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.