Getting to Know You

Student demands for changes in college courses are increasingly complex, and the right responses are more difficult to formulate. Nowhere is this more striking than in a debate at the University of California at Berkeley over whether all students should be required to take a course focusing on the contributions of minorities to American culture.

Like many other American universities today, UC Berkeley offers a range of academic courses of special interest to ethnic minorities. The catch is that in courses on black history or literature the bulk of the students are black, and the same pattern holds in classrooms where other minority students explore their ethnic heritage.

One quite predictable response is that minority students now want both to learn about their own cultures and to make whatever arrangements are necessary for all of their fellow students to attend the same courses, partly to help strangers to those cultures better understand the background and problems of students whose cultures they do not share. Minority students hope that if others--particularly whites--are exposed to this history, literature, music and art they will be more sensitive to the hopes and needs of black, Latino or Asian-American students.

The UC Berkeley administration is sympathetic to the proposals, as are many faculty members. But the students’ demand that such courses be required on a campus that prides itself in having few requirements of any kind has plunged Berkeley into a debate that is most likely to be won by forces that oppose any change. Somehow the focus must be readjusted so that everyone wins something.

Berkeley requires that all of its students be proficient in English. Beyond that, no courses are required; the school simply delineates areas from which the students must select courses--like languages, science or the humanities. Minority student leaders think that their concerns are important enough to require a new policy that would require all of the school’s students to take some course, be it history or sociology or religion, that primarily focuses on the contributions of two minority groups to the field in question.

The faculty has had heated discussions concerning the proposal. Some of its members say that required courses would kill students’ curiosity rather than pique it. Others note that the four minorities mentioned in the proposal before the Academic Senate--black, Latino, native American and Asian-American--by no means exhaust the list of excluded minorities.

Last spring the Academic Senate decided to poll the faculty members by mail--a move certain to kill the proposal, because many of the members would have voted without hearing arguments favoring the plan. Now the Senate rules committee says that a vote by mail is out of order. As a result, the Academic Senate may consider later this fall recommending further study of the proposal. That’s a good idea, because it would give groups that want to see some change more time to consult, department by department, on how best to achieve those changes.

In the meantime the Academic Senate might well begin a course-by-course review to make sure that minority contributions in all fields are fully covered in lectures and texts. In that way students will learn about these important achievements no matter what develops. Such integration probably will require a redoubled effort by the university to recruit and retain minority faculty members, since they would have the greatest interest in making sure that the job gets done.

The Faculty Senate could help professors revise their courses by giving them summer grant money or providing teaching assistants. That is the sort of innovation and improvement that is covered by the law earmarking lottery money for education.

Such changes would not give students everything that they want. But they would be far better than no change, which is what some professors want and what they might get if there’s no flexibility in the debate. For the immediate future, it might be preferred to a required course, if that would create resentment without broadening understanding. This could be a long debate, but there are few more important on the changing campuses of the University of California.