CURRICULUM TRANSFORMATION AT UC
BERKELEY:
OUR PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
Remarks presented at a Berkeley faculty workshop, September 1991
Please do not cite or quote without prior permission
L. Ling-chi Wang
Department of Ethnic Studies
University of California, Berkeley
lcwang@uclink.berkeley.edu
510 642-7439
As the chair of the largest autonomous department of Ethnic Studies in any research university in the U.S., I am frequently asked about the relations between the newly created "American Cultures" breadth requirement and the future of Ethnic Studies on the Berkeley campus by my friends and colleagues in the field of Ethnic Studies. The concerns they have behind the inquiry are: (1) whether Ethnic Studies is cutting its own throat and undermining its course enrollment in the long run by letting other departments offer courses with Ethnic Studies contents; and (2) whether the structural autonomy and intellectual integrity of Ethnic Studies, so fiercely advocated by its proponents in late 1960s, are being compromised or sacrificed in the hands of professors who are either not qualified to teach courses on American Cultures or, indeed, are opposed to the central notion of racial diversity in the new requirement.
The concerns they raised are legitimate, especially in these days of devastating budget cuts at the university and of well orchestrated, national campaign, from Alan Bloom to Dinesh D’Souza to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to delegitimize or expunge dissident intellectual perspectives represented by women’s studies and Ethnic Studies. I therefore welcome this opportunity to address these questions and to clarify our relations with the new American Cultures breadth requirement. I shall begin with a brief sketch on the rise and growth of Ethnic Studies on the Berkeley campus since late 1960s. I shall then recap the intellectual and political debates leading to the final approval of the "American Cultures" requirement by the Berkeley faculty in Spring 1989. I shall conclude with a few remarks on the relations between Ethnic Studies and the new graduation requirement, which can be met through courses in various departments and disciplines across the campus.
Ethnic Studies on the Berkeley Campus
The dominant perspective on racial and cultural differences in the intellectual tradition of Euro-America has been surprisingly unchanging, from biblical theology to present-day social sciences and humanities. From the biblical notion of "chosen people" to pseudo-scientific social Darwinism of the 19th century and the present-day social theory of assimilation and ideology of integration, the underlying assumption of Euro-American racial superiority and cultural supremacy in our intellectual tradition has never been seriously undermined or challenged. In other words, while the theoretical foundation may have shifted from theology to biology and then to social sciences, the dominant ideology on race persists in our knowledge, in the ways we reflect and organize our knowledge.
In a direct challenge to this dominant racist ideology, Ethnic Studies on the Berkeley campus came into existence in Fall 1969 following two months of massive student protest and intense faculty soul-searching. Organized as an autonomous department reporting directly to the Chancellor, Ethnic Studies consisted then of four independent Ethnic Studies programs—Afro-American Studies, Asian American Studies, Chicano Studies, and Native American Studies—each provided an administrator and a core faculty to develop its own curriculum, degree program, and research agenda.
The autonomous status symbolized an explicit repudiation of the dominant ideology of race and race relations perspectives in the Euro-American intellectual tradition, or what historian Harold Cruse characterizes as a rejection of the "integrationist ethnic," a deeply rooted intellectual and ideological consensus aimed at insuring the hegemony of the cultural particularism of the Euro-Americans and the exclusion or nullification of cultural particularisms represented by the racial minorities. In other words, the early advocates of Ethnic Studies deliberately rejected the notion of curricular "mainstreaming" or "integration," favoring, instead, autonomous academic programs built on the principles of solidarity among racial minorities, "self-determination," and "educational relevance," unencumbered by failed traditional paradigms and biased scholarship. As the new kid on the block, the autonomous department provided the needed institutional protection, freedom, and flexibility during its formative years and the necessary resource to develop new programs and anti-racist and counter-hegemonic scholarship.
By early 1980s, Ethnic Studies had taken root on the Berkeley campus. Each of the four programs had a permanent faculty, offering a B.A. degree program and producing influential new scholarship. Together, the four programs offered some 150 regular courses on minority histories, cultures, and communities, enjoying a steady rise in enrollment. In 1975, a new undergraduate degree program jointly operated by all four programs was added to give students an opportunity to do comparative Ethnic Studies. In 1983, the first Ph.D. program in Ethnic Studies in the U.S. was added. This semester, Fall 1991, the total undergraduate enrollment in Ethnic Studies is about 3,215. A total of 1,182 students were turned away from Ethnic Studies classes because of over-enrollment. The graduate program, jointly sponsored by Ethnic Studies and African American Studies, has about 70 students pursuing the Ph.D. degree this year. In short, we have what no other university in the U.S. has.
The success of these programs was widely recognized in some academic circles and fully acknowledged by an External Review Committee (The Brinner Committee Report) appointed by the administration in 1981. Yet, as successful as they were, the five programs in Ethnic Studies were largely isolated from the academic mainstream: their interdisciplinary approach was frequently dismissed by some discipline-bound scholars as "undisciplined" studies; the core curricula in most departments remained securely Euro-American; and most disciplines in social sciences and humanities continued to ignore race and ethnicity as significant categories of analysis. In fact, Ethnic Studies continued to be treated in some circles as if it had no intellectual legitimacy, and repeated calls by minority students to make Ethnic Studies a requirement for graduation throughout 1980s were dismissed by the faculty senate as political or self-serving. Indeed, the recent campaign against the so-called "political correctness" can be seen as the latest ploy by the academic mainstream to demonize and suppress this legitimate academic enterprise.
In short, while Ethnic Studies may have succeeded in being established in the academy and having its teaching and scholarship flourished, it existed still largely as an intellectual ghetto, disenfranchized and having only negligible impact on the entrenched disciplines and institutionalized organizations of knowledge. The enrollment gains in Ethnic Studies classes had come mostly from the rapidly changing racial composition of the undergraduate student body during the decade of 1980s.
The American Cultures Requirement
To break out of this intellectual isolation, some minority students and faculty proposed several times throughout the 1980s the idea of a new campus-wide Ethnic Studies requirement for graduation. The objective was to have Ethnic Studies added to the list of core courses considered essential to a liberal arts education. Proponents advanced four major reasons. First, students needed to understand the experiences of minority groups as the composition of the student body turned racially diverse. Second, such a requirement would enhance the prestige and increase the enrollment of Ethnic Studies. Third, it would add some color and texture to the predominantly monolithic white Ethnic Studies curriculum in the traditional disciplines in social sciences and humanities. Lastly, it could help reduce the rising incidents of campus racism. Needless to say, none of the above reasons are intellectually grounded. Formal representation rather than substantial integration is at the heart of the proposal.
To both the proponents and opponents of Ethnic Studies, the idea represented boldest initiative to penetrate the undergraduate core curriculum since the establishment of the department in 1969. Its primary objective was to expose every undergraduate to at least one course in Ethnic Studies. However, the move could just as well be seen as an admission of the failure of Ethnic Studies to gain intellectual legitimacy and exert its influence on the academic mainstream. While the academy may have set up the four programs in Ethnic Studies in response to intense political pressure, their presence was grudgingly accommodated at best and their scholarship continue to be seen as having no intellectual merit. Little wonder, the proposal for such a campus-wide requirement for graduation received treatments ranging from a polite cold-shoulder to outright contempt by powerful segments on campus, and was given a death sentence in "the silence embrace of faculty senate committees," to quote former UC president Clark Kerr.
The negative response to the proposal can be attributed to several factors: (1) The idea of a single Ethnic Studies requirement was too narrowly conceived, failing to link the requirement to the primary intellectual concerns of the academy, which are research and teaching. (2) Many faculty opponents considered the proposal to be the beginning of the deconstruction of Western civilization or a pretext to increase both the enrollment and power of Ethnic Studies. (3) The proponents failed to win support beyond the small Ethnic Studies constituency, in other words, they failed to build a sufficiently broad coalition of supporters. (4) The proponents underestimated the power of the faculty senate and the positive role the campus administration can play in the organizational dualism of campus governance. And (5) I am personally opposed to any requirement that can be fulfilled only through Ethnic Studies because I do not want the department to be treated as a service station for the whole campus.
In short, the proposal was doomed to failure from the start because it did not begin with a sober analysis of campus climate and conditions and because it lacked a cohesive, solidly grounded, intellectual justification and an effective organization and strategy behind it. It was not until 1987 that many of these deficiencies were addressed and an effective campaign coupled with skillful negotiations with faculty senate and administration was launched. What eventually emerged after two years of deliberation in Spring 1989 from the Special Committee on Education and Ethnicity of the faculty senate was the "American Cultures" breadth requirement, which was approved for implementation beginning Fall 1991. Also approved were a faculty committee to certify and monitor courses for the new requirement to insure their compliance with the legislative intent and a Center for the Teaching and Study of American Cultures, a faculty development project crucial to the success of the new requirement.
The intellectual foundation for the new requirement is summed up in the following paragraph in the report of the Committee on Education and Ethnicity:
"American society is distinctive if not unique in the diversity or racial and ethnic groups that shaped its early formation and that continue to shape its identity in the present. This identity, and academic debates about our identity, reflects three processes, two of which are encoded in our national motto, E Pluribus Unum. First, we are constituted by people with historic traditions from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and elsewhere. Second, these traditions have been reshaped by New World experience that has impressed a new level of identity upon the whole. Thus, American culture derives from its many constituent groups, but in their interaction on American soil it has been redefined, both within each racial and ethnic tradition and at a level that transcends all such traditions. The third process may be described as exclusion. The experiences of exclusion and isolation have affected most groups in the United States, although some have experienced this over a longer time period and in qualitatively different ways than others."
In essence, the new requirement calls for a reconceptualization of American history and identity. The debt that the American culture owes to the intellectual tradition of Europe is undeniable and fully acknowledged in the new requirement. However, this Euro-American tradition is to be studied comparatively with African American, Asian American, Chicano/Latino American, and Native American traditions, traditions that have been largely excluded in our conception of national history and identity. The main thrust is substantive inclusion, not mere token or procedural representation. Thus, for a course to be certified as an "American Cultures" course from any department, it must compare at least three of the five major groups or traditions in a cohesive manner.
Ethnic Studies and the New Requirement
Under these general guidelines, most of the courses offered by the four programs in Ethnic Studies do not come close to fulfilling the new requirement. Established 22 years ago with quite different curriculum objectives and research designs, these programs conduct research and offer courses on the history, culture and community of each of the major racial minority groups in the U.S. Unless there is a major reformulation of their curricula based on the stipulated guidelines of the American Cultures requirement, only a small handful of existing Ethnic Studies courses can be certified. Ethnic Studies has no plan to alter its curriculum. In fact, its only plan is to limit the number of courses in comparative Ethnic Studies from being certified. There is, therefore, no competition between what Ethnic Studies does in teaching and research and what the American Cultures requirement is attempting to do for Berkeley’s undergraduate education.
The American Cultures requirement can therefore be seen as a synthesis of the integrationist and separatist approaches to curriculum reform in higher education. Both are important for what they set out to accomplish. Ethnic Studies has no intention to alter its curriculum to take advantage of the new requirement. With its limited resources, it must continue, first and foremost, to function autonomously, as it has been in the past 22 years, in the advancement of Ethnic Studies scholarship. Secondly, it must provide support and assistance in the development of American Cultures courses in other departments. Lastly, it must contribute some courses toward the successful implementation of the new requirement. However, to play these three roles effectively on the changing Berkeley campus, Ethnic Studies must be given additional faculty and financial resources. Failing that, both Ethnic Studies and American Cultures requirement will suffer and the new and exciting intellectual frontier awaiting exploration will remain unknown and unexplored.
The academic resources developed by Ethnic Studies in the past 22 years are vital to the successful implementation of the new requirement. Without the accumulated scholarship and experience of Ethnic Studies, it would not have been possible for the Berkeley campus to carry out the new mandate. In this respect, Berkeley is well prepared to develop the new courses for the American Cultures requirement. In fact, it would be inconceivable and impossible to impose such a requirement without the presence, support, and fruit of the four programs in Ethnic Studies.
Conclusions
As important as these new courses on American Cultures will be to the Berkeley undergraduate program (the campus is now planning to create more than 100 courses that can be used to fulfill the new requirement), the real challenge is not so much in the number and variety of innovative courses being offered in departments outside of Ethnic Studies nor in the cost and logistics involved in setting them up, which have been quite formidable. Instead, the real challenge lies in the ability and willingness of the traditional disciplines within social sciences and humanities to accept the new notion of "American Cultures" and to integrate it fully in the creation of new knowledge through research and teaching. To explore and incorporate such a notion in every department and ultimately, in every discipline, is what makes the new requirement intellectually exciting and challenging. It is a creative process that requires open-mindedness in every department and discipline and, above all, a firm commitment to "intellectual affirmative action," as Professor David Lloyd puts it.
Instead of one cultural particularism dominating or denigrating other cultural particularisms, as it has been in the intellectual tradition of Euro-America, we now have what Cruse called "democratic ethnic pluralism" in the pursuit of knowledge and in the search for our national identity and destiny. Instead of pitting the mainstreaming approach against the autonomous approach to Ethnic Studies, we now have cooperation in the common cause of curriculum transformation between the two. One cannot exist without the other. The benefit to Ethnic Studies and American Cultures is mutual. Ethnic Studies is not cutting its own throat in its support of the American Cultures requirement, and its intellectual autonomy and integrity are not being compromised or sacrificed, as long as the university continues to provide adequate support of its programs. As for the concern over the intellectual integrity of the new courses, it is too early to tell. However, as long as there are programs in Ethnic Studies, there will be a check and balance between Ethnic Studies and the new courses in American Cultures.
If a liberal education still means the cultivation of aesthetic and moral sensitivities, broad human sympathies, and the capacity for critical and independent judgement, then the new requirement represents a re-affirmation of such a mandate—a commitment to create an inclusive curriculum and to redefine our national identity—and is a modest beginning in the university’s effort to prepare men and women to live intelligently and responsively in our multiracial and multicultural democracy in a shrinking world.