National Initiative on American Commitments:
Diversity, Democracy, and Liberal Learning

Curricular Recommendations of the American Commitments National Panel

In recommendations published in 1995 in American Pluralism and the College Curriculum (AAC&U), The American Commitments National Panel emphasizes that every student should:

• Acquire knowledge of the diverse cultures, communities, and histories that comprise United States society;
• Connect this knowledge to a continuing engagement with democratic ideas and aspirations;
• Develop experiential as well as formal understanding of these topics;
• Develop deliberative capacities for a world in which unitary agreement does not, and is not likely ever to, exist.

In identifying these goals for diversity in the curriculum, the Panel report warns against the hidden message of many diversity requirements that view courses on world cultures and United States diversity as interchangeable, or leave attention to United States diversity optional. Education for United States democratic and cultural pluralism, the Panel holds, is just as important as global study and deserves its own space and time in the curriculum (American Pluralism, xx-xxi).

To meet the above goals...
...the Panel recommends that each student's education include studies and experiences in:

1. Experience, Identity, and Aspiration: The study of one's own particular inherited and constructed traditions, identity communities, and significant questions, in their complexity.

2. United States Pluralism and the Pursuits of Justice: An extended and comparative exploration of diverse peoples in this society, with significant attention to their differing experiences of United States democracy and the pursuits (sometimes successful,sometimes frustrated) of equal opportunity.

3. Experiences in Justice Seeking: Encounters with systemic constraints on the development of human potential in the United States and experiences in community-based efforts to articulate principles of justice, expand opportunity, and redress inequities.

4. Multiplicity and Relational Pluralism in Majors,Concentrations, and Programs: Extensive participation informs of learning that foster sustained exploration of and deliberation about contested issues important in particular communities of inquiry and practice.

Taken together, these complementary forms of learning (personal, societal, participatory, and dialogical) constitute an appropriate college curriculum for effective citizenship in a diverse democracy. In calling for this curriculum, we are asserting that students must learn, in every part of their educational experience, to live creatively with the multiplicity, ambiguity, and irreducible differences that are the defining conditions of the contemporary world.