symposium on "Feminism and Multiculturalism," which included an impressive array of gay and straight women of color from the United States and around the world, is a step in that direction.

Women's studies must also work more closely with other interdisciplinary programs and provide expertise, along with ethnic studies, for the multicultural initiatives taking place on many campuses. Feminist scholars must continue to conduct research and generate data to inform public policy debates and decision making affecting American women and families, and women and families in developing or third-world countries. Women's studies must continue to broaden its base by listening to potential allies who were ignored in the early years or distanced themselves because of its primary focus on gender. Transcending the boundaries of race, ethnicity, class, geography, and language in the interest of a feminism that is more expansive, more responsive to a diverse group of women around the world will continue to be a major challenge to women's studies in the 1990s.

The current preoccupation with "political correctness" must not be allowed to obscure the reality of a modern-day, well-organized, right-wing movement (inside and outside the academy) whose old and popular racist, sexist, and homophobic schemes threaten to reverse the progressive reforms of the 1960s. Despite the institutionalization of black and women's studies, racist and sexist biases in mainstream teaching and scholarship still abound. This makes it necessary to advocate loudly and clearly for the demise of the androcentric curriculum that is insensitive to racial, ethnic, cultural, sexual, and class difference.

One of the most urgent challenges for the American academy in the 1990s is to respond to issues of diversity by making the old and new scholarship on people of color and women central, not peripheral, to the curriculum. Women's studies has an important role to play in this process.