Much of the current debate in American higher education focuses on the failure of colleges and universities, especially at the undergraduate level, to produce truly educated students. The "conservatives" and "radicals" have different diagnoses and treatment strategies for the problems that threaten to destroy the academy. Representing the conservative position, Allan Bloom, E. D. Hirsch, and Dinesh D'Souza argue for a speedy return to a glorious past before the introduction of black studies and women's studies. Ironically, their arguments foster greater cultural illiteracy. To be sure, the debate about the value of the "great books of the Western tradition," which occupies the agenda of many curriculum committees and national conferences, is problematic even when coherently presented. Insufficiently inclusive, this debate ignores, in fact, much of the world and perpetuates the notion that the best that has been thought and said throughout history has sprung from the minds of Western, white males.

The story of the most recent wave of curriculum reform in the academy begins in the 1960s with the civil rights movement and the development of black studies. During that decade, black studies courses, programs, and departments emerged as the academic arm of the black liberation struggle, challenging the Eurocentrism and racism of the American academy as well as focusing attention on the devaluation or marginalization of African Americans and other disenfranchised groups. New areas of scholarship on other ethnic groups have also emerged over the past 20 years as demands on higher education have increased from diverse "minorities" whose perspectives, experiences, and cultures have historically been absent from the college curriculum despite their significance in the history of this nation. Black and ethnic studies as legitimate fields of study in their own right have generated a substantial critique of traditional academic disciplines and significantly enlarged the scholarship on people of color.

Similarly, over the past five years, women's studies has been institutionalized as an important area of teaching and research. Over 900 programs exist in the academy in the United States at the present time. This report attempts to understand what the term institutionalized has meant and continues to mean.