
This story is part of an ongoing series celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Core Curriculum and the key learning requirements of LMU’s signature undergraduate educational experience.
Rooted in histories of political and social activism, the “Studies in American Diversity” (FDIV) requirement is a foundational element of the Core Curriculum that asks students to examine the workings of power and privilege in the United States. The development of the requirement over the past few decades is complex and reflects the ongoing conversations about race and diversity in the country and the political landscape of Los Angeles.
The first iteration of this requirement came about after the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, which erupted after the acquittal of four Los Angeles Police Department officers who were videotaped brutally beating Rodney King. Anger over police brutality turned into city-wide upheaval that included burning businesses, looting, and resisting police. This incident prompted the university to create the “American Cultures Studies” requirement to dedicate more space and critical thinking toward social inequities and racial issues. Ten years ago, when the current Core Curriculum was instituted, “American Cultures Studies” was renamed “Studies in American Diversity.” Five years later, the University Core Curriculum Committee (UCCC) reassessed the requirement and found that students were having very divergent experiences. The committee set out to refocus FDIV on specific learning goals, such as asking students to examine the intersection of race with other categories of marginalization and to connect racial justice movements to contemporary social and structural issues.
The work of recommitting to the goals of the requirement coincided with the 2020 murder of George Floyd and protests against police brutality — and again, current events revealed the importance of ensuring that all LMU students receive an intellectual foundation to think critically about serious concepts in the study of race and racism.
“FDIV as it was written was not necessarily [focused on] intellectual outcomes but with a focus on content,” explained Mairead Sullivan, professor of women’s and gender studies and co-chair of the UCCC. “What this meant was that students weren’t all getting the same foundational intellectual approach. [The new FDIV requirement] ensures that all students get introduced to the work of critical ethnic studies early on in their education and makes it so they’re better prepared for other advanced courses.”
Each reappraisal of the FDIV requirement has brought the Core Curriculum closer to fulfilling its mission of providing a foundational body of knowledge that students can then use to make interdisciplinary connections and grapple with issues of racial justice and movements of resistance and liberation. Updates to the core are guided by faculty primacy. In the FDIV revisioning, the UCCC worked with the Faculty Senate to create an advisory committee of faculty with disciplinary expertise from each of the Ethnic and Gender Studies departments as well as two faculty outside of those departments.
Ed Park, professor and chair of the Asian and Asian American Studies Department, sees the requirement as indicative of the kind of mission-driven education that LMU provides students.
“I think our pedagogy is slightly different from other institutions because we’re comfortable with values and moral discernment,” said Park. “We don’t offer a buffet of courses that students pick and choose from, we provide more guidance, and the FDIV requirement in particular is comfortable with that idea, that we are telling a particular kind of story of how America got to where it is.”
The Core Curriculum’s structure is inherently one that provides students with the guidance and scaffolding necessary to engage in rigorous intellectual thinking. For Juan Mah y Busch, professor of English and chair of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies, teaching in the Core, and specifically FDIV courses, is rewarding because he is able to impart in students the knowledge and tools to begin thinking critically for themselves.
“We give students foundational knowledge, and then we build on it. I’m not going to tell somebody what direction to take or what decisions to make,” said Mah y Busch. “But we’re trying to give students the questions to ask, the skills to do the research, and the ability to articulate their interests. The Core is the spine through which you navigate all of the other kinds of things that you’re looking into. It’s formational.”
Students have reacted positively to the new FDIV courses, showing the value of an ethnic studies education that provides students with the opportunity to reflect on their own values and previously held beliefs.
“For students who come from those communities [that we discuss in FDIV], they can know that they matter,” said Curtiss Takada Rooks, assistant professor of Asian and Asian American Studies and acting chair of African American Studies. “They’re seeing that their stories are important and viable.”
The 10th anniversary of the Core provides a valuable opportunity to consider the changes made over the past decade and to reflect on LMU’s signature combination of liberal arts education grounded in Jesuit and Marymount mission and traditions.
“The Core is the thing that is the distinctive LMU academic experience,” said Sullivan. “All of our classes are mission-driven and uniquely LMU, but the Core is the thing that all of our students share and that all our faculty share. Many universities say they’re doing justice work— at our university we’re not invited to do justice, we don’t do it as an addition to our educational mission; it is a demand. We cannot be producing the education that we are called to do without the demand that we engage in these questions.”