Former MFP Fellow Publishes Book on Multiculturalism, Curriculum Change

by Alfonso R. Latoni-Rodríguez, Director, Minority Affairs Program

Sociologists’ lived experience often stimulates scholarly projects. Such is the case for David Yamane, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He has recently published a book entitled Student Movements for Multiculturalism: Challenging the Curricular Color Line in Higher Education (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). His intellectual journey reflects his success as an ASA MOST student and an MFP fellow.

According to Yamane, the story behind the book springs from the summer he spent in 1990 at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, as an undergraduate student in the first cohort of ASA’s initial MOST Program —Minority Opportunities through Summer Training. “That summer,” he said, “was crucial to my professional development because I was able, for the first time, to observe at first hand the practice of scholarship and engage in that practice myself in a serious way.” Under the mentorship of Professor Michael Olneck, Yamane was introduced to the sociology of education and began data collection on the development of the ethnic studies course requirement at UW-Madison. In the year following the MOST program at Wisconsin, he worked with his advisor at UC-Berkeley, Professor Jerome Karabel, to collect comparative data on the American Cultures course requirement at Berkeley and write his Senior Thesis, “Challenging the Curricular Color Line.”

True to the MOST goals, Yamane went on to graduate school to pursue a PhD in Sociology at UW-Madison. He did so with the support of the ASA Minority Fellowship Program (MFP). As an MFP Fellow, Yamane received a package of assistance that included financial support, mentoring, direct research training, access to professional networks, and continuous guidance and evaluation.

With its emphasis on research training and professional development, the MFP provides resources and support to promote success and excellence among predoctoral minority students. Since its inception, more than 405 minority students have participated in the Program, more than 200 Fellows have received their PhDs, and many more are completing their doctoral studies.

The publication of this book combines the best of both MOST and MFP Programs. In the book’s Acknowledgments, Yamane expresses his gratitude for the opportunities and experiences MOST and MFP represented for him during his years of undergraduate and graduate training to become a sociologist. During these years, he revisited his senior thesis, collecting and analyzing more data on the subject of curriculum and diversity. In his first year at Notre Dame, he polished the work enough to get the book published by a major university press. Student Movements for Multiculturalism: Challenging the Curricular Color Line in Higher Education begins with the premise that a comprehensive understanding of American life must confront the issue of race. A key battleground in the struggle over the “color line” in the US has been in higher education, and despite vocal resistance, a “multicultural revolution” swept through American colleges and universities in the 1980s. An important part of this revolution has been the implementation of mandatory courses in multiculturalism. More than half of all colleges and universities in the United States now have such general education requirements, due in part to the efforts of students who actively demanded curricular change. These efforts are the focus of Yamane’s book.

Drawing on interviews with students, faculty, and administrators, as well as extensive analysis of primary documents, the book examines the movements for curricular diversity in the late 1980s by students at UC-Berkeley and UW-Madison. Although not the first universities to diversify their curricula, they were the first to garner significant national attention for doing so. In both cases, students’ efforts to address racism and racial inequality — to challenge the color line — in higher education led to the development of multicultural general education requirements. In the book’s conclusion, Yamane argues, in contrast to Allan Bloom, that multiculturalism in higher education represents an opening rather than a closing of the American mind.