Bildner Family Foundation New Jersey Campus Diversity Initiative

Institute Seminars

This first seminar suggests a rationale for making diversity central to academic excellence. Without diversity, the quality of education suffers and so does our civic life. It also suggests a rationale for infusing democratic aspirations into the center of the academic enterprise. Without it, the quality of learning suffers and diversity is without a moral compass. The series of articles below argue that by foregrounding the intertwining civic and intellectual missions of college in a diverse democracy like ours, the academy will produce socially responsible citizen-graduates who can help create more just democratic communities, both locally and globally.

We begin with the founding documents of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights in which pluralism was enshrined as a value when the United States began its experiment in democracy. Flawed and limited in its determination of who constituted a citizen in this new republic, the Founders nonetheless committed the U.S. to ideals of democracy and equal opportunity.

Education has always been deeply implicated in the expansion and definition of democracy whether in the nascent republic, the post Civil War period in the South, the establishment of land grant colleges, or the augmented class opportunities with the GI bill after World War II. Higher education also continues to grapple with its historical record of inequalities that restricted access of certain populations because of their race, class, gender, beliefs, and religion. The founding documents also remind us of the movements that have echoed the rhetoric of these documents as various disenfranchised groups have demanded recognition of their full rights of citizenship.

Following the documents, the next cluster of readings explores the responsibility of higher education to attend to the commitments of democracy and equality first articulated by the founders. The readings also draw our attention to how some educators have redefined ideas about how to create a diverse democracy through higher education and the consequences of not doing so.

The forward and synopsis of The Drama of Diversity and Democracy outline higher education's history of excluding non-whites and the striking progress in the last fifty years in opening new doors of opportunity. Today, the report asserts, "Our nation's campuses have become a highly visible stage on which the most fundamental questions about difference, equality, and community are being enacted." As such, higher education now can offer "spaces of dialogue and possibility."

The next set of readings examines the purpose of education in a diverse democracy and the challenges in fulfilling the commitments of the founding documents. Hiley evokes democratic aspirations as he reflects on the purposes of education. He argues that educators can prepare students to engage in meaningful dialogues about important issues that prepares them to be active participants in a pluralistic democracy. Knefelkamp and Schneider provide intellectual frameworks for constructing these dialogues and purposeful learning that offer the problem-solving and collaborative learning skills needed to build a diverse democracy.

In "Let America Be America Again," Langston Hughes juxtaposes the promises at the core of the country's democratic institutions with a historical practice of injustice, exclusion, and hypocrisy. Yet Hughes remains hopeful that the power in these founding ideals is not spent, but finally can be used to create a nation that will live up to its promise.

Readings for Seminar 1

Declaration of Independence.

The Preamble and Amendments to the United States Constitution.

Association of American Colleges and Universities. 1995. Forward and Synopsis to The Drama of Diversity and Democracy: Higher Education and American Commitments. Washington, DC: AAC&U.

Hiley, David R. 1996. The Democracy of General Education. Liberal Education 82:1, 20-25.

Knefelkamp, Lee and Carol Schneider. 1997. Education for a World Lived in Common with Others. In Education and Democracy: Re-imagining Liberal Learning in America, 327-344. Ed. Robert Orrill. New York, NY: The College Board.

Hughes, Langston. Let America be America Again. In ReReading America: Cultural Concepts for Critical Thinking and Writing. Eds. Gary Colombo, Robert Cullen, and Bonnie Lisle. 1992. Boston, MA: Beford Books.

Seminar 2
Intersections of Identities

Identity is commonly understood as defining who a person is. Identities are both selected and imposed, formulated in natal communities of affiliation and constructed by powerful social, economic, and political forces. In many social contexts, some people have undue power to name, define, or circumscribe others' identities. Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher, argues that identity is shaped by recognition. To refuse recognition or deliberately misrecognize someone is no mere social gaffe, but an act of psychological violence. Misrecognition, he cautions, "can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being."

The readings for this seminar explore different dimensions of identity formation in the context of the search for recognition in the U.S. How are we to understand identity's impact on education and the learner? How do we formulate campus policies and communal practices that can encompass a respectful engagement despite a vast array of identities? How do we understand multiple and overlapping identities and how might identities be used for strategic purposes?

The first reading tackles the tangled question of racial identity. Michael Omi and Howard Winant argue that rather than being fixed, race is "an unstable. . . complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle." Today's racial hegemony, they assert, is "messy" because "it is the product of a vast historical legacy of structural inequality and invidious racial representation."

The next reading represents an emerging body of scholarship that discusses whiteness, that "invisible" race and color in the United States that mistakenly is often seen as neutral, valueless, and undifferentiated. Gallagher elaborates on how it, too, is a social construction that changes in its meaning over time.

Inspired by her own Chicana heritage, Gloria Anzaldúa raises through her poem the complicating reality of multiracial identities in a single individual. Anzaldúa suggests that to survive as a person in whom cultures, races, and identities mingle and are in conflict one needs to be a crossroads where one lives without borders.

Patricia Clark Smith's "Grandma Went to Smith" introduces class as an important identity in higher education. Although most Americans have great difficulty talking about class, since forty percent of college students are first-generation students, class is now more visible than ever, but too little explored an identity. Linda Morgan-Clement offers some practical thoughts about how these multiple identities, including religion and sexuality, play out on a college campus. Finally, in the last humorous but telling poem, Pat Parker captures the absurd consequences of living one's daily life governed by rigid racial categories.

Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. 1994. Racial Formation. In Racial Formation in the United States, 53-76. New York: Routledge.

Gallagher, Charles A. 1997. White Racial Formation: Into the Twenty-First Century. In Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror, 6-15. Eds. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. To Live in the Borderlands means you. In Borderlands/La Frontera, pp. 194-195. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute.

Smith, Patricia Clark. 1993. Grandma Went to Smith, All Right, but She Went from Nine to Five: A Memoir. In Working Class Women in the Academy, 126-139. Eds. Torarczyk and E. Fay. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

Morgan-Clement, Linda. 1998, Fall. Diversity on Campus: The College of Wooster. The Diversity Factor, 23-27.

Parker, Pat. 1987. For the White Person Who Wants to Know How to be My Friend. In Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color. Ed. Gloria Anzaldúa. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute.

Seminar 3
Immigration, Migration, and Citizenship

According to the 2000 census data, the state of New Jersey ranks fifth nationally in the number of immigrants arriving during the 1990s, but it ranks first in terms of the diversity of its immigrant populations, with the largest concentrations migrating from Asia-Pacific and Latin America. Simultaneously, racial and ethnic diversity within the state continues to increase. The demographic changes within New Jersey are indicative of trends occurring nationwide. Because of the increasing diversity within our citizenry and our global interconnectivity, many people are beginning to pay greater attention to issues of immigration, migration, and citizenship.

This seminar will explore the theoretical and practical questions driving our understanding of these issues within a globalized world. How do we explore identity and citizenship in a world that is increasingly characterized by large movements of people across national boundaries? Can current models of citizenship accommodate individuals with membership in multiple groups and identification with disparate places? How would global citizenship be defined? Where do obligation and allegiance fit?

We begin our reading with Ronald Takaki's A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, which explores the complex and interconnected history of immigration in America. Takaki's treatment of a variety of immigrant groups including Irish, Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian and German Jewish immigrants, tells a complex story of interconnectedness, assimilation, and cultural imperialism.

Appadurai's essay, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy," offers a conceptual framework for understanding contemporary issues in globalization. He creatively invents a neologism using the suffix "scape" and combines it with the prefixes ethno-, media-, techno-, finance- and ideo- to describe the characteristics and movement of global culture and capital.

We conclude with some literary expressions of the complex relationships between issues of identity, diaspora, and belonging. Judith Ortiz Cofer, a Puerto Rican author, and Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian-American author, capture the varied experiences of newer immigrants in their personal narratives "Rituals: A Prayer, A Candle, and a Notebook" and "AHA". Both authors use their stories to give voice to their own experience and attitudes toward multiple identities, assimilation, and "becoming" American. Daniel Teraguchi's article describes innovative approaches to reaching out to many of these new immigrant communities.

Readings for Seminar 3

Takaki, Ronald. 1993. Chapters 6, 7, 10, & 11. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company.

Appadurai, Arjun. 2000. Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy. In The Global Transformation Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate, 230-237. Eds. David Held and Anthony McGrew. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc.

Cofer, Judith Ortiz. 2000. Rituals: A Prayer, a Candle, and a Notebook. In Becoming American: Personal Essays by First Generation Immigrant Women, 29-38. Ed. Meri Nana-Ama Danquah. New York, NY: Hyperion.

Danticat, Edwidge. 2000. AHA! In Becoming American: Personal Essays by First Generation Immigrant Women, 39-44. Ed. Meri Nana-Ama Danquah. New York, NY: Hyperion.

Teraguchi, Daniel Hiroyuki. 2001, Summer. Strengthening Campus-Community Connections with Immigrant Populations. Diversity Digest, 7.

Seminar 4
Communities of Engagement, Locally and Globally

Individuals engage the world through multiple and complex networks of associative communities. In recent years, many critics have voiced concern that such communities diminished the possibility of national unity. Others worried that engagement in America's civic life, its public arenas, was rapidly evaporating. This seminar will examine some of these concerns: What makes a community strong? How do communities encourage or discourage engagement? Can they accommodate multiple allegiances? How does diversity challenge our sense of community? Our understanding of democracy? Does diversity inhibit identification with a larger community-- or enhance it? Can diversity become, or has it historically been, a mechanism for re-engaging citizens in the fundamentals of living in a participatory, deliberative democracy?

We begin with an examination of the theoretical questions of allegiance--to the nation and to the world--which often shape attitudes toward assimilation, Americanization, patriotism, nationalism, and nativism. Martha Nussbaum sets the parameters of the debate in "Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism" and provokes several alternative perspectives in For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism. Nussbaum argues for a return to "the very old ideal of the cosmopolitan, the person whose primary allegiance is to the community of human beings in the entire world."

Ron Takaki's chapter about the participation of Japanese Americans, African Americans, and Native Americans in World War II puts Nussbaum's theory to the test of history. In these histories, we see an expression of nationalist allegiance redefining the American democratic experiment. American minority involvement in WWII transitioned to the Civil Rights movement as the struggle for democracy abroad refocused on U.S. democracy. Takaki states that by, "fighting against fascism abroad and against prejudice at home, minorities created the 'ties that bind' for all Americans."

Marianna de Marco Togorvnick further complicates our discussion of community by describing her fierce loyalty to (and liberating escape from) her working-class Italian American neighborhood of Bensonhurst where the community is simultaneously supportive and intolerant.

Finally, James Joseph provides a theoretical framework for reconciling the dual nature of communities that provide a strong sense of belonging as well as foster a deep sense of exclusion. He writes that "to live together in community is to be constantly engaged in connecting or re-connecting with those who differ not simply in race or religion, but tradition and theology as well as politics and philosophy. Where there is diversity, there is likely to be alienation and separation." Because conflict is inevitable, the value of reconciliation must become "as highly prized a value in the age of interdependence as freedom was in the scramble for independence."

Readings for Seminar 4

Nussbaum, Martha C. with Kwame Anthony Appiah. 1996. For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Takaki, Ronald. 1993. Chapter 14. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company.

Togorvnik, Marianna De Marco. 1994. On Being White, Female, and Born in Bensonhurst. In Crossing Ocean Parkway: Readings by an Italian American Daughter. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Joseph, James. 2002. Public Values in a Divided World: A Mandate for Higher Education. Liberal Education 88:2, 6-15.