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How best to teach diversity

BY ROBIN L. GARRELL

On March 13, UCLA was honored to have Professor Derek Bok, former president of Harvard University, present the Allan Murray Cartter Lecture, “The New Agenda for Undergraduate Education.” Never an apologist for the status quo, Bok challenged us to rethink the goals of undergraduate education, and how we want students to develop. He asked: Do we aim to create an educated citizenry and instill values such as tolerance? And if so, how can we achieve such goals?

These fundamental questions underlie today’s debate about what has come to be called the “diversity requirement.” At all the other UC campuses, undergraduates are required to take at least one course from a prescribed list. Although UCLA is the only UC campus without an explicit diversity requirement, we have not neglected diversity issues in our curriculum.

We recognize that in a pluralistic society, it is important for undergraduates to study multicultural interactions and to develop analytical skills for understanding complex issues. In the early 1990s, rather than adding a separate diversity requirement, our faculty chose to develop approaches to diversity in courses across the disciplines. In a 2002 reform to general education (GE), we gave special emphasis to diversity, considering whether courses addressed multicultural issues in central and substantial ways. A large proportion of the GE courses in the Society and Culture and the Arts and Humanities foundation areas do so.

Some members of our campus community have nevertheless pressed for an explicit diversity course requirement. In the past year, the Faculty Executive Committees of the College, the School of Theater, Film, and Television and the School of the Arts and Architecture have voiced support for a proposal from the Undergraduate Council requiring a single lower-division course that would simultaneously satisfy existing GE course requirements.

The faculty must approve changes in requirements for undergraduate degrees before they can go into effect. A joint faculty-student workgroup is now formulating the criteria that will be used to determine which courses could satisfy the diversity requirement and is developing a preliminary list of such courses. The GE governance committee endorsed the idea that “diversity” includes such characteristics as race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic background, religion, sexual orientation and age. It encompasses historical as well as contemporary perspectives, and global as well as American contexts.

Faculty will have the opportunity to review the proposed regulation change and vote on it as early as fall 2004. If approved, the diversity requirement would go into effect for freshmen entering UCLA in the fall of 2005.

Which brings us back to Bok’s questions. Diversity in every sense — racial, ethnic, gender, cultural, political — is central to the UCLA experience. Indeed, diversity is one of our strengths. We have publicly committed to achieving a diverse faculty and student body, and to creating an environment that nurtures understanding, empathy and open-mindedness.

The current debate is really about how best to teach the value of mutual understanding and the societal consequences of intolerance. Our faculty will soon decide whether adding a diversity requirement is the best way we can envision achieving these goals in undergraduate education at UCLA.

Garrell is associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry and chair of the Faculty Executive Committee of the College.