[The Faculty Senate is asked to propose] the creation and implementation of a for-credit, educational requirement on racism, bias and equity for all Cornell students.
Institute a university-wide diversity course requirement, with carefully developed guidelines about the types of courses that can fulfill the requirement.
Our university was founded on a commitment to diversity and inclusion; we believe there is no better time for the university to fully honor that commitment.Barnard’s15 “Thinking about Social Difference” and Stanford’s16 “Engaging Diversity” requirements impose narrower guidelines to ensure that students are not just studying different cultures or societies but rather the complex identity, power and interaction dynamics that are introduced when multiple different cultures intersect within a single society. By requiring students to take a course on “Cultural Diversity in the U.S.,” Penn17is even more explicit about requiring students to study how diversity dynamics impact their immediate societal environment. Perhaps, the best example that we were able to find of a bold institutional commitment to diversity education is at Georgetown,18where students are required to take two “Engaging Diversity” courses, one domestic and one global in orientation. Careful attention should be paid to how the requirement is defined so that it is not unduly diluted
Despite the fact that we can reliably predict that every student will continue to face diversity in their workplaces and communities throughout their lives, Cornell hast not yet committed to providing all students with at least some minimum level of preparation for engaging effectively with a diverse world.
Currently, only the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences (CALS) has a contemporary diversity course requirement with clear guidelines that restrict the types of courses that will satisfy the requirement.14 Although the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) and the ILRSchool have a “cultural analysis” and “cultural perspectives” distribution requirement, respectively, that could be satisfied by diversity courses, it can also be satisfied by a broad range of other courses that would not necessarily prepare students to engage and lead effectively in a diverse society. Our benchmarking suggests that many of our peer institutions (Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, UCLA, U. Washington) have adopted an approach that appears similar to that at A&S and ILR – they have broad distribution requirements rather than more specific diversity requirement. We encourage Cornell to similarly respond to the intense challenges and opportunities presented by our diverse world by introducing a university-wide diversity course requirement.
The CALS Human Diversity Requirement: “It is expected that in the process of earning a degree, students will enhance their abilities to communicate with people of different cultural perspectives; to listen carefully and respectfully to views of others, especially views with which they disagree; and to employ ethical reasoning in judging ideas, actions, and their implications. These courses explore the challenges of building a diverse society, and/or examine the various processes that marginalize people and produce unequal power relations in terms of race, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, gender, age, or economic status. All courses that satisfy the Human Diversity requirement have at least 50% content in one of the following areas: (a) critical analysis of historically or contemporary marginalized* communities; (b) examination of diverse processes that produce unequal power relations in terms of race, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, gender, age, or economic status; or (c) review of the challenges of building a diverse society.
