of Muhammad, we need to be able to do more than think
that these people are wacky," Burger said. That doesn't mean students need
to agree with those views, but they need to have some basis for
understanding, he said.

William G. Wagner, dean of the faculty at Williams, said that he thought
some of the good that would come from the change would arise from faculty
members' explicitly thinking about how their courses would fill the
requirement, as opposed to just having the designation added. "Under the new
requirement, not only will courses need to include a more self-conscious and
rigorous examination of the concept and methods of studying diversity, but
faculty teaching the courses will need to demonstrate how they satisfy the
objectives of the requirement," he said.

Many of the courses that used to qualify may still qualify, of course, and
professors stressed that many of the underlying values that led to the
original requirement were still valid.

In part as a result, the changes have won support from faculty who teach
ethnic studies, who also see value in the new approach.

Carmen Whelan, co-chair of Latina/o studies at Williams and an associate
professor of history, said she was "very supportive" of the new approach.
Many diversity requirements were created in part as a counter to
"institutional racism in the curriculum" that resulted in many parts of
history and culture being ignored or denigrated, she said. Courses that meet
the new requirement will still provide a balance to traditional offerings,
she said.

"But I think diversity comes in many forms, and the new initiative here is
to really broaden those definitions of diversity," she said. "And in this
way, diversity requirements can continue."

— Scott Jaschik <scott.jaschik at insidehighered.com>