ABSTRACT
From Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind to protest at Stanford University, the issue of university curriculum, the canon, and diversity has opened a hot and controversial debate. Concomitant with this concern is the growing perception that higher education in the US is in crisis; colleges and universities question their success in forming the ‘educated’ person. I was initially baffled by these various issues. For me, as most Chicanos and Chicanas, the university has always been controversial. For most of us the university manifests a particular class, racial/ethnic, and gender perspective of the world; no novelty existed in recognizing the curriculum and the canon as problematic. At the same time, the 1960s and early 1970s was the period when most Chicanos/as had the first opportunity to attend the institutions of higher learning. Yet critics of education described this era as one in crisis-with the implied suggestion of its inferiority. What then does the debate about curriculum, canon and diversity, on the one hand, and the talk about crisis in higher education, on the other, mean to Chicanos/as?
