The chancellor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater has issued an estimated $80,000 in grants to nearly 30 faculty members in the hope that the teachers will use the money to help incorporate diversity into the college curriculum.

The campus’s attention was drawn toward the issue of diversity in 2001, when some students performed in a Homecoming skit wearing blackface makeup.

Although the students involved in the skit meant no harm, the racially charged skit angered students, who called for immediate action from the school.

Jackie Hauky, a UW-Whitewater sophomore, said unrest caused by the incidents was not riotous.

“It wasn’t that big of a deal here; they sort of made it a big deal on the news. Even my parents heard about it in Milwaukee,” Hauky said. “[The idea for the grants] wasn’t just because of that; they were having other problems in the community.”

UW-Whitewater chancellor Jack Miller created a task force to study diversity on campus and affect change in the campus climate. Two months ago, the task force set out to put some changes into the school’s curriculum.

Vice Chancellor Richard Telfer explained that each student at UW-Whitewater is required to take a diversity course, similar to UW-Madison’s ethnic-studies requirement, but faculty at Whitewater were beginning to feel that this was not enough.

“We have to take an ethnic-studies class, but everyone regards it as kind of a joke,” Hauky said.

Hauky said the class she took to fulfill the requirement was a general history class focusing on race relations that didn’t teach her any new information.

Faculty members were concerned that students could take one course and wouldn’t have to concern themselves with diversity ever again. Thus, the diversity task force set out to change this policy in a meeting two months ago.

“The sentiment is that we want to infuse diversity into the curriculum,” Telfer said.

Chancellor Miller offered the opportunity for each faculty member to turn in a written proposal on how he or she could use the grant money to try and incorporate diversity into the school’s programs. Many of the teachers were excited about the idea and jumped on the opportunity to change the curriculum.

The chancellor approved the proposals of 27 faculty members, who received grants averaging almost $3,000.

Telfer explained that there were a number of great ideas proposed by the faculty, and a wide variety of ideas were approved.

One group of teachers chose to create a diversity resource website in which students and teachers could have their questions answered and to which faculty could refer in order to learn different teaching methods.

Other teachers wanted to educate themselves further on the subject of diversity and used the money to attend conferences.

One teacher used the grant money to bring in guest speakers, most notably cartoonist Aaron McGruder, creator the nationally syndicated cartoon strip “The Boondocks,” which follows the lives of young African-American children growing up in the suburbs of Chicago. Last Thursday McGruder held a free lecture at UW-Whitewater entitled “What’s the Color of Funny?”

Teachers also used grant money to change some of the material covered in their courses. One history professor used his grant to add more material about African Americans and Native Americans to the course, while another history professor will use the money to create a course on the history of race relations in America.

“We feel this is a positive thing,” Telfer said. “It’ll really help us learn more about diversity.”

Hauky said she understood the need for diversity to be incorporated into the curriculum because UW-Whitewater is not a very diverse campus.

“The vast majority of kids are white, middle-class suburban or farm kids,” Hauky said.