The Two Modes of Inclusion

Abstract

This paper argues that, as the civil rights movement emerged and began to make its claims for inclusion of African Americans in institutions of higher education, two modes of inclusion emerged — two ideas of what it might mean to “include” previously excluded groups within educational institutions. The first mode of inclusion meant simple participation in, rather than alteration of, main- stream institutions of life. While first-mode inclusion might require the removal of certain formal barriers to participation and good treatment of the included persons, it did not appear to threaten the larger community’s basic social organization. However, in the background there remained a second, far more disruptive idea: that inclusion required the transformation of some of the fundamental rules that governed educational institutions themselves and of the larger society that surrounded them. Civil rights claims often styled themselves in the language of the first mode, but when they were done being articulated and defined by those who pushed for inclusion, they often, subtly but inexorably, slid into the second. This paper argues that the same tension between first- and second-mode inclusion claims has emerged repeatedly since that time as various groups have invoked the legacy of the civil rights movement, including in the activities of those who have recently styled themselves advocates of racial inclusion, and of intellectual diversity, in higher education.