Today’s Agenda

Colleges and universities are trying to change their curricula to reflect the increasing ethnic diversity on campuses across the nation.

USC has come up with a plan, implemented last fall, that requires freshmen to take a diversity course to graduate. A couple of students queried in Platform say it’s a waste of time.

Alison Dundes Renteln, however, an assistant professor of political science at USC who taught courses on diversity before it was made a requirement, says the main goal is to expose students to different world views.

“Although history has taught us it includes the experience of all peoples, we know that there has tended to be a Eurocentric bias,” she says.

Some believe standards are being lowered by these new classes. Renteln responds, “We’re not telling people they shouldn’t read Aristotle or Plato. Nobody who teaches diversity courses thinks people shouldn’t learn what are called the ‘great books.’ We’re just saying there are other great books besides the ones that have been taught traditionally.”

She says that when students take a course in political theory at most universities they just get Western theory. “If you take modern political theory you get the Enlightenment: Rousseau and Locke. If you take ancient political theory, you get the Greeks. Nobody studies Islamic political thought or Chinese political thought. One thing that’s unusual about USC in our political science department is that we have courses in Islamic political thought and Asian political thought. We realize that there’s political thought in other parts of the world besides Europe.”

The problem, in her view, is that if diversity courses are not required, some students would prefer not to learn about embarrassing episodes in our history.

“My point is that people will have a very narrow view if they don’t have these courses and I think this is the impetus for setting up these courses.”

Jack Bunzel, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, takes the view that additional mandated courses are not needed.

“It seems to me under the heading of diversity we may be including a menu of offerings that are more polemical than they are academic, a little more politically correct than they are intellectually substantive. In terms of the priorities of educational courses that students ought to be invited to consider as part of their graduation requirements, a mandated course about diversity would not rank at the top of my list.

“There’s a sense in which people feel that they’re doing the Lord’s work if certain students are required to be taught about diversity because diversity is a good, not an evil. Well, I have no quarrel with that. The problem is that when we’re talking about whether we’re doing this for solid and rigorous academic reasons or as some part of consciousness raising, then we’re getting into questions of not only how many requirements can a university put on a student, but who is authorized by what kind of disciplinary training to offer what sort of rigorous courses.”