Introduction

Fought for throughout the latter half of the 1980s, agreed upon by campus faculty in 1989, and launched with its first courses in 1991, the American Cultures (AC) Requirement was a milestone in higher education. According to Ling-Chi Wang, emeritus professor of Asian American Studies and one of the requirement’s strongest advocates, the AC program was "one of the most important curriculum-reform projects in the history of this campus...” Beyond bringing new information and perspectives to students, “... American Cultures challenges each discipline to raise questions that they had never raised before, and in the process, they have uncovered unknown aspects of their disciplines."

The American Cultures Requirement remains unique in the nation in its approach. The courses students must pass to fulfill a one-class graduation requirement cover all instructional fields, as adaptations of existing courses or newly designed ones. All incorporate in the curriculum a comparative analysis of the experiences of US racial and ethnic groups, drawn from at least three of the following: African Americans, Indigenous peoples of the United States, Asian Americans, Chicano/Latino Americans, and European Americans. For many UC Berkeley departments, this framework offers a new approach to course design that responds directly to a problem encountered in numerous disciplines: how better to present the diversity of American experience to the diversity of students now enrolled at the university.

For more information visit the American Cultures 30th Anniversary page.