Multiculturalism and the Mission of Liberal Education

Introduction

In many ways, the last 20 years in American higher education have proven to be ground zero for issues of diversity. New knowledge claims, the debate over free speech and community standards of civility, and the politics of group rights versus individual rights exploded on college and university campuses challenging faculty, students and administrators to examine the means and aims of higher learning.

Believed to engender a spirit of community, liberal education was placed center stage in these times of charged dissension on campuses, its proponents having faith in its ability to foster a mutual intelligibility judged indispensable in a growing ethnic and racial pluralism. Treatises like philosopher Martha Nussbaum's Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (1997) or projects like the Association of American College and Universities' "American Commitments: Diversity, Democracy and Liberal Learning" (1992), invoked a rhetoric that assumed the compatibility of liberal education with multicultur-alism.

In 1990, emblematic of the anxiety about the ethnic and racial diversification of the American collegiate experience, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching published the results of a yearlong study designed to reassert the ideal of community in higher education. Charged by college and university presidents to determine the ways in which a "renewal of community in higher learning" could be enacted given the "loss of community" (Boyer, 1993, p. 324), a loss mainly attributed to an increasingly diverse student body and professoriat and the era's curricular challenges, the Carnegie Foundation in its report proposed a set of communitarian principles that could "provide a model for the nation" (p. 328). The aim of these principles was to revitalize the ideal of community on post secondary campuses, an ideal presumed possible through the liberal mission of American higher education.

These principles of community, however, were not derived from a deconstruction of what is meant by «community," hence no mindful critique of the communitarian aim of the American undergraduate enterprise was undertaken. The Carnegie principles were the product of a Liberal definition of collegiate community and like other accounts of the ideal of community in American higher education did not verify that the post-modern goals of multiculturalism (a consequence of increased racial and ethnic diversity and the post-modern challenges to the curriculum) and the goals of community (a shared desire for a universal understanding of civility via liberal education) could be compatible.

The Carnegie principles, like most of the scholarship and commentary on the need to rekindle community on campus, attempted to address the racial and intellectual tensions that characterized the college and university campus of the past 30 years by reasserting the worthiness of liberal education. Some would judge the reassertion ineffective, given the persistence of these tensions, leading us to ask if liberal education and its consequent ways of thinking and knowing can truly engender community on the American college campus. Our specific interest is the institutional agent of liberal thinking and learning, the Liberal Arts College, and whether or not it can give rise to effective communitarian sensibilities. ¹

To begin, our first task is to do what the Carnegie project did not do; that is, to ascertain whether liberal education can be an effective means to community on campus. We must verify that liberal education and multiculturalism are compatible; that liberal educational principles can bring about an effectual pluralistic community. To do so, we will employ a framework using concepts proposed by American pragmatic philosopher, John Dewey.

Not unlike the colleges of John Dewey's late 19th and early 20th centuries, college campuses at the culmination of the 20^th century faced disciplinary and curricular disputes, the impact of the social sciences and their knowledge claims, the alleged "loss" of a liberal culture, the concern over the growing heterogeneity of its students and faculty and the longing for community. It is, as Alan...