American Pluralism and the College Curriculum
Higher Education in a Diverse Democracy

Overview

Higher education has a central role to play in preparing students for the complexity and diversity of their society. But we need a much richer conception than most campuses hold of the curriculum basic to this preparation. In this richer conception, education for democratic pluralism is just as important as education in cultural pluralism.

Education for United States democratic and cultural pluralism is not the same task, we emphasize, as the education for global knowledge and interconnection in which so many institutions are currently engaged. Students require both global knowledge and domestic knowledge. Colleges and universities shortchange their students when they view courses on world cultures and United States diversity as interchangeable, or leave attention to United States diversity optional and elective. Education for participation in United States cultural and democratic pluralism is preparation for citizenship and leadership. It deserves its own time and space in the curriculum.

It is important that programs and departments involve students in extensive opportunities to practice deliberative discourse on subjects about which they care intensely. All graduates in all programs must learn to listen to others' experiences and challenges, explore multiple ways of knowing and forming knowledge, and open themselves to experiences of modifying their own understandings based on what they have learned from others' contributions.

Students' encounters with diversity through major programs - acknowledging complexity and multiplicity, exploring the dimensions of difference, taking multiplicity into full account in their own constructions - further the deliberative practice of United States pluralism. Students learn to listen to one another in order to understand more completely. Equally important, through their immersion in topics where no single perspective can be adequate to the complexity of the issue, students discover both the limitations of any particular framework and, by extension, their inescapable dependence on difference as a source of greater understanding.