Student Movements for Multiculturalism

Challenging the Curricular Color Line in Higher Education

David Yamane

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9780801877209
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Beginning with the premise that a comprehensive understanding of American life must confront the issue of race, sociologist David Yamane explores efforts by students and others to address racism and racial inequality—to challenge the color line—in higher education. By 1991, nearly half of all colleges and universities in the United States had established a multicultural general education requirement. Yamane examines how such requirements developed at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin at Madison during the late 1980s, when these two schools gained national attention in debates over the curriculum.

Based on interviews, primary documents, and the existing literature on race and ethnic relations, education, cultural conflict, and the sociology of organizations, Student Movements for Multiculturalism makes an important contribution to our understanding of how curricular change occurs and concludes that multiculturalism represents an opening, not a closing, of the American mind.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• One: There Is No Progress without Struggle: Multiculturalism, Student Movements, and Academic Innovation
• Two: Challenging the Curricular Color Line at UW-Madison
• Three: The Long March to American Cultures at UC-Berkeley
• Four: From Process to Product: Substantive Development and Implementation of the Requirements
• Five: Institutionalizing the Challenge: The Future of Curricular Multiculturalism
• Conclusion: Multiculturalism: Closing or Opening the American Mind?
• Appendix A: Methodological Notes
• Appendix B: Membership of Committees That Drafted Multicultural General Education Requirements at UW-Madison and UC-Berkeley
• Appendix C: Courses Satisfying Ethnic Studies Requirement at UW-Madison in First Year of Implementation
• Appendix D: Courses Satisfying American Cultures Requirement at UC-Berkeley in First Year of Implementation
• Notes
• Index