Students Fight For Diversity WSU Activists Won’t Quit In Battle For Wider-Ranging Substitute For Western Civ Class

If student activists at Washington State University wanted a Sisyphean rock to push up College Hill, they found a doozy.

Their pushing stands to rattle the institution with a kind of heated debate and political sparring that hasn’t been seen here in decades.

Their task: change the classes they must take to focus more on the contemporary issues of “race, class, gender, ability and sexual orientation” - known in academia as diversity.

In particular, the students want to substitute one of two required World Civilizations classes with the choice of introduction to Comparative American Cultures, Introduction to Women’s Studies or American Culture.

One problem they face is that changing the curriculum is a role reserved solely for the faculty. Convincing the faculty to go for a change will entail running a bureaucratic gantlet that includes at least four university committees and the Faculty Senate.

Organizers of the effort are unfazed. They may not have power over the curriculum but they do have the power of protest and they’re not afraid to use it.

“We’re prepared to wait it out and win,” said Neil Walker, student body president.

“Most people are pretty much willing to go to the mat for it because they feel like there’s got to be some ownership in education,” said Franz Maish. “We have to have some sort of say in what we’re taught.”

A feisty Comparative American Cultures major and former co-chair of the Asian Pacific American Student Coalition, Maish has a low-patience approach that is hard on WSU administrators. He is even harder on the World Civilizations classes that formed the foundation of the school’s education-reform efforts 10 years ago.

“Everyone agreed that since these classes started they weren’t cutting it,” he said. “It was the same history we learned in junior high and early primary school, really basic essentialist notions that obviously come across in racist ways, the food fair type of diversity: people in New Mexico build houses like this and eat this; people in China build houses like this.

“Then you study ancient Greece and all the ‘great philosophers’ for three months when you only spend a day on Latin America. That doesn’t even touch on intersections of race in the United States.”

When Maish and other minority leaders last year proposed dropping one of the World Civilizations classes for diversity classes, they garnered the support of virtually every student organization on campus.

Faculty were not so encouraging.

Nineteen World Civilization faculty last spring posted a letter to the Daily Evergreen, the WSU student newspaper, saying the two World Civ classes need to be kept together to retain their “commonality of knowledge.”

“(It) would be foolish to sacrifice a course which was developed using hundreds of thousands of dollars, many thousands of hours of development and training, the commitment and hard work of more than 40 teachers and a wide range of departments across the campus,” the faculty wrote.

They also noted that the faculty in 1985 created a diversity requirement in which students must choose from courses that include black, Hispanic, Native American, Asian-American and “non-Western cultures.”

Dick Law, director of the General Education Program overseeing the World Civ classes, said it is ironic that the classes should be attacked when the school’s curriculum reform is seen in some quarters as a model of diversity education.

“These are values that students and faculty share,” he said. “There are fundamental similarities in values. It comes down to how. What’s the best way?”

Law said he worries about creating a course requirement that, by appearing to be indoctrination, could create a backlash against diversity efforts in general.

“Cultures process these issues differently but they always have the capacity to tear a culture apart,” he said. “… If you look at the great cosmopolitan cultures of the past, like Tang China, Athens, Baghdad of the 10th century, there’s an effervescence of culture, different ideas fermenting together. But they also can be Rwanda, Bosnia. And there are no guarantees that you’re going to get one rather than the other. You always have to think about that. How do you build community?”

Then there’s the burden that would have to be shouldered by faculty in the small Comparative American Cultures, Women’s Studies and American Studies programs should their introductory courses become mandatory. The Curriculum Diversity Committee has recommended adding the classes and the option of a fourth American diversity class on top of the two World Civilization classes.

But for all the extra work it might bring, Deborah Haynes, director of the Womens Studies Program, speaks with an excited air about the student’s zeal.

“The student activism is admirable,” she said. “I’ve said from the start, it reminds me of the ‘60s … I say yes to that. This kind of activism will result in unknown changes still to come.”

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