| National Panel Reports
Following an extensive dialogue throughout the higher education
community, the National Panel developed three reports that
explore higher education's responsibilities within a diverse
democracy. The research and analysis in this series locate
diversity issues in the nation's basic commitment to democracy,
liberty, equality, and justice. All of these reports are available
for purchase.
The Drama of Diversity and Democracy:
Higher Education and American Commitments
The Drama of Diversity and Democracy explores higher
education's role in an inclusive egalitarian democracy. It
reminds readers that, since the nation was founded, the democratic
ideal of equality and fairness has been applied selectively.
The authors argue that democratic values and aspirations,
if fully engaged and applied to everyone, can provide a moral
compass for responding to the challenges presented by a diverse
society.
Drama challenges efforts to sweep under the historical
rug the ways that this country has both resisted and been
strengthened by the clamor for inclusion of those on its margins.
If we understood our history more fully, the authors observe,
we would be much better prepared to respond to contemporary
challenges. As contentious as they may be, contemporary dialogues
about difference are "the latest, but surely not final, chapter
in this country's ongoing negotiations over the meaning, application
and inclusiveness of its democratic principles."
What is needed now are creative ways of effectively engaging
those tensions. America's campuses are communities that can
play a major role in advancing public understanding of large
societal issues. Higher education is already fundamentally
committed to both intellectual and societal pluralism. Building
on this legacy, our campuses should now make themselves national
meeting places to explore America's conflicts over its diversity.
The job of higher education becomes educating two constituent
groups about the history of diversity in America: the students
and the community of which the campus is a part.
Colleges and universities have historically been too inwardly
focused and too limited in their responses to the increasing
diversity on campus and in society. Campus leaders have worked
extensively on more inclusive admissions policies and faculty
hiring, development of student services, special programs
and ethnic centers, and/or graduation requirements that students
take at least one course on pluralism and difference.
All these changes were healthy and necessary. But they often
have been attempted piecemeal, without reference to one another
or to a larger vision of the campus as a community that deliberately
fosters engagement of our differences. Moreover, the larger
society has been left out of the campus dialogue about diversity.
The academy needs now to develop a vision of itself as a community
that nurtures both recognition of distinctive traditions and
fruitful connections across difference. And it needs to engage
the larger society in discussion of issues with which it is
wrestling internally.
The report recommends that colleges and universities initiate
community seminars about "the meaning, application and inclusiveness
of [our nation's] democratic principles." Since the report
was published, colleges and universities throughout the United
States have launched such seminars. Planned in partnership
with community leaders, the seminars have helped to advance
a national dialogue about where we have been and about the
kind of society we want to become.
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Liberal Learning and the Arts of Connection for
the New Academy
It is a given that people are different from one another in
many ways. So how is it that the acknowledged, inevitable,
and intrinsically interesting differences among Americans
have been cast as a problem for this country that aspires
to liberty, justice, and equality for all? Why do contemporary
conversations about diversity in liberal education begin with
the view that diversity is an educational problem as well?
Such are the questions that spark Liberal Learning and
the Arts of Connection For the New Academy.
The academy has always placed education for civic responsibility
at the core of its educational mission. But for a long time,
higher education was reserved to the elite members of our
society. Now, as higher education has become both more widely
available and more diverse, Arts of Connection challenges
us to think in fresh terms about the meaning of education
for civic responsibility. What kinds of learning help all
students prepare to assume responsibility and leadership in
a democracy characterized by diversity and marked by persistent
and invidious inequalities?
The old model of liberal education, which dismissed the contributions
and considerations of non-white, female and alternative sensibilities,
provided a partial and distorted view of history. To correct
artificial exclusions and limitations, elements of a "New
Academy" have sprung up on contemporary campuses.
In the New Academy, new scholarship and curricula have developed
that take into account the various human histories typically
omitted from traditional liberal arts disciplines. Women's
Studies, African American Studies, Native American Studies,
Asian American Studies, Chicano/a Studies, comparative Ethnic
Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, Holocaust Studies, and a
multitude of other new fields study topics, groups, and ways
of knowing that were excluded from the educational canon.
Many faculty members in these new fields now hold double appointments
in more traditional departments. The learning generated through
these new developments is exciting, inclusive, transformative,
sometimes explosive. "It is in these spaces that the academy
is learning how to value and encompass the range of human
diversities."
Arts of Connection asserts the importance of restructuring
the core of liberal arts education to incorporate the range
of human diversities and challenges the academy to restructure
the way we learn together. It confronts polarized ways of
describing the world, proposing more inclusive and connected
perspectives for considering competing claims. Arts of
Connection proposes "interrelated educational commitments"
as foundational themes for a contemporary liberal education.
These themes are designed to help learners practice new ways
of thinking, learning and living together.
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American Pluralism and the College Curriculum
American Pluralism and the College Curriculum probes
the notoriously difficult work of changing college curricula.
This report focuses specifically on ways of addressing American
democratic and cultural pluralism across the college curriculum.
Illustrated with examples from recently established diversity
requirements, courses, and approaches at campuses throughout
the United States, American Pluralism demonstrates
that diversity is becoming an educational priority at all
kinds of institutions, from large state universities to small
private liberal arts colleges. The illustrations show that
in dozens of different ways new diversity courses are fostering
civic knowledge and social responsibility.
Diversity education is more than learning about cultural
difference. it requires knowledge of the power, equity, and
justice issues that drive much of the conflict over societal
difference. In a participatory democracy, diversity studies
also have important civic dimensions. For this reason, the
authors contend, "Colleges and universities shortchange their
students when they view courses on world cultures and United
States diversity as interchangeable, or leave attention to
United States diversity optional and elective." Both global
and domestic studies are important; each deserves space and
time in the curriculum.
The authors outline principles and curricular practices that
address multiple aspects of diversity learning: personal,
societal, experiential, and dialogical. They begin with the
traditional exhortation to "know thyself." Before students
can really engage difference in others they need to develop
a grounded sense of their own identities. This requires attention
to "diversity within," that is, to the interplay of often
complicated dimensions of culture, religion, race, class,
gender, and identity in one's own sense of self. in addition,
diversity learning in America requires knowledge both of other
communities and of the development of democratic values and
principles over time.
Diversity curricula also should include study of particular
groups' ongoing struggles for recognition, inclusion, opportunity
and justice. The report recommends a form of service learning,
which it titles "justice seeking." In justice seeking, the
student comes to understand participatory democracy by taking
part in community-initiated efforts to enhance opportunity
and participation in American society. This field learning
should be augmented by reflective seminars in which students
compare their field experiences and draw new insights from
the comparisons.
Finally, students need direct experiences with diversity
issues in their own chosen fields. Here, too, students' knowledge
should be experiential as well as academic. In almost every
field, students can look forward to working with multicultural
colleagues, to negotiating differences, to struggling over
issues of power, privilege, equity, and justice that may well
be framed in racial, ethnic, or other terms. Each field needs
to review its curricular practices and see whether they help
students develop the knowledge, skills, and values they will
need to address diversity issues in their day-to-day work.
American Pluralism also explores the preference for
emphasizing "what we share in common" as it has evolved both
in higher education and in liberal democracy. The authors
show that this preference for "universal" values has long
obscured awareness of all that the traditional curriculum
omitted. At the same time, it has been used as a basis for
objections to making the curriculum more inclusive. This report,
like others in the American Commitments series, argues that
the curriculum must prepare Americans to recognize, understand,
and negotiate differing perspectives.
American Pluralism summarizes its conclusions in recommendations
about four kinds of diversity learning: experience, identity
and aspiration (studies that focus on the individual's inherited
traditions and identity communities); United States pluralism
and the pursuits of justice (explorations of the diverse peoples
in American society and their differing experiences with democracy
and the pursuit of equal opportunity); experiences in justice
seeking (studies of encounters with systemic constraints on
the development of human potential and experiences with community-based
efforts to articulate principles of justice, to expand opportunity,
and to redress inequities); and relational pluralism in majors,
concentrations, and programs (participation in forms of learning
that foster sustained exploration of and deliberation about
contested issues important in particular communities of inquiry
and practice).
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