Diversity and Its Contradictions

receive so much attention in higher education? If refers to a movement or process aimed at understanding social differences, what makes this movement so controversial? And why is higher education such an important space for the debate about diversity? In grappling with these questions, I have come to believe that our discourse on contains contradictions that might impede the attainment of social justice in American higher education. In the 1980s diversity became a buzzword in the academy, representing a movement advocating the appreciation and celebration of difference in culture, ethnicity, gender, race, and sexual orientation and, at the same time, a critique of the dominance of the Western tradition in the undergraduate curriculum.