Boundaries and Borderlands:
The Search for Recognition and Community in America

Offered in 1994 and 1995, this ten-day faculty development summer institute organized a series of eight thematic seminars, afternoon workshops, and cultural activities for 200 faculty each year who were working on new courses on American pluralism.

The Association of American Colleges and Universities
Boundaries and Borderlands: The Search for Recognition and Community in America

Seminar Descriptions and Bibliographies
Seminar Number	Topic
Overview
Seminar One	Education in a Diverse Democracy
Seminar Two	The U.S. Democratic Experiment: Forging a Nation for Whom?
Seminar Three	Difference and Democracy: Theoretical Frameworks
Seminar Four	Race and Racialization: The Color of Democracy
Seminar Five	Women, Democracy, and Citizenship
Seminar Six	Rethinking Citizenship: Immigration, Nationalism, and Cosmopolitanism
Seminar Seven	Religion in a Liberal Democracy
Seminar Eight	The Limits and Promise of Community in a Multicultural America

Boundaries and Borderlands is a faculty development project connected to the Curriculum and Faculty Development Network of AAC&U's Initiative: American Commitments: Diversity, Democracy, and Liberal Learning This bibliography is based on the second Boundaries and Borderlands institute held at Williams College, Williamstown, MA July 20-30, 1995. Funding was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation

Overview
"American Commitments: Diversity, Democracy, and Liberal Learning"

The richness of diversity and the problems of difference characterized the United States before it became a nation and continue today to be both a source of strength and of contention. Such challenges have a special urgency about them and a particular relevance to higher education. The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has designed an ambitious initiative, "American Commitments: Diversity, Democracy, and Liberal Learning," to call attention to fundamental questions about education in a diverse democracy and to provide resources for colleges and universities willing to address those questions as dimensions of institutional mission, campus community and curricular focus.

In so doing, AAC&U has been able to seize upon an historic moment of profound re-examination of the meaning, purposes and quality of higher education in the United States. It is a moment characterized by stunning intellectual creativity, contentious debates and periodic confusion. Fueling this dynamic self-reflection is the insistent demand from disparate and self-defined communities of people that they be recognized, attended to and given space in the academy. A parallel driving force is the search for meaningful community.

As Benjamin Barber says, "The leading dilemma of our time is whether the need to honor and acknowledge diversity can be reconciled with the need to create a common civic fabric with which Americans can identify. The challenge must be met first of all in the academy and then in the nation at large." What distinguishes AAC&U's national leadership on this issue is our conviction that democracy cannot fulfill its aspirations without attending to diversity; and likewise, diversity itself is liberated from fragmentation by attending to democracy. We are, in fact, seeking a deeper unity in our nation through diversity.

Instead of cultural diversity per se as the organizing principle, we have turned to the multiple and distinctive communities which a democratic society offers. We fully acknowledge the significance of communities in anchoring citizens in a particular identity. We also recognize that one's identity is fluid over time and typically includes multiple identities, both inherited and chosen. However, we also stress the importance of reciprocal commitments, shared histories, and owned obligations as important both to the quality of human experience and to democratic vitality.

The scholarship of diversity argues that the aspirations of democracy can be fulfilled only when there is full recognition of our diversities. But the scholarship of democracy also argues that diversity must be anchored by mutual commitments to a shared sense of our common welfare. As John Brenkman puts it, "A democracy in the contemporary world cannot create a monocultural citizenry. And yet, a multicultural citizenry cannot generate a polity solely on the basis of its differences." How do we transform, then, these heretofore uncommon companions--democracy and diversity--into a productive, generative, mutually ennobling partnership? That is the challenge before us as we immerse ourselves in what Ron Takaki calls, "stories [that] contain memories of different communities" even as they together "inscribe a larger narrative," a more nuanced and complex story about democratic pluralism in the United States.

Curriculum and Faculty Development Network
Because the curriculum is a key site for engaging the meaning of democratic pluralism, the classroom a laboratory for deliberating difference, and faculty members a source for integrating critical new ideas, one of the three currently funded projects within AAC&U's "American Commitments Initiative" is a growing Curriculum and Faculty Development Network launched in 1993 and currently including eighty-five institutions. Through summer institutes, national workshops, campus-based faculty development, and electronic networks, these institutions are working to create, modify, and implement space in the curriculum where students can engage the complex but critical questions about American pluralism.

Boundaries and Borderlands
The intellectual heart of the eighty-five institution Network is a ten-day summer institute, "Boundaries and Borderlands: The Search for Recognition and Community in America," held at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts in the summer of 1994 and again in 1995.

The institute's title, "Boundaries and Borderlands," delineates twin concepts that are at the core of the dilemma of a diverse democracy. Boundaries suggest limits chosen and imposed, necessary and falsely constructed, that nonetheless are the terrain in which democratic pluralism is enacted. Borderlands suggest those spaces between or at the edges of intersecting boundaries, a kind of liminal space where it may be possible, periodically, to achieve some common ground. Keying off these twin concepts is another pair of relational ideas: recognition and community. Recognition most dramatically captures the insistence that all the people in our country be seen, attended to, and understood in their full complexity. Community speaks both to the origins of identity and the longing for places where we can be fully ourselves in all our multiplicity.

Morning Sessions
The institute offers colloquia with nationally known speakers, afternoon workshops on pedagogy and course development and cultural events that include dance, theater, films and photography. However, the experience that influences participants most profoundly--both intellectually and personally--is participation in eight three-hour morning seminars. In such a classroom setting, participants immerse themselves in new scholarship many are unfamiliar with, are challenged to find links between the scholarship of democracy and the scholarship of diversity, and engage in dialogues about issues fundamental to identity and community. Some of the critical overall questions participants wrestle with include:

• What must we know and understand about the multiplicity of groups and people that have been unequally acknowledged in our nation?
• What democratic concepts can we draw on from our own U.S. history to guide us in forging new civic covenants among our citizens?
• How are we to understand the contradictory interconnections between democratic aspiration and structural injustice?
• What kinds of intercultural competencies will graduates need to negotiate their disparate and multiple commitments and communities, inherited and adopted?
• What kinds of knowledge and capabilities are required for full participation in a pluralist democracy? What kinds of values?
• What are the crucial distinctions between recognizing/acknowledging difference and learning to take grounded stands in the face of difference? If both are goals for liberal learning, how can students develop both kinds of capabilities over time?

Although we have, in effect, constructed a curriculum, we see it as unfinished and evolving. Because "Boundaries and Borderlands" pairs democracy and diversity, we are forging intellectual relationships that remain largely separate in the scholarship and in educational practices. The seminars are, then, an act of invention. As such, they represent a set of questions, even as they are just being formulated. Thus, we offer them humbly, not as definitive but as emerging. We expect and invite others to shape and extend this emerging curriculum.

Democratic Pluralism in Action
In the evaluations of "Boundaries and Borderlands," participants described the impact of the institute. As one participant explained, "Its main effect will be to provide a solid intellectual base for campus discussion of diversity; it will depoliticize the multicultural debate by putting the issues into a scholarly framework and thus make participants knowledgeable voice in campus discussions." A seasoned professor quipped about the institute, "it�s really destroyed my career! I can�t do anything the same way again--and I�m glad!" An administrator wrote, "I wish we could have sent our entire faculty."

The candid but respectful conservation that took place around seminar tables where diverse people gathered face to face gave many participants an experience in democratic pluralism that worked. One participant wrote, "The institute was good at helping us develop a stronger sense of our own identities and [teaching us] how to talk across our differences to find commonalties. It makes us optimistic that this small mode of democracy and diversity can be achieved on a broader, institutional scale."

The Program Staff at the Association of American Colleges and Universities who created "Boundaries and Borderlands" offer these seminar descriptions and bibliographies in the hopes that others might also benefit from the insights and challenges embodied in the scholarship represented at the institute. We hope it may be useful singly to a faculty member or an administrator; we hope even more that some of you will create your own democratic community of engaged learners and listeners. We invite you to join with us in discovering our richly diverse America and in embodying its boldest democratic promise.

Caryn McTighe Musil, Director
Gwendolyn Dungy, Associate Director
Kevin Hovland, Program Associate
Debra Humphreys, Program Associate

Seminar #1 Education in a Diverse Democracy
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. While education can be intellectually liberating and a source of social and economic mobility for diverse groups, it can also be a source of profound suppression and discontinuities of deeply held identities, beliefs, and affiliations. The readings for this first seminar explore the complex role education has played as a vehicle for socializing students into notions of national identity. The readings also draw our attention to how some students and educators have redefined ideas about how to create a diverse democracy.

Several questions about the relationship of full citizenship and education are raised by our readings. What is the relation of education to a genuine democracy" What does "equal education" mean and how does one achieve it in a multicultural democracy? How does the allocation of power and decision-making about what is taught, in what setting, and to and by whom influence the perpetuation or dismantling of larger structural inequalities in our country? What are the illuminations and limits of identity politics and ethnic particularity in education? What is the relation of new understandings about diversity to pedagogies adopted in the classroom?

Thomas Jefferson's bill to establish more general access to education in the newly established republic opens our seminar with its argument that there is a correlation between education and the ability of citizens to protect their freedom, underscoring the continuing importance of education during our nation's history. Who had access to education, to what kind of learning, and about which subjects has remained a continuing source of contention.

The next two readings expose unaddressed issues in Jefferson's bill, focusing on the cultural silencing and erasures experienced by two young women when they find their racial identities in conflict with their education. Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkala-Sa) records the unanticipated traumas after she willingly leaves her Indian home for boarding school and college. Maxine Hong Kingston's "Silence" picks up on the theme of disrupted voice and the intersection of cultural boundaries.

Adrienne Rich's essay expands on questions of gender and education posed by Kingston and Bonnin and argues that it is a mistake to think that "because women and men are sitting in the same classrooms . . . reading the same books . . . they are receiving an equal education." She suggests ways students and teachers alike can foster equality. Richard Rodriguez's "The Achievement of Desire" raises troubling questions about how education can become a divisive wedge between a student and his parents and their culture, while Inez Hernandez's poem presents contrasting stances two Chicana students assume in relation to their education. Patricia Clark Smith's "Grandma Went to Smith" introduces class as an important consideration of our educational system which bell hooks elaborates on in "keeping close to home" as she draws from her own working-class background as an African American.

The next set of readings raise questions about the meaning of education in a segregated racist system and the consequences of the Brown v. Board of Education case which marked the end of legally sanctioned segregated schooling. The role of the black community in resisting narrow racist ambitions for students in a segregated school is captured in Maya Angelou's description of her graduation ceremony. Derrick Bell's piece raises questions about the ultimate effects of the Brown decision, arguing that "racial balance is not synonymous with, and may be antithetical to, effective education for black children."

Benjamin Barber's "The Civic Mission of the University," is a call to rethink the mission of the university and connect it to its central obligation to cultivate community, but a community in which all "members conceive of themselves as empowered to participate fully in the common activities that define the community--in this case, learning and the pursuit of knowledge in the name of common living."

The final readings speak to the task before us not only to reinvent new courses but to rethink our own experiences as teachers and knowers. Carla Peterson's "Borderlands in the Classroom" analyzes ways in which a multicultural curriculum led Peterson and her students to reassess how they constituted their sense of self and American society. Edward Said poses questions about the construction of knowledge, the dangers of national consciousness, and the impoverished "politics of knowledge based only upon the assertion and reassertion of identity." (To purchase a full description and bibliography for each of the eight seminars, please call AAC&U Publications Desk at 202-387-3760.)