USD Gets $1-Million Grant for Multicultural Agenda

A $1-million grant has been made to the University of San Diego to put flesh on plans by president Author Hughes to increase campus cultural diversity, a major university goal for this decade.

The money from the James Irvine Foundation will be applied to many programs over the next four years to nurture a multicultural attitude at USD, where Hughes has called for a change in campus culture “from one being driven by white Anglo-Saxon values and customs to one more inclusive of people with different values and customs and traditions.”

In an interview last spring, Hughes said a key dimension of encouraging diversity “is in letting various groups know of the multiplicity of cultural experiences that exist, rather that just the single white, Anglo-Saxon, Western European experience.”

Now, with the grant money, USD will begin an ambitious effort toward pluralism.

Among the plans:

* Faculty members throughout the departments and schools at the private, independent Catholic university will be encouraged with stipends and workshops to use the cultural diversity of the American Southwest in their curricula. Most of USD’s students come from areas in the metropolitan Southwest. The campus will seek adjunct nonwhite faculty to help plan the workshops and draw up the new curricula, and will more aggressively recruit minority faculty and administrators.

* The campus will bring in high school students throughout urban San Diego to work with USD science professors in special laboratory research as a way to increase science knowledge and interest, especially among nonwhite teen-agers.

* The School of Law will undertake projects through its community-based clinics to work with teen-agers in the juvenile court system, to teach American civics to Asian and Latino immigrants, and to run an experimental educational program looking at reasons for poverty in San Diego.

* A teacher preparation program in the School of Education will try to increase the number of African-American male teachers working with the San Diego Unified School District.

The university also will tailor many of its frequent faculty and student retreats to center on issues of racial and ethnic stereotypes, gender conflicts and related issues. It will also set up a community advisory board to try to change its “community identity as an elitist, expensive, and predominantly white campus.”

The undergraduate student body of 3,700 students is almost 80% white, although the freshmen class this past year was 25% nonwhite. Faculty percentages are similar.