Steeped in diversity and multicultural education for more than a decade, it's difficult for Jack Meacham to characterize his academic life any other way. Yet, despite having been a pioneer of the "American Pluralism" curriculum at UB, and later, throughout the country, he remains decidedly modest, preferring to focus on multicultural education at UB as a collective effort of which he is only part.

	Jack Meacham says it’s important to have diversity in the classroom to help prepare students for life.
	photo: Stephanie Hamberger

A little more than 10 years ago, UB was part of a national dialogue on whether courses about race and gender should be taught at colleges and universities. For Meacham, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor and chair of the Department of Psychology, it was an exciting time, and one that naturally propelled him into his current trajectory as diversity consultant, educator and speaker.

"Sixty-two percent of colleges and universities now have a diversity course or are developing a diversity course," says Meacham, citing statistics from a report released by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) in October. "Ten years ago, the number would have been (nearly) zero."

Pluralism's pioneers-Bill Fischer, now an emeritus professor of English, and Elizabeth Kennedy, founder of the Women's Studies Program at UB-"were way ahead of their time," Meacham says, crediting a core group of a dozen or so faculty members with piloting what would become a national model for diversity courses that broached the topics of race, gender, ethnicity, class and religion.

"Women undergrads who elect to take a course in women's studies-that's different from having a required course where you've got all sorts of students on campus who may be very antithetical to anything having to do with race or gender," says Meacham, who also is an adjunct professor in the Department of African American Studies.

"It makes you worry about students whose experiences are so limited-I mean, how are they going to get jobs, how are they going to survive in the workplace, how are they going to be responsible citizens in their communities if they've grown up only with people like themselves?" he asks.

Meacham has devoted himself to these students, trying to provide an unbiased perspective on issues he hopes will better prepare them for life beyond college.

"It's tremendously important to have diversity in the classroom," he says. "Campuses have a responsibility to prepare students to go out into American society as it is."

And as it is, the United States' demography is changing rapidly.

"By the year 2020, one out of three Americans will be a person of color," Meacham says, adding that in the same year, students of color-at the elementary and secondary levels-will make up 50 percent of the student population, already the case in New York State.

While "colleges have a long way to go to get the diversity...that is in the elementary and secondary schools," Meacham says multiculturalism is much more than a token phrase at higher-education institutions.

"Courses on multiculturalism and diversity are important because of jobs, because of careers, because of making the American economic system work," he said, adding that "corporations and businesses know that if they can't recruit, train, retain and promote women and minorities, they're simply not going to survive."

Students' survival, however, largely depends on their willingness to pursue diversity in their own education.

"What UB requires is one course, but from that point on, it's students' choice whether they take additional courses.having to do with race and gender," Meacham says. "My guess is there are huge differences in how people graduate as seniors."

The importance of that one course, however, is that it doesn't "permit undergraduate students to dodge issues of race and gender," he says.

Unlike other campuses-the University of California at Berkeley, for example-that allow students to choose from some 20 or 30 courses that may focus only on one issue, UB mandates students take one course that covers all the issues. "Berkeley's policy lets students who are racist not take a course about race; (it) lets students who are sexist not take a course about gender," he says.

"My role here is to support the students in their educational and personal and career goals," and how they relate to diversity, he says. "It's part of UB's mission statement."

Meacham takes this mission very seriously. From the beginning, he's been involved in promoting the American Pluralism model as a general education course worth emulating at campuses nationwide.

In addition to teaching the course at UB for several years, Meacham has taken the idea on the road over the past decade. He's presented at conferences and seminars throughout the early 1990s sponsored by groups such as the AACU and the University of Chicago National Institutes on Issues in Teaching and Learning. He's also served as a national consultant on diversity in the classroom. This past summer, he and Jeannette Ludwig, associate professor of French, were seminar leaders at a 10-day institute held at Brown University.

Most recently, Meacham was the keynote speaker at the Michael Tilford Conference on Diversity and Multiculturalism sponsored by the Kansas State Board of Regents and the Kansas Council of Chief Academic Officers.

He also developed an assessment instrument to gauge the quality of general-education programs.

"I gave that to AACU-it's one of their biggest sellers," he said. While he doesn't make a penny off their profit, Meacham appreciates the impact of his investment.

"I helped, indirectly, to shape the framework of gen-ed programs on dozens, if not hundreds, of campuses across the United States," he said. "It all reflects my involvement in UB's gen-ed program, and what I learned here."

Meacham also has adapted the curriculum to suit his psychology courses, but more importantly, his pedagogy as a whole.

"I spent three or four years completely transforming (Developmental Psychology) to get a lot more material on race and gender into the course," he said. "And then I developed a new course, on race and racism, that I've been teaching pretty regularly.

"What it did for me was change the nature of all the rest of my teaching," he says.