The American Council on Education noted that curriculums change in two ways: either by the addition of new knowledge or by reconsidering and re-evaluating existing knowledge.

Such change is brought about by faculty members who possess or develop new expertise or by the addition of new faculty members who bring different perspectives and academic training.

The Penn State administration's current attempts to integrate curriculum are grounded in legislation and bureaucracy and are narrow enough to have little impact on the student body as a whole; they essentially miss the target for change which opened this forum.

The undergraduate instruction committee proposes that by 1991 incoming students will be required to take one 3-credit "diversity" course or four 3-credit "diversity-enhanced" courses to receive a baccalaureate degree.

While we support any attempt to add diversity to the curriculum, we would like to point out the limitations of a proposal which places the responsibility of commitment to human understanding and service only on the students and on those few faculty who support integrated curriculum.

The writers of this forum represent ADAPT, which stands for Academic Diversity Awareness Project. We are a group of students forming a coalition concerned with diversity in Penn State's curriculum.

We recognize that the current curriculum centers primarily upon activities of white men, and subjects and work valued by patriarchal society. We advocate a diverse curriculum that reflects and respects achievements of women; of people of color; of lesbians, gays and bisexuals; or differently-abled people; of people with varying religious backgrounds and beliefs; and people of all ages.

A curriculum which reflects the diversity of people promotes intercultural understanding and engages more students in the educational process.

ADAPT will work to integrate Penn State's curriculum in several ways, including: creating a list of guidelines for non-biased teaching to be distributed to faculty; compiling a bibliography of integrated curriculum resources which will form a basis for a reference library; assessing the content of specific courses by gathering syllabi and comparing them with the developed guidelines and using these along with student input to create a directory of currently integrated and non-integrated courses; formalizing requirements for faculty to teach an integrated curriculum and promoting the hiring and tenure of professors who do so; and forming a standing office of curriculum integration to ensure the implementation of these and related proposals.

ADAPT is not satisfied with a proposal to include "diversity" classes as an add-on, but as a force that will transform the entire teaching and learning process university-wide. In other words, women and other underrepresented peoples should not be marginal to the academic experience.

The wheels of change at Penn State are square. Perhaps defenders of the existing curriculum believe that we seek to distort the curriculum with our own politically motivated reform ideas, and consequently to introduce political viewpoints into an otherwise neutral curriculum.

However, as Henry Louis Gates of Cornell University pointed out in 1988: "That people can maintain a straight face while they protest the eruption of politics into something that has always been political from the very beginning says something about how remarkably successful official literary histories have been disguising all linkages between the cannon, the literary past we remember, and those interests that maintain it."

We believe that the debate over whether or not to change the curriculum arrived at the conclusion "YES." The question that faces us now is how widely the imminent changes will be felt.

Will the new scholarship remain separate and marginal to the rest of education and teaching, or will it influence the entire University? We invite you to find out more about ADAPT and to share with us your experiences with well and poorly integrated curriculum.

If you're interested, please call the Women's Studies Office.