Student Movements for Multiculturalism

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 colour 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. Although there have been many polemics written for and against multiculturalism, Yamane is among the first to employ social scientific theory and methods to understanding multicultural curricular change in higher education institutions.He presents his two central case studies against the backdrop of four predictable, sequential steps in organizational innovation: recognizing the need for change; planning and formulating a means of satisfying the need; initiating and implementing the plan; and institutionalizing or terminating the new operating plan. He shows that the progress of multiculturalism in higher education - like progress toward racial justice in all aspects of American life - has not come without struggle. The curricular colour line has to be actively challenged, and this prompts charges that politics are taking over or corrupting higher education. Despite the popular notion that school curricula ought to be apolitical, Yamane notes that the curriculum is not and has never been "natural," non-ideological, or apolitical. (In the late 19th century, for example, it was no easy matter to establish Shakespeare in the college canon.) Yamane concludes by identifying the key issues emerging from these struggles, insisting that multiculturalism represents an opening, not a closing, of the American mind.Based on interviews with students, faculty, and administrators, extensive analysis of primary documents, and engagement with 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.