Debating Diversity and Social Justice Curricular Requirements: How Organizational Culture at a Liberal Arts College Informed the Change Process

For the past four decades, predominantly white colleges and universities throughout the United States have adopted diversity curricular requirements. While evidence suggests these courses yield positive outcomes for students, scholars have less often addressed the process of curricular change toward creating the requirements. Further, colleges have begun to update or supplement diversity requirements enacted in past decades, but this process has not been sufficiently studied. The curricular change process at a private, highly selective liberal arts college in the South offers an instructive case study of how organizational culture informed the implementation of a new social justice course requirement for all undergraduate students. It also offers a rare study of a college with an existing diversity requirement whose faculty approved a second requirement focused on social justice, as colleges may seek to revisit existing requirements after implementation. We draw upon interviews with faculty and institutional documents to question whether the new social justice requirement represented transformational change—or functioned as window-dressing that updated outdated language but ultimately maintained existing curricular arrangements.