Bethany Bryson, University of Virginia
bryson@virginia.edu

I draw on interviews with seventy-six English professors in four U. S. universities and case studies of their respective departments to document emerging definitions of multiculturalism and connect them to organizational conditions using a symbolic boundaries method for mapping meaning. Research sites vary by departmental prestige and political reputation. Findings indicate that English professors assigned meaning to the ambiguous and contested word, multiculturalism, according to principles of organizational convenience as much as, if not more than, political conviction. The four categories of meaning assigned to multiculturalism (canons, value, diversity, and pedagogy) demonstrate clear connections to the occupational interests of English professors, but definitions also varied by department, by prestige, and by state versus private funding. Next, I offer a comparative case-study analysis of each English department and draw connections between structures of authority and organization and the definition of multiculturalism that emerges. I conclude by discussion the implications of this study for research in human agency, social change, the social construction of meaning. I [plan to] conclude by discussing the implications of this study for research in the construction of meaning, for studies of cultural conflict and for questions about the effect of curricular changes on national culture.

After a decade of conflict over the role of cultural diversity in literary canons, mere mention of the word "multiculturalism" can still produce tension among English professors, and scholars have still not been able to untangle us from the twisted labyrinth of rhetoric that forestalls resolution to the problem. Empirical research on this issue has, for the most part, focused on either the process of canon formation (Corse 1996, 1997; Franklin, Huber, and Laurence 1992) or ideological positioning in the debate (e.g. Gitlin 1995, Wolfe 1998). Although these studies offer important insights into the conflict, they miss what I have found to be the most striking feature of English professors' talk on multiculturalism, a deep ambivalence about the word's meaning. To the extent that practitioners are unsure about the grounds of the debate, their decisions on political positioning and text selection rest on unsteady footing. Therefore, this study explores the canon wars from the opposite direction.

Rather than using reading lists and debates as indicators of political intention, I explore the way a political landscape is constructed from such behavior and the extent to which variations in that landscape play a role in shaping the way cultural producers fight over it. I use a symbolic boundaries method to map the definitions of multiculturalism mobilized by English professors in four universities and to identify variance among those definitions. Next, I analyze the extent to which those definitions mirror organizational conditions in each academic department.

In the United States, the sociology of culture has its origins in the study of organizations (Peterson 2000) and their effect on the cultural materials they produce. (Peterson 1975 and Hirsch 1972 are important examples. DiMaggio 2000 offers a detailed history of this influence.) Since that time the study of formal culture has merged with long-standing concerns about patterns of meaning, ideology, and the social construction of reality (Barry's piece in the culture newsletter, and Sharon's piece in CS). The sociology of organizations, meanwhile has found new interest in organizational culture (Powell and DiMaggio 1991, Kunda 1992, Jackall 1988). This study brings these two trends together in order to assess a specific case in the organizational production of meaning. Unlike traditional production of culture approaches that view culture as artistic products such as music and literature, this analysis focuses on systems of meaning that emerge as a result of organizational processes.

Multiculturalism, however, is normally studied under the rubric of cultural conflict where the word refers to hotly debated questions of whether and how cultural difference should be negotiated. The study of cultural conflict is currently dominated less by questions of cultural production than by questions about the stability of moral order (Hunter 1991, Williams 1996). From this perspective, the canon wars are but one instance in a larger pattern of conflict between orthodox and progressive worldviews. Bourdieu (1993), on the other hand, writes of such conflicts as "classification struggles" in which various factions of cultural producers battle for the right to classify, for example, literary works into canons of high-culture--valorizing their own products or those on which they are especially knowledgeable.

Both views conceptualize actors as intentional and possibly strategic agents acting out of strongly held beliefs or personal interests relating to the object of battle. Cultural conflict is not generally understood the way we understand most other social interactions--as heavily structured, partly accidental encounters with intentionality. Neither approach leaves room for the possibility that actors might get sucked into the torrent as though it had a life of its own. Neither approach leaves room for the possibility that participants navigate the terrain using maps produced long before the conflict emerged.

Multiculturalism is a word with a short history (so far) but wide recognition and high salience. It first appeared as early as 1971 in the education literature but came into wider usage when Canada adopted the word to label its policies on cultural and linguistic difference. But multiculturalism found its was into the U. S. national arena in the midst of controversy over the changing content of college English classes across the U. S. (See, for example, Bennett 1984.) Almost instantly, the question of multiculturalism was absorbed into the current controversies in English literature -- the rise of Marxist, feminist, and deconstructionist theories and the perceived politicization of literacy study. Once the simple concern for cultural diversity became entangled with this tangle of theoretical complexity, the possibility of attaching clear meaning to the word was nearly lost. Multiculturalism could mean anything from ensuring that all students have the opportunity to talk to abolishing literary canons (the widely accepted core of "great literature").

The importance of multiculturalism, however, extends well beyond the theoretical disagreements of English professors. Questions of cultural diversity are central problems of everyday life in all three of North America's large ethnically diverse nations. This condition makes the meaning of multiculturalism important to my respondents. English professors may conclude that multiculturalism does not have enough fixed meaning to be a useful word, but they cannot (easily) argue that multiculturalism doesn't matter or that the struggle to understand it is not worth the effort.

In addition, the idea of multiculturalism is an undeniably human invention, so studying the "construction" of its meaning allows me to observe the process of meaning-making without encountering the problem of essentialism versus social construction. Thus multiculturalism offers a perfect opportunity to study the assignment of meaning to a word. It has a short history, it carries heavy moral obligations, and it's exact meaning is ambiguous and (potentially) complex.

Broadly speaking, sociologists have taken two approaches to the study of meaning. The first and most common approach to meaning is interpretive. This work seeks to discover meaning as when Sharon Hays reveals contradictions inside the meaning of motherhood (1996) or contradictions between the meaning of work and family in welfare reform policies (forthcoming). This approach has a long scholarly history and makes important connections to other disciplines such a Geertz's (1973) "thick description" from anthropology and Benedict Anderson's, "imagined community" from literary studies. Interpretive approaches to meaning are crucial to our ability to produce cultural criticism, to break through the power of ideology, and to make one culture accessible to another.

The second sociological approach to meaning aims to uncover the general process of meaning-making. Symbolic interactionists devoted significant attention, for example, to the production of inter-subjectivity -- the process through which people negotiate the degree of overlap between individual (subjective) interpretations. More recently, cultural sociologists have sought to understand the larger processes of social construction by studying the way cultural gatekeepers (Ohmann 1987, Powell 1985) cultural elites (Crane 1987, Griswold 1987, Corse 1996), and the producers of mass culture (Binder 1992, Jacobs 1996, Tilly 1997) produce meaning for the rest of us. Some of the most exciting work in this arena has taken what John Mohr (1998) calls an institutional approach to meaning. Following the neo-Durkheimian work of scholars such as Mary Douglas (1991) and the "new institutionalism" in the sociology of organizations (see especially Meyer and Rowan (1997) and DiMaggio and Powell (1991)) this approach to meaning "examines how kinds of social organization make whole orderings of knowledge possible" (Swidler & Arditi 1994).

The project of identifying the institutional bases of meaning systems is crucial for bringing the problem of culture back into mainstream sociology and for bridging the artificial divide between culture and society (Hays 1994). Unfortunately, the conceptual mechanisms we have been offered for bridging that gap have been difficult of impossible for empirical sociologists to operationalize. (Sewell's (1992) "schema" and Bourdieu's (1977) "habitus" come to mind as particularly problematic examples.) I employ a symbolic boundaries approach to the theory and measurement of meaning that can be applied to both structures of meaning and structures of human activity, or the mutually constituted combination of these two abstractions. My goal is not to show that a particular meaning emerged, but to explore general theories about how meanings are constructed.

Michele Lamont (forthcoming) traces the history of symbolic boundaries to Durkheim's Les formes élementaires de la vie religieuse (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life 1965[1911]) in which Durkheim explains both social structure and meaning to the boundary between sacred and profane. From this view, whole societies are organized by the shape of this boundary and all social entities become meaningful according to their relationship to the boundary. Because Durkheim wedded the importance of sacredness with the mechanism of ritually constituted boundaries much of the work on boundaries that followed focused on simple binary relationships and argued that social systems are organized by a single all-important boundary as evident (Levi-Strauss 1963, Douglas (1991), and Bourdieu (1979). More recent uses of the symbolic boundaries approach has allowed for more complex cultural systems of multiple boundaries that may or may not overlap and are more likely to overlap at important, highly structured, junctures of social life (Tilly 1998). But complicating the system of boundaries meant that scholars would need to take the construction of meaning more seriously. That is, if we do not claim that the distinction between novels and how-to books is related to the sacred-profane dinstinction, we will need to explain why we bother to make such distinctions and whether there is any social significance to that action.

Though psychologists have long argued that classification systems constitute the foundation of human cognition, Zerubavel (1991) and DiMaggio (1987, 1997) have been instrumental in bringing this insight to contemporary U. S. sociology. Zerubavel made the clearest claim that symbolic boundaries are the foundation of meaning and that the "lumping and splitting" process of symbolic classification is the primary mechanism of meaning-making. Attending to the importance of perceiving "gaps" between categories, Zerubavel likened the process to constructing "islands of meaning." By Zerubavel's standards, then, it is clear that multiculturalism does not yet have a clear meaning. My hope is to catch English professors in the act of constructing the moat around it. Though, I suspect that the project of clearly defining multiculturalism will be abandoned before it is complete, the goal of this study is to offer empirical evidence on the processes through which the production of meaning is attempted.

DiMaggio (1987) made the connection between systems of classification and structures of social organization that is a central feature of my theoretical approach. I hypothesize (to the extent that it makes sense to do so in a qualitative study) that local attempts to classify multiculturalism will bear some relation to the organizational contexts in which those definitions are produced, but I explore the origin of those effects inductively. DiMaggio's theory of artistic classification, however, is aimed macro-level measurements. To test his individual hypotheses, one would collect data on the characteristics of whole societies, comparing, for example, the degree of access to higher education and levels of social inequality to the number of distinct genres used by the record industry.

To get from DiMaggio's indispensable attention to conditions of social organization to Zerubavel's view of classification as the production of meaning, I use a method of documenting symbolic boundaries similar to that of Michele Lamont (1992, 2000) who interviewed men of various social and geographic locations with questions about how they distinguish themselves from others and what sorts of characteristics they value. In so doing, she uses an approach culture advocated by Wuthnow (Wuthnow et al. 1984, Wuthnow 1987) that gets around the problem of accessing subjective meanings by mapping the relationships among observable symbols (such as the words produced in an interview). Like Lamont, I conceptualize interview responses as cultural products (rather than evidence of individual belief) and code those responses inductively, reporting the relationships that emerge. By asking also about socio-cultural valuation, Lamont's research also makes the important connection between cultural differentiation and inequality. I omit this step in the research presented here, but return to the issue in my conclusion.

Any sociologist attempting to discuss the relationship between ideas and organizational structures must eventually face a disturbing fact. The two are not really distinguishable. I do not know what is inside anyone's head. I can only rely on the things people do (e.g. talk), and the objects they create (e.g. essays) to convey ideas. In truth, then, I'll be comparing two types of human behavior. The first is behavior directed toward ideas: communication about the idea and value of multiculturalism. The second type of behavior is popularly considered more real. It is the rest of life where actors stop addressing ideas and return to "real" life. Public opinion researchers consider it a well-established fact that abstract beliefs are different from concrete decisions. For example, survey respondents are far more likely to report supporting the racial integration of neighborhoods and schools in the abstract than when the survey question specifically refers to the respondent's own neighborhood or school (Schuman and Bobo 1988). I intend this study to make that point for cultural sociology. The public battles over multiculturalism in our nation's system of education do not directly represent changes in either education or national culture. Moreover, I argue that the form of multiculturalism that finally takes root in our public institutions and our way of thinking about the world will get much of its character from the people who try to make it happen in their classrooms, businesses, and organizations. This is the reason I focus on the process of classification as the organizationally situated production of durable a meaning for multiculturalism.

Breaking with current assumptions about the sources and processes of cultural conflict demands a qualitative method that offers data rich enough to re-construct systems of conceptual categories for building theory (Glaser and Strauss 1965). Furthermore, the substantive questions, "What does multiculturalism mean, and how did it come to have that meaning?" demanded a multifaceted research design that would allow me to take into account a wide variety of constraining and enabling structures (Sewell 1992) such as professional pressures, departmental culture, and systems of validation at all levels.

Bourdieu, for example, argues that fields of power (e.g. social structure, professional associations, universities, and departments) intersect, encompass, and constrain each other to the point where ignoring one field can seriously distort our view of another (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Methodologically, he suggests that learning everything there is to know about the context of the topic at hand will provide the answers. Thus, the question demands a research design (described below) that would cast a wide net, yet offer sufficient depth to yield qualitative richness. I hope the result will be a theoretical understanding of cultural conflict that does not need to naively assign causal relations to a narrow range of independent variables conveniently found at arm's length.

To maximize both context and richness, I centered the research design on an analysis of multiculturalism in four English departments and then sketched their broader milieu through secondary sources and data sets. At the national level, I studied popular reports of battles over literary canons in the United States. I attended a meeting of the Modern Language Association (the primary professional organization for English professors). I talked to textbook sales representatives. I studied other interpretations of the battle published by English professors, and I re-analyzed aggregate data presented in the 1996 Digest of Education Statistics on college enrollments and degrees conferred in the United States since 1900. Though I have not included evidence from these other levels of analysis, they constitute important steps in the interpretive process informing my analysis.

The multiple case study method is modeled on a "replication logic" rather than a "sampling logic" (Yin 1994) in that the project is not considered a sample of four departments. Rather, the departmental studies constitute four complete and self-contained case studies. Interview data on individual understandings of and orientations toward multiculturalism were aggregated to the organization level and analyzed with respect to the organizational conditions and practices observed there. (Of course, the unaggregated diversity of responses within each department is also an important part of the story about the practices through which multiculturalism gets defined.) Once all four cases were analyzed, cases were compared to highlight similarities and important differences. In the analysis below, I also aggregate interview data across the four departments, but I refrain from performing statistical analysis on the resulting tables because a probability sample was not attempted.

Throughout the observation and analysis process, I employed the technique of "pattern matching" (Strauss and Corbin1990) to test, augment, and develop empirically grounded theory. Thus, there is a constant conversation here between the sociological literature and field observations in which expected patterns are derived from the literature and compared to patterns evident from empirical observations.

In the case studies, I use two analytic approaches to span cultural and organizational approaches to the question of conflict over multiculturalism. First, I analyze the meanings that multiculturalism has taken in the four research sites as well by documenting the boundaries of their talk about multiculturalism. This "symbolic boundaries" analysis allows me to map structures of meaning and opinion within and across English departments and connect the structure of those meanings to the organizational structures in which they were produced. Second, I attend to a host of organizational practices in and around the departments, and connect these conditions to structures of meaning in each department. Connecting cultural and organizational analysis allows me to offer rich descriptions of meaning-making and multiculturalism that do not lean too heavily on either cultural or organizational perspectives.

The four departmental case studies follow a research design intended to vary on two dimensions (departmental prestige and curricular progressivism) and to control several others. The first dimension, prestige, ensured that I would be able to examine the battle in elite departments like the ones covered by the press but also extend the analysis to account for multiculturalism in the sort of non-elite English department that most college student's encounter today. The politics of multiculturalism in both elite departments have, in fact, made the national news, though not necessarily to the extent that others have. The other two sites are inside non-elite universities. In terms of status and position in the field of literary production and dissemination, these departments more closely resemble the departments that most college students experience today because most college students are not enrolled at Stanford and Duke. Like Jacoby (1994), I believe sociologists and cultural critics have ignored most of the field by focusing our analyses of these battles on a few elite schools.

To increase the range of individual and organizational responses to multiculturalism in my study, the second dimension along which the research design varies is the degree curricular expansion, a.k.a. "progressivism." I guaged progressivism according to the breadth of curriculum requirements and course offerings. Two departments require extensive course work in traditional areas of English literature, one requires extensive coursework in newly emerging fields and one specifies very few specific requirements at all but boasts extensive offerings of non-traditional courses. In this two-by-two design, then, one elite university is progressive and one elite university is more traditional in relation to canon and curriculum expansion. The same is true for the non-elite pair. All four sites are research or comprehensive universities (rather than liberal arts colleges) and have undergraduate student populations of at least 4,000, 25 percent of which are non-white.

Procedurally, this design meant that I selected research sites using the following method: First, I obtained a list of the top 25 graduate programs in English literature (U. S. News and World Report. September 18, 1995, pp. 108-111). Next, I researched traditionalism and progressivism by reading course catalogs and talking to literary scholars. Then, I sorted the 25 on progressivism, matched them end-to-end on race and gender demographics (all have a non-white population that is between 24 and 26 percent of the student body), and chose a public-private pair. Next, I selected all the four-year undergraduate universities within 600 miles of Princeton that were described as "less competitive" in Baron's Guide and had at least 4,000 full-time undergraduates and the same proportion of non-white undergraduates that the elite selections had (25 percent). I divided the resulting list into public and private institutions, and matched universities in each list on SAT scores. (This step reduced the list considerably because few private universities are both large and non-elite.) For the remaining matches, I researched curriculum and mission statements, and choose the pair that exhibited the greatest distance on progressivism.

After selecting the four cases that best fit my research design, I sought permission from the institutional review boards (sometimes called committees on "human subjects") at each university to conduct research within the organization. With institutional approval, I contacted department chairs who consulted with faculty before granting me permission to solicit voluntary interviews, collect publicly available information, and observe interactions in public spaces. I was lucky enough to secure permission from all four original case selections.

Data collection occurred in two stages at each research site. In the first phase, I visited each department for one week during which time I introduced myself and collected orienting documents including policy statements about the curriculum, faculty lists, course directories, and articles from local newspapers about multiculturalism or curriculum issues in the English department.

In the second phase of fieldwork at each site, I spent four to twelve weeks at each location (depending on the size of the department and the ease of scheduling interviews-a condition that varies inversely with prestige). During this time, I conducted interviews with faculty, familiarized myself with their teaching and scholarship, and observed interactions whenever possible. Tape-recorded interviews generally lasted one to two hours and were professionally transcribed. I coded interview transcripts and tracked characteristics of both individuals and departments with the help of qualitative analysis software that permitted me to cross-reference interview texts and explore relationships between coding categories.

The definition of multiculturalism, or the lack thereof, lies at the root of opinions on multiculturalism and, by extension, definitions of the word lie at the center of conflict over its value and appropriateness. In this section, I lay the groundwork for understanding pro and con positions on multiculturalism by analyzing the meanings the word has acquired across the four departments. Here, I find that English professors apply the word to four arenas of activity in their own professional jurisdiction: literary canons, cultural breadth, literary politics, and teaching methods. Individual professors may have various opinions on one or more of the four arenas, and the those orientations may be combined to produce almost any definition of multiculturalism offered by respondents in the four departments. The intersection of the four arenas, furthermore, hints at a possible "core" (or ideal-typical) definition.

I prompted faculty to talk about multiculturalism simply by asking, "How do you feel about multiculturalism?" The short question was designed to impose as little context as possible on respondents so that I could infer their definitions from the qualities they attributed to multiculturalism, the context in which they placed it, and the assumptions they used to talk about it. I chose the word "feel" to help elicit affect-type responses similar to those of closed-ended survey questions (analyzed elsewhere in Bryson 2001) while the open-ended interview context would allow respondents to explain the reasons for their opinions. Although most of the faculty I interviewed expressed frustration with the ambiguity surrounding multiculturalism, all obliged me with their reactions, and I was able to code a definition from most.

My inductive coding of the themes that emerged from English professors' talk about multiculturalism revealed four primary arenas of discourse: (1) diversity, (2) canons, (3) value, and (4) pedagogy (i.e., teaching practices). The four arenas are not mutually exclusive "types" of multiculturalism. Rather, they are elements of multiculturalism, or at least, they are elements of the multiculturalism that English professors talk about.

These four themes may then be taken together to describe the overall scope of multiculturalism in English departments, they may be used alone, or they may be combined in ten other ways to produce a wide variety of specific definitions. Thus, one could draw on a single area, such as literary preservation, to say that multiculturalism is a threat to cultural tradition. The intersection of two domains (literary preservation and cultural diversity) produces a definition that was popular at JFK: multiculturalism is an attempt to make literary canons represent the cultural breadth that exists among their students.

Combining all four areas produces the narrowest and most specific possible definition. Though no respondent actually offered this definition, we may consider it an ideal-typical definition in the sense that in contains all the major characteristics that English professors attribute to multiculturalism. Thus at its most extreme, multiculturalism in English literature refers to an accommodation to the increasing salience of cultural diversity in the U.S. that has caused a politicization of the criteria (literary value) used to select texts (literary preservation) that are taught to students in order to accommodate cultural diversity.

Note that this ideal-typical definition applies specifically to English professors. The word has important applications outside their discipline, and therefore the scope of this "definition" is not wide enough to encompass its application to many other areas. I did not restrict faculty to talking about their profession, but I did ask the question in the context of a conversation about their work.

Figure 1 depicts the four arenas of meaning as a Boolean diagram that represents all possible combinations of overlap among the four arenas. The four white "petals" represent single arenas of meaning, the six light gray areas represent all the possible overlapping pairs, the dark gray areas are the four possible combinations of three arenas, and the black section at the heart of the figure represents the overlap of all four arenas at once. Together with the area outside the "flower" (representing the possibility that a respondent could claim no definition for the word) there are sixteen ways that a definition of multiculturalism can combine the four arenas of meaning. I have labeled them accordingly and assigned numbers to each area that match the numeric coding I used in this analysis. In graphical depictions I present later, space will limit me to the use of these numeric labels. To preserve as much representation as possible, I coded a complete lack of definition as zero, the four main arenas as one through four, the paired arenas were coded five through ten and so on. Thus the sixteen possible meanings are coded from zero to fifteen. Though there are sixteen possible meanings, five of these possibilities (areas 1, 4, 9, and 13) went unused.

See Table 1 for the proportion of respondents across all four sites who drew on each of the four arenas of meaning (plus the fifth category--no meaning at all). Percentages do not add to 100 because most respondents drew on more than one arena. Table 2 presents the breakdown of specific definitions produced by al the possible combinations of meaning.

- - - Figure 1, Table 1 and Table 2 about here - - -

The presence or absence of observable boundaries around the word multiculturalism do not determine its existence. The word clearly has a documented linguistic existence, and invoking the word has concrete effects not directly measured in this study. What is unclear is whether the word's referent has an existence, and this study cannot answer the question on a national level. Rather, I will discuss the extent to which the word multiculturalism refers to something concrete in my four research sites, where the concrete-ness of the referent is determined by measures of consensus about it's boundaries--its definition. The variability of definitions documented below would, however, indicate that the referent has very little "existence" outside specific local contexts.

Is it possible for multiculturalism to cause widespread controversy without having a clearly established meaning? In fact, the lack of consensus on its definition may be one cause of the controversy surrounding the word. Combatants may talk past each other by using different definitions of the word, or they may fight directly over its definition. Some literary scholars have published definitions, but they offer new definitions as solutions to the debate, or treaties in the battle (e.g. Raz 1994). That is, they attempt to produce a definition that will make the word acceptable in the belief that a carefully constructed definition of multiculturalism that is meant to acknowledge diversity and promote equality without threatening any existing arrangements should be able to produce consensus.

Of course, as the number and variety of these diplomatic definitions increase, the likelihood of achieving shared meaning decreases, so that twenty-four of the professors I interviewed specifically said the word had no consistent meaning. My question posed a problem for respondents who wanted to answer but could not do so in good conscience. Their frustrations apparently stemmed from outside the interview situation. As proponents of cultural enrichment, English professors are under tremendous pressure to offer meaningful responses to multiculturalism, so being uncertain about the meaning of the word poses a fairly serious barrier to fulfilling that responsibility. My presence and my questioning only aggravated an already troublesome tension between having a responsibility to multiculturalism and not knowing what it is.

Trinity's Professor Carlson clearly identified administrative pressures as a source of that tension when he said, "The upper administration is anxious, so we have in a certain sense a kind of hierarchy of paranoia that is driven by a word for which nobody has a definition." Though not succumbing to any paranoia, Professor Steele from Truman State expressed his frustration most forcefully when he said, "We're pretty damn close to absolutely clueless about what to do with it."

Do English professors really allow themselves to get caught up in a "hierarchy of paranoia" surrounding a word with no fixed meaning? Many do put considerable effort into finding an acceptable meaning for the word. Eighteen percent of the faculty I interviewed offered two definitions in order to separate "good" from "bad" versions of multiculturalism. This strategy of dual definitions indicates a strong desire to find a workable way to keep the word, but it also multiplies the ambiguities surrounding it.

Following received wisdom on the politics of the canon wars, I expected the collection of dual definitions to follow a pattern in which the "bad" definition represented a deconstructionist push to dismantle the canon entirely and the "good" definition involved a fairly benign movement to expand the existing canon. In fact, the variety in both "good" and "bad" definitions defies this exclusively cultural scheme of categorization.

The conceptualization of multiculturalism that divides it into deconstructionist versus superficial changes to the canon reflects the social position of elite cultural critics. It divides "types" of multiculturalism according to the classification schema that define the boundaries of theoretical approaches to literary criticism while ignoring other organizing principles, such as pedagogy, that affect scholars and teachers who do not live the lives of of public intellectuals--immersed almost exclusively in the worlds of scholarship and publishing.

Despite the difficulties associated with the word's ambiguities, most departments do attempt to come to terms with the meaning of multiculturalism. As a result, and the meanings faculty associate with multiculturalism vary according to the structure of power and the organization of work inside each department. At a general level, non-elite departments operate on bureaucratic authority while tradition and professionalism have stronger influences on elite departments. In addition, the elite and non-elite professors in my study perform different tasks and have different understandings of their professional responsibilities. Because of this crucial difference in the way professors in each department organize their work, the definition of multiculturalism varies according to the logic of those work routines.

The dominant theme in the way English Professors talk about multiculturalism is diversity. If this point seems obvious, I should note that 26.2% of my respondents managed to talk at length about multiculturalism without mentioning diversity or anything (other than multiculturalism) I could identify as related to diversity such as gender, race, ethnicity, cultural difference, pluralism or otherness. 43.8% of those avoided talk of diversity by sticking to a claim that multiculturalism had no meaning at all. The next most common way of talking about multiculturalism without diversity happened in the "literacy value" category. Six respondents - 37.5% of the non-diversity definitions - fell here. These professors primarily avoided questions of diversity by defining multiculturalism as a political agent of disorder that threatens the idea of literary value or quality. A professor at Trinity, for example, said, "What we are winding up with is a smorgasbord of texts but no way of accounting to students why they ought to be there other than our sense of preemptive political righteousness." A Truman State professor went so far as to say, "I don't like the idea of breaking down the barriers and having, you know, just literature." From JFK, one said, "I have no problem with multiculturalism except..." "...A number of us feel that the study of English literature has been politicized."

Although the question lies beyond the abilities of my methodological apparatus, a good case can be made that this these definitions use multiculturalism as a way of avoiding the concrete issues of race, gender, and cultural difference. One generous professor at St. Agnes even obliged my discipline by saying that issues of multiculturalism are primarily sociological in nature and not the legitimate concern of English classes. Perhaps she meant diversity rather than multiculturalism, but the important point is that she considers such matters beyond the scope of her academic responsibility. Finally a professor at Trinity mobilized an argument that would reappear in later interviews, especially at JFK. He said, "The first year I taught the Bible, Greek, French, and German literature, and so on. That's multiculturalism." I chose not to code this statement as diversity in part because he made this claim alongside all the defining features of a "literary value" position including talk about ideological positions, politization and the claim that these things "undermine the study of literature". Nevertheless, the connection between his claim and that of multiculturalists is important on both philosophical and political grounds. I will discuss the issues in more detail later.

The two respondents who reacted to multiculturalism with talk about the canon that avoids questions of diversity did so by treating the canon as an externally generated entity. A professor at Trinity simply said of multiculturalism, "I've always felt we have enough to bear with the traditional canon. I simply don't have time to introduce more." Conversely a professor at Saint Agnes called it "the changing canon." Both these respondents avoid diversity by deferring to experts other than themselves for canon construction. They teach "the canon". Multiculturalism is only a problem for people who would dare define the canon.

Before I move on to all the multiculturalisms that intersect the field defined by attention to diversity. Let me briefly address the definitions that mention only diversity. Nearly 20% of respondents talked about multiculturalism as diversity without addressing questions of literary value, canons, or teaching practices. The major theme in this category argued that the multiculturalism is a social condition much broader and more serious than the concerns of English Literature. Some professors such as this one from Trinity applied this theme alone and left me to infer that their discipline attempts to do its small part. "I think it's good for us, for universities to think about the world that we live in and the culture at large. America is grappling with heterogeneity in a particularly pronounced way." Another argued that the attempts of literary and cultural critics to make sense of multiculturalism are pointless. He said, "It's a democratic reality. It doesn't want a philosophy."

More often, respondents separated questions of diversity from literary concerns in order to critique literary approaches to social justice. For example, a Trinity professor said, "I would be in favor of a multicultural requirement at this university provided it was rigorous, if students were, say, required to learn a non-western language, if they were required to know the history of a culture other than their own." Another said, "It's hard to be multicultural here. It's like a multicultural country club."

Just over half of my respondents invoked the idea of literary canons to talk about multiculturalism--alone or in combination with other fields. Thus canons are second only to diversity and constitute a cultural theme in the way these professors defined and negotiated multiculturalism in our interviews. I have already described the way two professors avoid talking about diversity by treating canons as reified entities outside their control. Here, I will describe definitions of multiculturalism that lie at the intersection of diversity and canon formation (category #6). Of the nine respondents who drew only on canons and diversity when talking about multiculturalism, three did so matter-of-factly such as these two St. Agnes professors. One said, "When I think about multiculturalism, I think about an inclusion of people we should have been reading all along." The other said, "I'm very supportive of it... In the freshman courses I teach, the textbooks include Tony Morrison and a whole bunch of authors from different cultural backgrounds.

For a number of the faculty at Truman State, multiculturalism also appears primarily as a reason to select works from textbooks and anthologies on the basis of the author's identity. He said, "...depending on how you think of the expansion of the canon or the alteration of the canon or just the destruction of the canon or whatever...I've been trying to integrate more works by women." A graduate instructor at JFK added an implicit critique of traditional canons when she said, "I define multiculturalism as anything that sends a whiff of fresh air in."

At both elite universities, professors argued, in one way or another, that literature is multicultural and that it has never been otherwise. They use different conceptions of canons to get to this conclusion, however.

A senior professor at JFK, (who is white) for example, explained that literature written by African-Americans was available long ago and told of his efforts to bring it into (or back into) academe. A professor at Trinity hit a similar note. "If you look at anthologies from the '30s, there are slave songs, worker songs, and native American pieces. Fads come and go, but only for a relatively brief time in America literary studies was there ever a moment when multiculturalism was not the same thing as American literature."

Finally, several professors spoke of multiculturalism as a new axis on which the study of literature could be organized and perhaps expanded. A professor at JFK explored this position best when she, "I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would object to a definition of multiculturalism that says we ought to teach, not only along the temporal spectrum...but also across a number of cultures in our own country and outside."

Related to canons is the question of value. Among English professors, values are generally addressed in terms of literary value (category #8, discussed earlier), but not always. Three professors at Trinity spoke of multiculturalism in terms of the value of diversity (category #5). Two argued that opening the human mind had always been the goal of a liberal arts education. The third pointed to a demographic trend. "I just delivered my kid to play camp this morning. I looked around and realized it was maybe 50% Caucasian, 50%, no more. I just think it's a fact of life and, given that, it'll take us 20, 30, 40, 50 years to figure out the next step...a way to allow for multiple perspectives."

Adding references to the canon brings us to category eleven, definitions that describe multiculturalism as a value-laden process of canonizing diversity. Of the four respondents who used this definition, only one included the value-laden aspect as a critique. This professor from JFK said, "comparative literature is a multiculturalist program without the cache of multiculturalism." He argues, here and in other parts of the interview that cultural difference is a central and valuable part of the discipline's mission. However, he argues that certain types of diversity have unfortunately gained more value ("cache") than others.

A professor at Trinity, on the other hand, used a similar definition favorably, referring to its "obvious political implications." For this professor, multiculturalism is a positive politically motivated move to increase culture diversity in the canon. Two other Trinity professors argued that the value of diverse literature is inherent in the works. One said, "I think of multiculturalism as a way of adding richness to the discipline. The other made a more specific claim that political motivation is unnecessary saying, "One studies, or one should study African-American literature because it's interesting."

The final arena to which definitions of multiculturalism can be applied is teaching. By "teaching" I mean a specific concern for pedagogical practices and for the needs of one's students. Thus a mere reference to syllabi, anthologies, or curricula was not enough to justify coding under this category. Though all these examples are tools in the teaching process, many professors spoke of them strictly in the context of personal expertise, departmental responsibility, or canon construction. Under "teaching", I included words relating to students, classrooms and teaching practices. Less than a third of respondents (29.5%) included such ideas in their definition of multiculturalism. I want to emphasize however, that this does not mean less than a third were concerned about teaching. What set this 30% of respondents apart from the others was a belief that multiculturalism has something to do with the relationship between professors and students. Much of the debate about canon expansion takes place on assumptions about literary value and the future of Western Culture--far removed from concerns about whether one's students are capable of understanding a work of literature and whether it changes them.

As a case in point, take category seven, "teaching the canon." No professor responded to my question by saying that multiculturalism threatens the goal of offering cultural capital to (possibly disadvantaged) students. This does not mean that my respondents were unconcerned about their responsibility to convey such skills. In fact, this idea emerged as a dominant theme in my questions about syllabus construction. That category seven is empty indicates that multiculturalism does not appear relevant to this point. Adding issues of diversity to the mix, however, reveals the answer:

Five respondents gave definitions that referred to teaching and canons as well as diversity. These are coded in category twelve. Each of these four professors argues, in one way or another, that teaching multicultural literature conveys something vital to students specifically because of multicultural realities outside of the literature classroom. A professor at Truman State said that multicultural literature is an important part of improving cultural understanding, but he wants to push the discipline (or at least textbook publishers) further on that point. "I just believe that all of us grow up monoculturalists. If I have cause with other multiculturalists, it's because their multiculturalism isn't multicultural enough. Too many people who preach multiculturalism leave here and go home to a monocultural world, and I find that disturbing."

At JFK, one professor argued that multiculturalism is less important to students who don't encounter much cultural difference. She said, "I think these issues become much more alive when I talk to people teaching out in California. Here it's more of a what-am-I-going-to-teach issue. There, I think the relationship to the students lives is a lot more urgent." A female professor at Saint Agnes used her own experience to demonstrate her belief that the author's identity can play an important role in reaching non-white and female students. "I do think it's important to teach works that aren't all by the same kind of person... because it was important to me as a kid to read works by women." At Trinity, a graduate instructor argued that the debate over multiculturalism emerged out of opposition to the teaching practices associated with multiculturalism. A professor there said, "Multiculturalism is too easy to talk about on Oprah Winfry. It doesn't really give you the full complexity, and I don't know which of us is going to suddenly start teaching Asian-American literature."

Responses coded in category ten, "Teaching to Diversity," share the spirit of those just discussed except that they do not make claims to the importance of literary works for enacting multicultural teaching practices. All three of these responses came out of Truman State. The first extended her definition of multicultural education beyond questions of literary canons by invoking the importance of early childhood. She said, "It's a good thing, a necessary thing in principle. In practice, I think we are very confused about it, particularly in the pedagogy, and we do it too late, anyway. It should be started in kindergarten or pre-school."

Another response specifically embraced the ideas that a professor at Saint Agnes earlier excluded as "sociological". This Truman State professor said that when "multicultural issues come up in the classroom, we would encourage teachers not to back down from it." Finally, a part-time instructor there revealed that he talks specifically about multicultural education in the classroom. "We just wrapped up a week of discussion in one of my composition classes: "multiculturalism and education..." I really think it is very important for creating a classroom where everybody feels that they are a part of things."

Eight professors gave responses to multiculturalism that invoked all four arenas of meaning (values, diversity, canons, and teaching), but four did so by offering a long rambling discussion that eventually touched on each topic. Although these four respondents help support the idea that multiculturalism can cover all four arenas, they do not contribute to the development of a unified meanings for multiculturalism in the context of English Literature.

The first attempt at a unified definition came from a Truman State professor who began by explaining that multiculturalism is a centerpiece of the department's course in literary theory. He said "It's a theory of power and a theory of art that reflects where we are on this planet, and we had better start learning something about it." (Other parts of his response helped me interpret power as value and glean the pedagogical implications of this statement.)

Another Truman State professor offered a less formal response to multiculturalism when he said, "This is the real world [English literature]. This is where multiculturalism happens. The segregation is out there in the banks, in the workplace. So we are doing a real honest to God effort here." At JFK, one professor defined multiculturalism as "attention to different kinds of cultures and their influence, especially on Anglo-American trends in teaching literature... It's very smart, balanced, sensitive people who are trying to teach values of critical thinking and critical tolerance." Finally, another professor at JFK said, "I guess I feel like, whether we like it or not, we're living in it... The institution has a responsibility to serve the needs of its students. I tend to be fairly open-minded about notions of literary value, for instance."

Together, these responses indicate that there does exist one ideal-typical definition of literary multiculturalism. In fact this region of meaning is the third most common in my interviews (following plain diversity and diversifying the canon), but attention to teaching practices is not as widespread as the other three arenas, and it shows the strongest tendency to cluster in certain departments - most notably, those in public institutions. I will return to this issue later.

Commentators often waver between viewing the battle over multiculturalism as an important moral cleavage, and claiming it to be "merely" a war over academic turf. Indeed, questions of literary value do translate directly into career trajectories, material resources, and professional valuation. To describe the battles over multiculturalism as mere struggles for organizational resources, however leaves out the "culture" in multiculturalism and denies that the matter has any relevance for the general public. Therefore, I make an attempt to put the two explanations together.

This section makes an explanatory connection between the meaning of multiculturalism described above and the work routines that generated the limits of those definitions. As contextual and organizations conditions vary across the four sites, so do definitions of multiculturalism. Here, I establish the organizational factors that shape both local understandings of multiculturalism and the extent to which multiculturalism is a divisive issue for each department.

The way multiculturalism's meaning varies by department can be attributed to the way teaching English varies by department. To begin, the difference between elite and non-elite definitions reflect differences between professional and technical aspects of the job. It is well documented that elite departments stress research, sometimes to the exclusion of teaching, which is often the primary activity for the vast majority of the remaining English professors who work in non-elite colleges and universities. Most faculty in elite departments follow cultural critics such as E. D. Hirsch and Allan Bloom in drawing direct connections between literature and society through values and/or politics. Non-elite professors do not directly critique that position, but they do focus their attention on the practices that link literature to society: syllabus construction and pedagogy.

Below, I discuss the formal and informal organization of work and authority inside each department as it relates to local definitions of multiculturalism in use there. Table 3 presents the number of respondents in each department who used each area of meaning as well as those who suggested the word lacked a clear definition. Beside each raw number is the percentage of department members who mentioned that area of meaning. Percentages do not add to 100 because respondents often drew on two or more areas of meaning to construct their individual definition. For reference, I also include a breakdown by department of all sixteen types of meaning in Table 4. However, the small number of definitions in each cell preclude systematic analysis. My discussion will center on Table 3.

- - - Insert Table 3 and Table 4 about here - - -

At Trinity, the substantive definition of multiculturalism hinges less on texts than on the breadth and diversity of American culture. By expressing a responsibility to culture, the faculty at Trinity see themselves as curators and producers of American culture--a role defined by the faculty as well as the university that intentionally hired this collection of intellectual superstars. The faculty at Trinity experienced multiculturalism as a (potentially positive) challenge to the traditional authority of the canon, on one hand and a (negative) threat to academic freedom, on the other. Their approach to multiculturalism has followed their pattern of work. Although they select readings for students, they are less likely to think of multiculturalism as "plugging in" works by authors from excluded cultural groups. To most Trinity professors, multiculturalism is about canonizing an appropriate form "cultural capital" in the sense that professors want their students to be familiar with the cultural resources that have been legitimated through social institutions and popular (not merely elite) acknowledgement. (See DiMaggio 1991b.) In content, however, they're specifically referring to multiculturalism and preparing students to be competent in a multicultural upper-middle class "world." One said, "I'm equipping them, I hope, for the life work and world ahead of them, um, uh, beyond the 21st century--a mutli-cultural, multi-social, multi-lingual, whatever--complex world, and life ahead of them."

Another member of the Trinity faculty specified the importance of multicultural literacy this way:

Professors at Trinity are also acutely aware of a significant shift in their value hierarchy from aesthetics to politics. Notably, this observation comes from both staunch traditionalists and multicultural advocates. Given the centrality of this shift in scholarly and journalistic accounts of multiculturalism, it is less curious that both "sides" at Trinity agree literary studies have been politicized than that non-elite faculty did not mention it. It makes no sense to say that work produced in a bureaucracy has become politicized because most participants in bureaucracies see most of their occupational activities as political. Charges of politicization come from people who draw on the traditional authority (in the Weberian sense) associated with preserving classical "masterpieces." They experience any attempt to change that tradition-based source of power as the entrance of politics into an arena in which interest-based change is inappropriate. Progressives agree that new work is self-consciously political, but they also argue that traditionalism is political in a much more insidious way precisely because it denies its own political interest in maintaining its position in the status order.

Both elite departments accommodated multiculturalism by hiring specialists in emerging fields, but Trinity faced the issue head-on in a single push to hire nearly a dozen professors, many of whom were already well established scholars. With two exceptions, JFK has made most of their "progressive" hires at the junior level. Because their internal differences fell along the pre-fashioned lines of status and power, the political landscape at JFK seemed to have more entrenched fissures. Although both progressives and traditionalists at Trinity associate multiculturalism with politicization, the issue is more salient at JFK.

In both elite departments, a few staunch traditionalists openly lament politicization, while progressives offered definitions of multiculturalism that stressed their responsibility to a diverse student body and the importance of providing their students with skills for facing cultural diversity in the outside world. There is, however, a subtle yet crucial difference between the way professors at JFK relate multiculturalism to cultural breadth and the way Trinity faculty does. While English professors at Trinity cite their responsibility to the multicultural nature of American culture, JFK professors connect their responsibilities to students. Four even suggested that their concern for multiculturalism is reduced by the lack of diversity in the student body compared to elite universities on the west coast.

- - - Table 5 about here - - -

Table 5 presents the percentage of professors in each department who orient their sense of multicultural responsibility to each of six reference points. English professors have two ways of grounding their multicultural responsibilities in students. The first and less popular method uses ideas about cultural representation to develop an applied reflection model of cultural production. That is, faculty who ground their multicultural responsibility to the diversity of their students do so because they want their syllabus to reflect the cultures represented in the classroom as a matter of equity. The second, and more popular method of grounding mcl responsibility in students treats the student body as a cultural unit. These professors hope to infuse their students with both a wide array of cultural knowledge and a set of skills necessary to weave them together into some sort of multicultural agreement. This model aims to prepare students to navigate a multicultural world. It is, thus, multiculturalism for students.

Multicultural responsibility at Trinity is not so much grounded in classroom representation. Rather, students are conceptualized a a vehicle for professors' responsibility to shape an preserve national culture. Professors at Trinity teach multiculturalism to students in order to make the world better, rather than to make students better. They feel a responsibility to the multiculturalism in the United States and train students to act responsibly toward it.

Table 5 also indicates a key organizationally produced difference between elite and non-elite faculty. Although many professors in non-elite departments did offer a specific philosophical account of their responsibility to multiculturalism, most did not. In non-elite departments, multiculturalism seems to come from the walls and the sky, and dealing with it is less a matter of rationalizing one's autonomous actions than it is a question of managing interests and constraints. My ethnographic observations in the four departments lead me to believe that the cultures of autonomy and constraint (in elite and non-elite departments, respectively) benefit from strong culturural reinforcement. Although, elite professors do have more control over their professional practices, many constraints in their work life are quite similar to those of non-elite faculty. Nevertheless, elite professors are still more likely to produce accounts of their actions that emphasize autonomy. Faculty in non-elite departmnents explain their behavior with reference to a rule or policy whenever they can. The latter strategy was a more efficient way to complete to complete a sociological interview, but both models are culturally appropriate for their contexts.

At the university level, Saint Agnes evidences the most bureaucratic and hierarchical organizational structure of the four universities in my study. Although the chair claims to have no power over the faculty, senior professors clearly exercise a great deal of power over the untenured juniors, and this department suffers the worst treatment of the four at the hands of its own university administration.

The faculty's reactions to multiculturalism at Saint Agnes also suggests that they have had few if any collective discussions about the word--perhaps because there has been almost no direct push to do so from the students or the administration. A full 75 percent of the faculty specifically said the word had no real definition, (refer to Table 3) and a third never offered any indication that it had acquired an operational definition for their own work. For junior faculty, though, my question offered an occasion to allude to stifled conflict between two generations. (See Chapter Five for more on Saint Agnes' generation gap.)

While the junior professors apparently do not initiate conflicts within the department they have addressed multiculturalism with resources from the university and external funding sources. In this bureaucratically organized structure, the failure to address multiculturalism at the department level has meant the failure to define it. To the extent that there is a definition, though, it centers on text selection rather than politics. Specifically, text selection is a problem for the department because multiculturalism has structured the set of anthologies and readers available to them. Senior professors believe the few tradition-oriented readers available to them are too difficult for their students. In their own classes, these professors normally chose shorter works and move more slowly than they would like. In committee decisions about the books that juniors, adjuncts, and part-timers will assign, however, senior faculty often agree (with reluctance) to allow multicultural texts because the publishers offer no realistic alternative at the level of ability they believe their students need.

It may be a result of the hierarchically organized structure of authority at Saint Agnes that students do not challenge the content of English courses. (Diversity in the student population, however, is a constant across all four research sites.) Students do not directly express dissatisfaction, but neither do they choose to major in English. At the time of my visit, there were very few English majors at Saint Agnes. The department has been able to fill some courses with non-majors, but the full-time faculty devotes most of its teaching load to freshman English even though graduate students in the department's MA program teach many of these courses.

The story at Truman State, conversely, is one of unparalleled success. English is the most popular major, and interviews reveal that the department has employed two critical strategies in the face of the institutional changes described in Chapter 2. The first is the department's specialization in composition and related fields such as rhetoric, communications, pedagogy, and linguistics. We might think of these as "applied" fields in English language and literature--a good strategy for an English department in a vocationally oriented middle class university. As indicated above, the faculty also relates pedagogical issues directly to multiculturalism so that nearly 43 percent of the faculty understand multiculturalism as at least partly a pedagogical issue.

The second strategy the Truman State department employed in the face of environmental changes, and the one more important to this study, was a bureaucratic resolution to the problem of multiculturalism. Professors in the Truman State English department were, by far, the least likely to point to ambiguity surrounding the meaning of multiculturalism. There's no mystery to this cultural phenomenon, though. The faculty there resolved the problem long ago in 1983 when they devised their multiculturalism policy. (Chapter 6 details the policy itself.) Their policy statement serves to clarify and define the academic responsibilities of faculty members with respect to multiculturalism. In fact, 64 percent of the faculty mentioned the policy when I asked how they felt about multiculturalism. Thus the policy serves to define expectations for all members of the department and it even defines the word for many.

Although the policy is supposed to appear on every syllabus, many professors routinely forget this detail. There are other organizational practices, however, that support the policy and keep it in the limelight. For instance, job applicants always preview the policy. Adherence to the policy is presented as a condition of work in the department, so there has been an intentional selection of professors who are comfortable with it. The department also makes heavy use of faculty workshops to help with various aspects of the job. For instance, one series of workshops was intended to give faculty resources to broaden their syllabi in compliance with the multiculturalism policy. This is a prime example of how organizational practices can shape ideology (such as the meaning of multiculturalism); the workshop was titled, "Institutionalizing Multiculturalism."

One member of the department expressed surprise at the difference between his department's view on the issue and (almost) everyone else's:

While professors in the two elite departments appeared to conceptualize canon construction at the level of their discipline or specialty, canons in non-elite departments have a more concrete existence in the form of textbook anthologies. Many professors there agonize about their inability to cover all the material in an anthology during of one semester. This bothers them, in part, because leaving out a work literally means skipping physical pages. Anthologies make teaching a "whole" canon appear almost possible, and they increase the sense that text selection is a zero-sum game where adding multicultural material more clearly means skipping traditional works. Old friends from previous years. The difference at Saint Agnes is that they had not agreed upon a consistent justification such difficult changes. Expanding the canon at Trinity required far less soul searching and produced fewer disagreements.

 In both non-elite departments, the path to multiculturalism (or lack thereof) lies in the structure of bureaucratic authority. Policy defines multiculturalism at Truman and the lack of policy at Saint Agnes inhibits the emergence of an institutionalized meaning for the word. In both cases, the working definition of multiculturalism takes the shape of teaching practices--syllabus production and pedagogy. At Trinity and JFK, multiculturalism takes the shape of scholarly cultural production as well as the preservation, interpretation, and distribution of literary high culture. In so doing, however, the faculty in the state-funded university, JFK, framed their responsibilities in terms of student needs, whereas professors at Trinity described their job in terms of a responsibility to national culture(s). In all four cases organizational routines and decisions appear to precede local definitions of multiculturalism. Thus, is appears that a department comes to understand multiculturalism only after deciding to accept it.

This study in meaning construction has bracketed the focus on power that motivates most sociological research, the new focus on symbolic boundaries (Lamont forthcoming, 2000, 1989), and my own work. In this paper, I have characterized the production of meaning for multiculturalism as a locally constructed by-product of concerned, sympathetic, and well-meaning English professors' attempts to navigate new political terrain. I have done so in order to provide an honest and ethnographically sensitive portrayal of meaning-construction at the local level.

From the perspective of larger social structures, however, this is a story of the hegemonic imposition of meaning on a word once offered as the rallying cry for radical cultural and social change. These concerned, sympathetic, well-meaning English professors who come from all positions on the political spectrum, confronted a contradiction between multiculturalism's macro-level claims about hegemonic cultural authority and their own position inside and near the top of that structure. Until now, most of our attention has been directed toward the occasional battles between opponents and defenders of multiculturalism, but my research demonstrates that many English professors chose to change multiculturalism rather than fight about it. They have made sense of multiculturalism in a way that supports the current institutional structure and their position within it.

Thus, my analysis offers support for Hays' (1994) theoretically grounded claim that most human agency serves to reproduce structures of power rather then to transform them. My tendency is to blame the socio-cultural structure that provides the boundaries of reasonable activity for any socially situated actor, but there is a moment--a moment when most of my respondents face the fact that they have been asked to change (and possibly destroy) that structure. Most conclude that the request is unreasonable, and, given the structures that define reasonable activity, it is. It is unreasonable to change the world.

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