Ethnic-studies programs, arising from a student and community grass-roots movement, challenge the prevailing academic power structure and the Eurocentric curricula of American colleges and universities. There is little uniformity or stability among 700 ethnic-specific programs and departments. The challenge is reconciling academic goals (knowledge…

Institutions embrace diversity in theory, but they do not do much to implement it. Their inadequate support for ethnic studies is a case in point. The "managing differences" model of diversity does not seriously question the status quo. Current diversity efforts on campus help perpetuate the racial order as historically constructed, with…

This article argues that in an increasingly multicultural society, liberal education is more important than ever, and that ethnic studies are a significant contribution to the college curriculum. Because ethnic studies faculty have been drawn from other disciplines, programs have not become independent academic units, rendering them weak. A deeper…

Institutions of higher learning in the United States have hastened to create ethnic studies programs, perhaps as a sort of "fire insurance" against student activism and protests. Certainly the move toward ethnic studies has roots in the student activism of the 1960s. Such studies are particularly prominent in large public institutions,…