Excerpts from Dr. Arthur E. Levine's Diversity on Campus

The Meaning of Diversity
The academy does not agree on what diversity means or how it should be achieved. To be more precise, over the past four decades, the term has taken on a number of different, competing, even conflicting meanings, often on the same campuses. Several years ago, during a study of race relations on campuses, I interviewed the presidents of 14 very different institutions. I asked them whether diversity was an important issue at their colleges. Most said yes. I next asked them to define the term diversity and to explain the specific goals this entailed for their campuses. In general, the presidents had a hard time with the question. There was a good deal of rhetoric, circumlocution and imprecision in language. Neither the presidents, nor their institutions had a clear sense of what they meant by diversity, but what emerged from the conversations were four rather distinct notions of diversity and associated activities.
The first, very much a product of the 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement, was the need to admit more minority students to college. A second set of diversity goals, developed in the 1970s, is the support or retention of minority populations…A third diversity goal, very much a product of the 1970s and early '80s, is integration…A fourth and final notion of diversity, which emerged in the late 1980s and continues into the present, is pluralism or multiculturalism.
 
The Curriculum
With regard to the curriculum, competing claims boom loud. Some say the college curriculum has been largely impermeable to diversity: that it remains unalterably Eurocentric, offering a dead, White, male, Western curriculum and ignoring, or at least marginalizing, diversity concerns. Others say that colleges and universities have sold their souls in the name of diversity; that higher education has abandoned the Western canon and rushed willy-nilly into embracing non-Western, ethnic and gender studies.
In a study of a representative sample of 196 colleges…I found both claims to be incorrect. We learned that more than a third of all colleges (34 percent) has a general education diversity requirement. At least a third offered coursework in ethnic and gender studies. More than half (54 percent) of all institutions introduced diversity into their departmental offerings. A majority sought to increase the diversity of their faculty. Half of all colleges had advising programs targeted at diverse populations. More than a third (35 percent) of all colleges and universities had diversity research centers and institutes.
The conclusion of the study was that the sheer quantity of activity belies the notion that the curriculum has been impermeable to diversity. On the other hand, the character of the changes, largely add-ons rather than replacements or substitutes, makes untenable the idea that the traditional canon is being abandoned.