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Diversity Project a Success, Sociologists' Group Says
An eight-year project designed to encourage minority participation and "foster diversity" in higher education largely succeeded, according to Promoting Diversity and Excellence in Higher Education through Department Change, a report issued by the American Sociological Association in August. The Minority Opportunities through School Transformation (MOST) program, launched by the group in 1994, worked through academic departments rather than with individual students or entire institutions. Departments of sociology at eleven institutions participated in the project by reshaping the undergraduate curriculum to prepare students better for graduate-level work and to emphasize diversity issues, strengthening research training and mentoring, attempting to create departmental climates that were "sensitive to issues of diversity and multiculturalism," and taking steps to increase the number of minority students in the academic pipeline.
Their efforts were successful in every area, according to the report. In the penultimate year of the project, departments reported that more than half of their course offerings explicitly dealt with diversity, compared to one quarter in the 1993-94 academic year, the last year before the project started. The number of graduating minority sociology majors almost doubled over the same period, and the number of students presenting research papers at scholarly meetings increased tenfold. Several departments reported striking increases in the number of undergraduate sociology majors who went on to graduate studies in the field. And though increasing the number of minority faculty was not an explicit goal of the program, most participating departments did so, the report says.
While the MOST program has formally concluded, its leaders hope that its findings will encourage others to commit themselves to similar endeavors, says Felice Levine, former executive officer of the sociological association and the principal investigator on the project. "There was nothing specific to sociology departments about the project, and participating departments were not provided with significant funding," she says. "We'd like to see other departments at all kinds of institutions take these principles and adapt them into plans that fit their circumstances."
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