Ideas on the Multicultural Proposal

At this point, I feel that we should take a vote and make some proposals. It would be fine to send several ideas to the Faculty Senate for them to consider, with our arguments or support. Or, we could propose a clear research agenda to obtain useful data. (Very likely the Coordinating Committee and Executive Committee above us will have their thoughts as well).

I believe that there are the following proposals on the table:

1. Keep the current Faculty Senate wording, from the 1987 resolution. But modify the specific wording of the Multicultural Course inventory/approval rules, I suggest wording as follows:

Courses must include a multicultural perspective as their primary goal; to satisfy this requirement, the bulk of the content must introduce students to the perspective or experience of non-dominant western cultures or peoples (so, including non-western, non-white, and gender-sensitive content).

A bare majority of material satisfying the requirement will not be sufficient. Courses must include “some awareness of, and sensitivity to” the material, so excluding pure survey lecture courses.

With the new wording, and the passage of fifteen years, it is appropriate to ask teachers of appropriate courses to provide new requests and supporting material to include their courses in the Multicultural Course list as of Fall 2004.

2. Return to the Faculty Senate with a proposal for increased credits, and a different distribution in favor of non-western culture.

I propose, 6 credits, with 3 credits in the non-western culture category, and the other 3 credits either “free” or in the other non-white, gender-sensitive, content area.

Also, I hope that this will include slightly different wording as in #1 above, so that we can look anew at all courses.

The next two proposals are still on the table, but I think that they have less support.

3. Increase in credits to 9, distributed as follows:

Each student shall have completed a minimum of 9 credits of multicultural course content in any of the following subjects:

1. Gender content courses, including women’s feminish, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer studies

2. Non-western, non-industrialized, non-middle class cultural studies

6 credits in #2, 3 credits in #1.

I would also favor, as part of this, the last two sentences of proposal 1.

4. Eliminate the multicultural proposal in its current form, and propose that any efforts to continue to have multicultural courses be included in either the colleges’ distributional guidelines, or as a part of the General Education initiative. We could include a general discussion of our analysis and then ask the General Education committee to consider the problem, and propose eliminating the current multicultural studies rules by vote of the Faculty Senate. We would say that the current rule can be eliminated since the overall problem has largely passed and now multicultural ideas should be incorporated more into sets of new classes as part of Gen Ed.

Below are the past discussions from the minutes:

December 2, 2002

1. The Multicultural Studies review continued.

Michael Arenson noted that in the B.Music major, there are 130 credits, and no distributional requirements. The result is that the multicultural requirement would just add to the total required credits--add 3 credits, and it would have to be 133.

Maggie Parsons talked about the study abroad programs, indicating that they give students a good perspective on a different (non-Delaware) world in a variety of ways, outside the classroom.

Doug Buttrey noted that the knowledge of ethnicity and gender has changed over 15 years, so the criteria might need to be different. Later, how would one define multicultural?

Thomas Leitch proposed a set of decisions, which eventually we largely voted on.

1) Should there be some multicultural standard (0r none)? Y 8, N 0, Abs 1.

2) Should the requirement be changed? Same 0, Change 7, ? 2.

3) Should there be a list of accepted courses, vs. some other system?(Interpreted that we keep status quo vs make some change, including establish the list of courses anew) Y 3, N 0, Abs. 6.

4) What should be in the multicultural requirement?

Lou Hirsh asked Why have a multicultural requirement? Doesn’t that reflect badly on our teaching success? Shouldn’t we always bring the students to new places? It was suggested that the general education requirement should include this goal. Lou suggested that the courses on the list included too-narrowly focused courses. [My thought--should the classes satisfy some of the Pathways goals?]

We then voted in a straw vote on what areas seemed appropriate to include:

1) International non-western Y 9, N 0, Abs. 1.

2) Ethnic, black American Y 1, N 0, Abs. 8.

3) Women (non middle class) Y 3, N 2, Abs. 5

It was suggested by Maggie Parsons that I check on what the General Education committee is doing--I did that on Friday, and they requested, particularly the Chair, Avron Abraham, that we connect our efforts with the Gen Ed guidelines passed by the faculty senate, particularly points 9 and 10. I agreed to bring them to the committee at our next meeting.

November 15, 2002

Old Business

1. Multicultural Studies review.

Hilton Brown presented his proposal to increase the total credits to 9, and focus on international and secondarily gender/sexuality issues. There was some agreement that gender and ethnic issues have changed in 16 years, since the proposal was originally passed. Is the “inner city” now part of students’ world?

The list of acceptable courses appeared to be too long and not to fit the desired goals--perhaps departments needing students try to fit a class in, and departments with too many students try to keep them out?

It was remarked that Pathways courses seem to have the same objectives as the multicultural requirement--to expand students’ views and understandings, etc. Why is the multicultural group better than some other one (I will think of biology/evolution, for example) that would extend students understandings?

It was suggested that all study abroad programs probably satisfy the multicultural requirement, since the student is abroad and is learning about another culture.

Thomas Leitch questioned the homogeneity of “western culture” that students are presumed to know about. Perhaps they know very little about the ancient Greeks or the middle ages.

Doug Buttrey wondered if the multicultural requirement should be adjusted to each student, as some students will be quite familiar with certain “non-western” cultures, and learning about them would not be appropriate.

After 45 minutes of discussion, we turned to other matters, planning to return at the next opportunity.