Sociologist Calls for More Diversity in UC Multicultural Education Effort

UC Berkeley sociologist Neil Smelser, whose 1986 report on undergraduate education fueled the University of California’s push to require multicultural courses, told educators Thursday that the movement must grow because “education and diversification are the same thing.”

Smelser, acting director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education at Berkeley, told colleagues at a UC conference on cultural diversity that the most important function of the university is to expand the way students think so they learn to critically analyze and appreciate the world beyond their campus.

“The first principle to remember is the student is always wrong,” he said in a keynote speech at 2-day conference at the Irvine Hilton and Towers. “After we undermine the foundations of their critical thought . . . we have to give students the capacity to put it back together again.”

Smelser praised faculty members at UC Irvine and UC Berkeley for their recent requirement of classes to promote multicultural diversity, but he added that he favors making such classes optional so instructors will be forced to engage students with exciting course material.

Such classes should emphasize cultural, racial, ethnic and gender issues, he said.

“I would like to see implementation either less radical or more radical,” Smelser said, and urged UC campuses either to offer 15 to 20 optional courses that would attract most students sometime during their college careers or to undertake an ambitious effort to incorporate issues centered on cultural diversity throughout the curriculum.

“We sought to have more of a package, rather than just a bit,” Smelser said. “What we passed (at Berkeley) is a bit.”

Berkeley’s Academic Senate, which establishes curriculum for the campus, ended a year of controversy Tuesday when faculty representatives approved an American Cultures undergraduate requirement, which can be fulfilled by taking a course examining blacks, Latinos, Asians, American Indians and Americans of European heritage.

The compromise requirement, passed in a 227-194 vote, mandates study of three of the five groups in proposed courses.

UCI’s multicultural requirement, approved unanimously by its Academic Senate on April 13, is potentially broader. Beginning in fall, 1990, entering undergraduates would be required to take a course examining the historical, social and political aspects of minorities in the United States or the cultures and histories of foreign countries.

UC Santa Barbara was the first campus of the university to require a multicultural course of all undergraduates. Students majoring in the College of Humanities and Sciences at UC Riverside must also take such a course; the four other general UC campuses are considering similar requirements.