Diversity at Wesleyan

Academic Programs

Alford A. Young, Jr., Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan, Wesleyan University Alumnus and Trustee, writing about Wesleyan University's academic core, recently described Wesleyan's educational approach to diversity in the following terms:

     For Wesleyan, diversity is not simply a matter of counting heads or targeting enrollment objectives. It is also a matter of bringing into the classroom a profound sense that diversity matters in the learning process. The ideas transmitted to students in Wesleyan's classrooms should motivate them to function better in multicultural national and international contexts. This task is not restricted to the social sciences and humanities, where there often appears to be more clarity about how diversity and difference can be included in the design of a curriculum (this is already indicated by the inclusion in Wesleyan course descriptions of race, class, and gender-based perspectives on theory and knowledge). Wesleyan has also shown that there is a way for the natural sciences to connect bodies of knowledge to a social world comprised of different ethnic and racial groups, patterns of social organization, and ways of living (perhaps best embodied by the Science in Society program, yet also exhibited by course offerings that offer some challenge to rigid conceptions of biological categories). Diversity at Wesleyan is not simply a factor in getting students on campus and into the classroom, but in what they do and learn in that classroom, and what their capacities for agency are upon leaving the classroom.

     Wesleyan University, as does any institution, strives to convey to its students the patterns of advance in the modes of inquiry that constitute academic disciplines as well as sub-fields within those disciplines. Wesleyan however, is not only situated to do more than that with its curriculum, but has history of doing more. As expressed by the actual content and structure of course offerings and academic programs, the institution offers an explicit model of how diversity can and should be embedded in intellectual activity, and not solely in administrative bureaucracy. Thus, where the debate about diversity stops for many higher educational institutions, it continues for Wesleyan, and it does so by pursuing the question of how the classroom experience in the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences should relate to diversity as an important social objective. The power of the academic commitment at Wesleyan is that the classroom is regarded as the site for working out the implications of diversity such that course material, and the way that course material is being taught, is sustained by a notion that knowledge is handled by different people in different ways, and this matters for how an educational agenda is pursued. (Reflections on the Academic core of Wesleyan University, Alford A. Young, Jr., September 17, 1998)

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