Reporter Volume 25, No.23 April 7, 1994

By MARK WALLACE
Reporter Staff
Multiculturalism and diversity may be hot issues on American campuses
in the 1990s, but to Maxine Seller they are the issues she's been
dealing with all her life.
	"I've been teaching multicultural issues at UB since 1975,"
says Seller, a professor in the Department of Educational
Organization, Administration and Policy (EOAP). "I had only a handful
of students then, but now I have to turn them away.
	"A lot of my interest in minority issues, in how people
identify themselves and integrate their different identities comes
from the fact that I'm Jewish and grew up in North Carolina in the
1940s," Seller says. "My father was a Polish immigrant, Jim Crow laws
were still fierce at that time, and I also had to contend with
Southern attitudes toward women. So I think I always had a sense of
what it meant to be marginal."
	Seller's mother was from the North, and Seller went north to
Bryn Mawr for college. "I had a mentor in history thereQthough we
didn't use the word mentor thenQnamed Helen Taft Manning, who was the
daughter of President Taft, and who showed me that a woman could be a
scholar and have a life, too," Seller says. "Having a role model is
extremely importantQit was the first time in my life that I thought I
might do something other than have a family."
	However, by no means did Seller get a feminist education at
Bryn Mawr, she says. "We weren't taught much about women, and nothing
about minorities or Jews," Seller says. "I was trained to work with
historical documents, but not in the content that later became my
focus. I try to deal with my students in a way that recognizes that
they, too, may take what I'm doing and go off in their own
directions."
	Seller earned her Ph.D. in history at the University of
Pennsylvania. She planned to do a dissertation on the role of French
intellectuals in the Spanish Civil War, she says, but was told that
she would have to go to Europe to do her research. Seller was already
married and had children at that time, she says, and so she switched
her field to American Jewish history, doing her dissertation on Isaac
Lesser, a Jewish community leader in 19th century Philadelphia.
	That switch started her on the path of studying ethnic history
and ethnic communities in the U.S. that continues to this day, Seller
says. "Since then, I've moved on to compare immigrant groups to
colonized communities like Native Americans, African Americans, and
Mexican Americans," she says.
	In the late '60s, at Bucks County Community College (BCCC)
near Philadelphia, Seller taught a course called "Women In Society"
that, she says, the college administration did not like. "The women's
movement had dawned and was saying things that I had thought for a
long time," Seller says. "The administration wouldn't pay for the
course, so we did it for free, and they wouldn't give us a classroom
so we taught it in the cafeteria after the lunch hour. A local
minister even accused us of causing divorces. But eventually the
course was regularized, and we even started a day-care center."
	At UB, Seller currently teaches courses on the History of
Education in the EOAP Department as well as special history courses in
ethnicity and education, the education of women, and the education of
minorities in the U.S.
	Her courses emphasize studying what she calls informal as well
as formal education. Seller says, "I'm interested in the role of
women's clubs, labor unions, newspapers, parochial schools and
settlement houses in education. I look at all the different
environments in which people learn, whether those environments come
from outside, like public education, or from within the group."
	Seller is the author of a number of important books on the
history of education and on women and ethnicity, including To Seek
America: A History of Ethnic Life in the United States, which she
wrote, she says, when she realized there was no textbook for her
minorities course at BCCC and was given a contract to write one. She
has just finished a book called Women Educators in the United States,
1820-1993, which will be published this spring and is, she says, a
book that incorporates diversity and details the life stories of 66
women, including Native American, Puerto Rican, and Jewish women, as
well as women from many other ethnic groups. 
	Seller is the co-editor of the forthcoming series from SUNY
Press, Voices Of Immigrant Women, as well as of Common Differences:
Dilemmas of Identity, Community, and Pluralistic Society in the United
States, a book she is currently working with UB professors William
Fischer of English, David Gerber of History, and Jorge Guitart of
Modern Languages and Literatures.
	Seller is also active outside UB. She is one of the founding
mothers of the Pro-Choice Network in Western New York, and is vice
president of the local Bureau of Jewish Education. "I feel it's
important to be involved in different communities," Seller says. "I
enjoy politics, although I don't always get directly involved. But I'm
hopeful that one can make a difference."
	Seller sees multicultural education as extremely important,
because the United States is a diverse country, and because she
believes that multiculturalism is a positive value. But she says she
hopes that a multicultural curriculum doesn't become an excuse for
avoiding other kinds of social reform, including better financing for
schools and job opportunities for minorities.
	"Multicultural education is only one part of a program to make
our society more just and open, and it is not a substitute for other
kinds of change," Seller says.
	"UB has to take a stand, has to make affirmative action a
reality," Seller says. "I was disappointed that UB didn't take a stand
against hate speech when Khalid Abdul Muhammad was here...a stand for
diversity, but against hate speech about any specific group, no matter
who is speaking."
	Whatever the status of the current multicultural debate,
Seller feels that her academic life has been greatly rewarding. "My
experience at UB has been a good one," she says. "Like many women,
I've had a checkered career and have taught at lots of places. At UB
I've been free to teach what I want to teach, and have had many
supportive colleagues."