Student Movements for Multiculturalism: Challenging the Curricular Color Line in Higher Education

by David Yamane

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801870996
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	12/23/2002
Series:	Challenging the Curricular Color Line in Higher Education
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.46(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

David Yamane is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Chapter 1. There Is No Progress Without Struggle: Multiculturalism, Student Movements, and Academic Innovation
Chapter 2. Challenging the curricular Color Line at UW-Madison
Chapter 3. The Long March to American Cultures at UC-Berkeley
Chapter 4. From Process to Product: Substantive Development and Implementation of the Requirements
Chapter 5. Institutionalizing the Challenge: The Future of Curricular Multiculturalism
Conclusion
Appendix A: Methodological Notes
Appendix B: Membership of Committees That Drafter 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-Berkley in First Year of Implementation
Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

Robert A. Rhoads

In an interesting and well-written analysis of two key cases, Yamane identifies and analyzes recent student movements oriented toward advancing multicultural curricula. He does an excellent job of situating these movements within the larger landscape of higher education.

— Robert A. RhoadsUCLA, author of Freedom's Web: Student Activism in an Age of Cultural Diversity

Michael Olneck

This is a meticulously researched and theoretically well-informed study that illuminates how student demands for multiculturalism in the curriculum become education innovations that may ultimately be incorporated into the normal practices and enduring structures of higher education. Yamane shows well how efforts for broad-scale social change are simultaneously advanced and blunted by organizational and institutional intricacies.

— Michael Olneck, University of Wisconsin—Madison

Robert A. RhoadsUCLA

In an interesting and well-written analysis of two key cases, Yamane identifies and analyzes recent student movements oriented toward advancing multicultural curricula. He does an excellent job of situating these movements within the larger landscape of higher education.

— Robert A. RhoadsUCLA, author of Freedom's Web: Student Activism in an Age of Cultural Diversity

From the Publisher

In an interesting and well-written analysis of two key cases, Yamane identifies and analyzes recent student movements oriented toward advancing multicultural curricula. He does an excellent job of situating these movements within the larger landscape of higher education.
—Robert A. RhoadsUCLA, author of Freedom's Web: Student Activism in an Age of Cultural Diversity

This is a meticulously researched and theoretically well-informed study that illuminates how student demands for multiculturalism in the curriculum become education innovations that may ultimately be incorporated into the normal practices and enduring structures of higher education. Yamane shows well how efforts for broad-scale social change are simultaneously advanced and blunted by organizational and institutional intricacies.
—Michael Olneck, University of Wisconsin—Madison

Editorial Reviews

The book's clarity and succinctness increase its accessibility to both researchers and practitioners . . . Yamane successfully argues the need for a multicultural curriculum by attempting to bridge the arguments of those for and against such a requirement [and] pushes the reader to not be satisfied with the current marginalization of the multicultural curricular requirement as only one or two courses of a student's general education requirement.
—Elaine W. Kuo, Journal of College Student Development

This account of recent higher education history is a study in the power of students to affect their education.
—Jennifer Patterson Lorenzetti, University Business

From the Publisher

The book's clarity and succinctness increase its accessibility to both researchers and practitioners . . . Yamane successfully argues the need for a multicultural curriculum by attempting to bridge the arguments of those for and against such a requirement [and] pushes the reader to not be satisfied with the current marginalization of the multicultural curricular requirement as only one or two courses of a student's general education requirement.

Journal of College Student Development - Elaine W. Kuo

This account of recent higher education history is a study in the power of students to affect their education.

University Business - Jennifer Patterson Lorenzetti

The book's clarity and succinctness increase its accessibility to both researchers and practitioners... Yamane successfully argues the need for a multicultural curriculum by attempting to bridge the arguments of those for and against such a requirement [and] pushes the reader to not be satisfied with the current marginalization of the multicultural curricular requirement as only one or two courses of a student's general education requirement.

— Elaine W. Kuo

Journal of College Student Development