On the eve of the funeral of Chicano hero Cesar Chavez last April, UCLA Chancellor Charles Young announced that the school had decided against creating a separate Chicano studies department. No other ethnic group had its own department, a university task force on the subject noted, and there was not enough academic substance to justify adding that one. Within days, however, 300 students -- equivalent to a tenth of the school's Chicanos and about 1% of total enrollment -- staged a protest that escalated into a window- breaking skirmish with police. Next came a hunger strike by five students and one faculty member. In June UCLA backed down, creating the Cesar Chavez Center for Interdisciplinary Instruction in Chicana (in deference to women) and Chicano Studies.
Four hundred miles up the coast, at the University of California, Berkeley, "students of color" -- notably those of Asian and Hispanic descent -- have grown into a majority that demands to see its diversity reflected in textbooks and the faculty. After a debate admittedly more political than scholarly, the school now requires all undergraduates, whatever their ethnicity or major, to study at least three out of five cultural groups: Asians, Latinos, Native Americans, African Americans and Europeans. The explicit goal: to move away from an "Anglocentric" curriculum toward one that validates other cultures, however slim their connection with America's past, as equally and essentially American.
Curriculum changes like these -- which really amount to a rethinking of what is required to be an informed citizen -- have become commonplace since the twin phenomena of political correctness and prescribed multiculturalism emerged into national consciousness at the end of the '80s. Like much else in American culture, the changes have been most visible first in California, the place where the face of the nation is changing most rapidly. There, Hispanic and Asian presences have both fueled and complicated the p.c. and multicultural debates that initially arose out of polar conflicts between blacks and whites or men and women.
With America moving toward an era when there may be no ethnic majority, with whites just another minority, multicultural and p.c. demands are spreading to previously unbesieged institutions. Ethnic studies have been mandated at such heartland schools as the University of Wisconsin and Texas A&M. At Yale, funds unavailable to most extracurricular groups underwrote student performances of Hispanic culture, while nearly half the student body petitioned for more courses on the Asian-American experience.