Jen ran her fingers through her blonde hair as she leaned against the wall in her Wisconsin tee shirt and prepared to catch her afternoon flight to Africa from Washington, D.C. She was talking with us about her decision to spend the next year in Eritrea with a group of doctors working with their Eritrean counterparts to develop a training curriculum in specialized pediatric medicine. Wanting to make a difference through her work as a physician, she had enrolled in the exchange through Physicians for Peace, an international non-profit group of doctors and health care professionals from around the world. These doctors believe that medicine can effect peace by creating cooperative, sustained transnational and multicultural alliances where none existed before.

Impressed by the commitment of this young woman, I wondered what kind of education prepares someone: a) to want to do such work in the first place, and b) to do it well. Both are formidable and complex challenges to higher education. We know from the research of Sylvia Hurtado that gender itself--specifically being female--is a key indicator of what Hurtado calls “democracy dispositions”: the ability to see and value multiple perspectives and to work with others to solve obstacles that bar full equality. Sandy Astin’s and my own work in the early nineties both indicated that students taking ethnic and women’s studies courses were more open to hearing other people’s views, more likely to think there were racial problems that still needed to be addressed, and more likely to live in interracial neighborhoods.

Yet we learn from many of the writers in this issue of On Campus with Women that white women too often remain silent in the face of inequities, especially racial inequities. White women might offer a sympathetic ear to a distressed individual, but they frequently stop short of challenging the system that has been the source of discrimination. 

Moving Beyond Friendships

Troy Duster and his colleagues at University of California--Berkeley observed similar dynamics between students in the early nineties. While students had chosen Berkeley because it was so racially diverse, by graduation students of all colors were disappointed by their experiences. The investigative team discovered striking differences in what racial groups wanted from their intercultural encounters. 

White students, for example, hoped to develop friendships across racial lines and to socialize with students of color. By contrast, students of color cared less about socializing than they did about having their white friends join with them to try to improve the racial climate and policies at Berkeley. White students balked at such suggestions and said they really didn’t know enough to get involved.

What prevented whites in the above case from recognizing that the legacies of a history of racial exclusion still haunt the academy, and that friendships alone are not the answer to continuing systemic inequities? How might these undergraduates come to see that engaging this issue is part of what it means to be educated for democratic citizenship?  

Defining Intercultural Learning More Sharply

Higher education experts now agree that intercultural learning is essential for a 21st century college education. But perhaps we have not yet pushed hard enough to define what we mean by that phrase. Some campuses translate intercultural learning as developing knowledge about groups other than your own. Other campuses emphasize developing capacities to communicate effectively across cultural differences. Still others concentrate on valuing diversity, even celebrating it.

These goals for intercultural learning are admirable, but they are missing two elements: 1) cultivation of the capacity to analyze systems that produce inequalities (whether intentionally or unintentionally); and 2) practice in democratic action to alter the systemic sources of injustice. The first requires critical analysis; the second requires courage and political savvy. Both should be threaded through undergraduate courses and co-curricular activities. Both help foster informed, responsible citizenship.

Developing the analytical ability to understand how large economic, political, or social systems operate requires knowledge from multiple disciplines. The task is confounded because many systems appear invisible; their origins, evolution, and consequences may seem natural, unconnected, or too complicated for the ordinary citizen to understand. Nonetheless, people consciously accept or unconsciously internalize the rules of the system. 

As a white person, for instance, I learned to not to see or ask about race. The system disciplined me to never ask why no black people lived in my small town, why most of my black school mates in junior high and high school were not on the college prep track, and why I never had a teacher of color in thirteen years of pre-college schooling. If I did ask questions about race, the responses led me to believe that there was nothing I might actively do to change the system other than disapprove of it on personal, moral grounds.

Marsha Houston’s article in this OCWW issue captures what people schooled by such exclusionary systems need to do to effect real change. She argues that developing multicultural alliances between white women and black women requires people to “break codes” and “transgress boundaries.” To break those codes and violate the rules, one must first understand how systems work.

One of the best ways for undergraduates to examine these systems is through the example of colleges and universities. We know our campuses are precious multicultural spaces where people work and live more intimately than they typically do in society. How might we capitalize on this reality more effectively than we do? How can we use this context to educate our students for responsible democratic action?

We might design courses to examine the history of the college in its community. What role had the college played in democratizing opportunities to various groups? What are the current issues in the community, and how does the college perpetuate or disrupt systems of inequality economically, politically, and socially? How might oral history bring differing perspectives into the classroom? How might a research project or service learning project engage students in working with communities not yet well served by society? What pedagogies would bring differences present within the class itself to the surface, thus deepening understandings that would foster multicultural alliance building?

Practicing Multicultural Alliances

At the University of Maryland, student groups gained practical knowledge about how to work across differences through multicultural alliances. They decided to select two or three specific strategic changes at the university, and to pursue these changes in common across all groups. One year they agreed to work to establish an Asian American studies program. Whether students were in a women’s group, the LGBTQ group, or the Black Students group, they worked in alliance with others for this common end. And their shared commitment succeeded.

These models are relevant to faculty members and administrators as well as students. What might be the consequence if white women allied with white men and people of color to think strategically together about how to increase the number of faculty of color on campus and to retain those who were hired? Such an alliance might require a person in a department with no faculty of color to speak up about the department’s current inability to fulfill its responsibilities to the scholarship of the discipline and to the students on campus. It might require a group to ask the faculty senate to improve hiring practices, to provide incentives for hiring, and to establish strong multiracial networks of professional colleagues who could recommend or be candidates. It might require mentoring new hires of color, opening professional doors for them, and affirming their voices in meetings where they might otherwise be silenced.   

Certainly the incentives of stratified systems entice those who benefit from inequities to remain silent and keep their privileges intact. But the incentives of democracy and the incentives of a liberal education lure in the opposite direction. The challenge in our professional academic lives is determining which will prevail--both in our personal choices and in how we educate the students under our tutelage for democratic action.