Has the Dream Stalled

Gerald J. Baldasty The creation of a truly multicultural curriculum and environment is stalled in journalism and mass communication education today. Despite substantive efforts by many, multiculturalism hasn't really become central to how we define our programs or teach our students. We talk about multiculturalism a good deal but we do not pursue it with great ardor. Multiculturalism is a broad term, encompassing issues of ethnicity, race, and gender. In this essay, I'll concentrate primarily on race because it illustrates best the issues we've been facing and dodging for the past decade. I base my views on observations from my own university and department and from serving over the past dozen years on accreditation site teams and for seven years on the Accrediting Committee for the Accrediting Council for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. To be fair, there really has been some progress in this area. Faculty are more racially diverse than a decade ago, race is discussed in courses far more than it once was, and the students in our classes often reflect the racial mosaic of American life. There are some excellent texts and research monographs dealing with media and race; authors confront difficult issues and provide the foundation for integrating diversity issues into the curriculum. Most of this is happening at the margins of journalism and mass communication education, however; it really has not become central to who we are or what we do. The problems are several: * First, white men haven't made diversity a priority; they're content to cede that issue to their female and minority colleagues. While visiting schools on accreditation reviews, I have been struck by the fact that the lead diversity advocate among the faculty is usually a person of color, or occasionally a white woman. I understand the reticence white faculty may have; when I created my department's race and gender course nearly nine years ago, I worried that - as a white male I did not know enough about race to teach a course about it and that I would make horrible mistakes. I didn't know enough; I made mistakes. But none of it was terrible and students were far easier on me than I was. I gained knowledge and confidence with time. * We've ghettoized diversity issues into courses about race and gender. Rather than truly diversifying courses throughout the curriculum, we've often relegated discussions of race to one or two courses, such as an elective class on gender, race and media. This allows both faculty and students to avoid race in virtually all of their classes. This is a serious problem, particularly in skills courses where faculty have an opportunity to help students gain knowledge and confidence about race that will make them sensitive and successful media professionals. One instructor at an accredited journalism program told me not long ago that race wasn't relevant to a reporting class. His class was just about gathering and reporting facts; other kinds of classes should deal with race. Race is very much a part of reporting, as media critics have persuasively demonstrated for more than thirty years. * When race is dealt with, it's usually added to courses rather than integrated broadly throughout the curriculum. When we deal with race outside of the stand-alone gender and race course, we deal with it in an additive fashion. In a course about communication history, for instance, we'll acid a unit on the "black press." In a writing course, we'll add a unit on covering minority populations. These units aren't integrated into classes; rather they are just tacked on. Although a unit on the "black press" in a media history course is better than nothing at all on the subject, that course would be much better if it addressed issues of difference, power, social control and privilege when dealing with all media. Merely "adding" a unit, for instance, leaves the black press on the margins (as just an "alternative" to the mainstream media) and also serves to obscure the fact that the mainstream media are closely tied to white culture. …