UCI Puts a New Emphasis on Ethnic, Cultural Studies

With minorities now composing 66% of this year’s freshman class, UC Irvine is embarking on an ambitious revision of course requirements aimed at promoting ethnic, cultural and global understanding.

So as UCI begins celebrating its 25th anniversary year today, students will find themselves reading Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” alongside Socrates, Plato and Homer in humanities courses, studying the development of urban cultures in Western and nonindustrial societies and analyzing the characteristics of underdeveloped economies.

“It’s an attempt to acknowledge specific social and demographic changes occurring, especially in the Southern California region, where an unprecedented mingling of different cultures is now a defining fact of life,” UCI history professor Spencer C. Olin said.

The emphasis on diversity comes as UCI is toughening many of its general education requirements. Some of the classes are new, but a good many have been overhauled to broaden students’ perspectives and understanding of a variety of cultures and societies, faculty members said.

Critics, however, wonder if in the smorgasbord of nearly 200 courses meeting UCI’s new diversity requirement the individual classes will have the depth and academic quality necessary to achieve the goal.

Several other University of California campuses already require students to take one course exploring U.S. ethnic and minority groups from a list of approved classes. But UCI’s faculty decided that students beginning this fall must take two: The first category of classes examines the culture or history of one or more minority groups, including women, blacks, Asians and Latinos in the United States; the second explores the culture, history, political, economic or sociological aspects of one or more foreign countries.

Efforts to revise courses to include themes of diversity and cultural understanding at other universities--most notably at Stanford and UC Berkeley--have provoked heated debate about their value and intellectual rigor.

At UCI, however, the faculty adopted the multicultural and international studies requirements unanimously and without rancor in April, 1989, after extensive study.

UCI anthropology professor Leo Chavez said the lack of controversy at UCI shows that most faculty members recognize the need to include a sense of the history and intellectual contribution of the various racial and national groups in the United States and the world.

“I think most (faculty) today realize there has been a major omission in what we’ve been teaching,” Chavez said. “What we’re trying to do now is, in a sense, not do affirmative action on history but to really include what should have been there all along. . . . We’re here to train future leaders of America and to transfer knowledge, and that knowledge isn’t limited to a Euro-American perspective.”

Some may question the importance of such efforts, including students who wonder why they are being burdened with yet another set of required courses at a time of increasing specialization in many disciplines.

“It seems like there are a lot of classes that students have to take already,” said freshman biological sciences major Michelle Nguyen, 18, of Midway City, who escaped Vietnam by boat in 1980 with her mother and sister.

“I would enjoy taking the classes but making it take longer for me to graduate would probably make it hard financially,” Nguyen said.

(UCI has not changed the number of units required to graduate. But as a practical matter, some students say, they have had to extend their studies because many of the required general education classes are in heavy demand and not enough are offered.)

Many educators respond that universities produce the leaders of the future and that filling the culture gap in their college curriculum is vital for understanding and cooperation in an increasingly polyglot society and an interdependent world.

“There is no group immune from the need for diversifying their own cultural appreciation and knowledge,” said Neal J. Smelzer, a UC Berkeley sociologist whose 1986 report sparked the University of California’s push toward diversity. “All groups are potentially ethnocentric, narrow and inward looking.”

Demographics aren’t the only reason to broaden the curriculum, say many educators.

“We introduced the requirement because it serves the university’s deepest intellectual interest,” said Michael Butler, UCI’s dean of undergraduate studies. “A more diverse curriculum introduces new questions, new comparisons and new ways of answering them. It makes education better. It makes the university smarter.”

Why make it a requirement? Because most students would not take such classes voluntarily, Butler said.

A survey conducted at UCI in the spring of 1989 showed that more than 80% of the students did not choose courses in either the multicultural or international categories. “So this should make a significant difference,” he said.

Students have until graduation to complete the two-course requirement. This fall, 47 courses will satisfy the multicultural requirement, and 146 will meet the international section--including many upper division foreign language classes.

The goal is to incorporate ideas about cultural diversity into as many courses as possible, Chavez said.

“We’ve been asked as we plan our courses to consider how to bring diversity in. . . . To really try to reconceptualize what it means to live in a diverse society,” he said.

Such a broad range of choices raises the specter of the debate that divided the UC Berkeley faculty in 1988.

Smelzer said there was grave concern among some faculty that a plethora of classes examining only individual groups or issues would not serve the purpose of broadening students’ understanding of society and the world at large. The multicultural requirement initially was rejected in 1988 but was revived and ultimately approved in 1989 on the heels of the UCI faculty action.

All classes that would satisfy the single-course multicultural requirement at the Bay Area campus must be strictly reviewed for content.

Hearing the number of approved courses at UCI, Smelzer wondered whether UCI’s faculty committee had been rigorous enough in examining the course content.

“The pitfall is just letting everything in, getting a big list of 80 or 90 or 100 courses, then losing the meaning of what a requirement is,” said Smelzer, a fierce advocate of diversity in the curriculum who also is one of the Berkeley professors concerned about preserving intellectual rigor and relevance.

Since both campuses are just instituting the requirements, however, Smelzer said it is too early to make a judgment on either the UCI or the Berkeley method.

While the multicultural and global requirements have generally been well received at UCI, some students and even some activist faculty members say its not enough and call for creation of departments of Chicano, African-American and women’s studies, to name a few.

University ombudsman Ronald Wilson agreed, but said, “I think you’ve got to start somewhere, and I think this is a very solid, important step.”

He pointed out that numerous black and Latin-American studies programs across the country have fallen on hard times or died for lack of student interest or campus support.

“Most of these programs were born out the protests of the ‘60s and . . . were used as appeasement tools or resources,” Wilson said. “They were not real solid efforts. What UCI is attempting to do is to . . . (lay) a foundation in which to build a true ethnic studies course program.”

Some students also complain that it is hypocritical to talk of promoting diversity when the multicultural classes are taught mainly by white males, who compose about 85% of the UCI faculty.

But some believe such criticism misses the point of the requirement.

“This program will fail if the only thing we do is have blacks administering to blacks and Latino professors to Latino students,” said Wilson, a black who lectured in black studies and literature at UC Riverside before coming to Irvine.

“We need to get away from territoriality--of blacks feeling only blacks can teach about blacks--and recognize we can all feel and understand. I’m not a white woman, but I love the poetry of Sylvia Plath and I cry when I read it.”

Butler said another example of UCI’s increased emphasis on a global approach to education is an expansion of its “Education Abroad” program.

“We’re sending about two-thirds more students abroad than we did two years ago,” Butler said. “We have 140 students going abroad for fall, 1990 . . . and we expect that growth to continue.”

The reason for such a push is the classic aim of a liberal education: to subvert provinciality, Butler said.

“That’s what universities are supposed to do. A millenium-old means to that end is to put somebody down in a culture that is different . . . and to get them to live there, not just sojourn there as a tourist,” said Butler, who as a student studied in England and Mexico.

Increased graduation requirements at UCI will not end with the diversity courses.

Another far-reaching change is the toughening of foreign language requirements. Beginning in the fall of 1992, students will have to take three quarters of a college level foreign language. In 1993, that requirement will increase to four quarters.

Graduate students Sitara and Luis Contreras have all that behind them, the couple said as they strolled their new campus last week with 10-month-old daughter, Nita, in a backpack.

But both agreed that the multicultural and diversity requirements are crucial for students. They both took a similar course at UC Santa Cruz, where they met at a dormitory that sought to bring diverse ethnic groups and cultures together.

“I think it’s wonderful,” 23-year-old Sitara said of the UCI requirement. “I wish it didn’t have to be required--that kids would take it anyway.”

“I think it works for everybody,” said Luis, a 23-year-old mathematics graduate student from East Los Angeles.

Added Sitara, a San Francisco native who plans to get a teaching credential at UCI: “These classes can be the start of bringing more peace to the world if people can understand different cultures.”

UCI FACTS: THEN AND NOW

1965 1990 Enrollment 1,589 *16,500 Faculty 118 900 Budget $5.9 million $548 million Contracts and Grants $1.3 million $78 million Private Support $173,000 $27.3 million Students Housed on Campus 450 4,650 Endowed Chairs 0 15 Fees $228 $1,795 Average Annual Cost $1,710 $9,420 Library Volumes 100,000 1.4 million Total Employees 359 8,500

* Projected

Source: UC Irvine ETHNIC MAKEUP OF UCI’S FRESHMEN

1989 *1990 Ethnicity Number % of Total Number % of Total American Indian/Alaska Native 18 0.8 14 0.5 Black 91 4.1 106 3.6 Latino/Mexican-American 202 9.1 221 7.5 Latino/Other Spanish-American 105 4.7 112 3.8 Filipino 61 2.8 130 4.4 Chinese 274 12.4 361 12.3 East Indian/Pakistani 50 2.3 76 2.6 Japanese 69 3.1 111 3.8 Korean 200 9.0 282 9.6 Polynesian/Pacific Islander 10 0.5 12 0.4 Other Asian 279 12.6 359 12.3 Caucasian 744 33.6 987 33.7 Other 32 1.5 47 1.6 Decline to State 79 3.6 116 3.9 TOTAL 2,214 100.0 2,934 100.0

*Data reflects those who have signaled their intent to enroll at UCI.

Source: UC Irvine