Like many Americans who immigrated to Canada – in my case, in 1970 during the Vietnam War – I was not prepared for the difference between the educational systems of my old home and my new adopted one. Actually I was not prepared for anything, since I knew virtually nothing about Canada at the time. I had attended a small private school in the middle of New York City as a scholarship student, and Oberlin College, a small private university in Ohio. "Small" and "private" are the operative words here – had I gone to a large public high school, or a state university, I am sure my impressions would have differed. Now, thirty years later, with two children safely through the local public system and almost twenty years of teaching at York under my belt, I often find myself reflecting on the adjustments I made while studying and teaching here, and the remarkable changes that have taken place in Toronto since my arrival.

As outsiders keep telling us, Toronto is a most unusual city. Yet when my wife Tam, a native of Hong Kong and I arrived, it seemed sleepy and quiet compared to the places we had just left, not at all the "multi-cultural" metropolis it is today. Whereas roughly 30,000 Chinese Canadians were living here then, for example, today there are over a dozen times that number, and a similar growth has taken place in the South Asian, West Indian, African, and other so-called visible minority communities. One statistical measure of this expansion is the fact that sometime last year the combined number of these minorities came to surpass that of the white population as a whole. In fact, now we are supposedly the most diverse city in the world, so that our students bring to class an amazing array of languages, cultures, and life experiences. Given that York functions as the "first university" for immigrant families in the area, and that the demographic transformation our community is undergoing is likely to continue for some time, the diversity of our student body will only increase.

These conditions stand in stark contrast to those of my own undergraduate experience. Classes at Oberlin were largely white, and made up primarily of children of the elite, with a smaller number of emerging "elites-to-be". Yet the school had a proud liberal tradition, having been, in the 1830s, the very first American institute of higher learning to award degrees to women and blacks. Moreover, as students of the late '60s we favoured the breaking down of class barriers and the taking of education and political ideas "to the people", a goal quite at variance with our decidedly privileged circumstances. My immediate reaction to the mass education system I encountered in Toronto was therefore overwhelmingly positive. Public schools in New York were and are divided by race and class, with the majority of families who can afford it, sending their kids to private schools, while elite institutions like Oberlin, despite their egalitarian ideals, separate the rich and the gifted from the larger community. Schools in Toronto exhibit less of this division and hypocrisy, although there is little reason to be complacent, given the ongoing changes taking place in our social structure.

Diversity at York, however, is far more than just a matter of complexion or numbers – it is key to the intellectual project we are collectively undertaking. Unlike in the old days, when Western Civilisation was the standard against which everything else could be measured, today we are challenged to understand it in relative terms, alongside the traditions represented by so many of our students. The way in which the "self" has been constructed in Christianity, for example, obviously becomes clearer when one steps outside the forest, so to speak, and looks at selfhood in South Asian, East Asian, or African religions. Monotheism is viewed most clearly against a polytheistic backdrop, linear mythologies against those that are cyclical in nature. An understanding of Western narrative form is obviously enhanced by reference to narrative traditions of cultures that have nothing to do with Aristotle and the Greeks. In short, when the Other emerges as a full-fledged (and diverse) partner in human cultural development, and not a bogeyman or exotic locus for Western imaginings, we are all challenged to develop more sophisticated and comparative frameworks for our analysis and our teaching, whatever our fields.

Our students should be active players in this process, not just for intellectual reasons (although these are, as I have just suggested, of crucial significance) but because it relates directly to their personal lives. They, after all, are experiencing diversity as a daily reality, and many if not most have to deal with problems of a "comparative" nature as they struggle to resolve the differences between the cultures (and often languages) of their home and those of the broader community. Comparative study of any kind helps bring such struggles into consciousness: yet it is also true that there is special meaning in studying traditions that are connected to "your" home culture. In many American universities, in fact, a great deal of attention is being paid to the various "diasporic" communities themselves, with entire courses of study being devoted to the area. If one looks ahead, it seems likely that we will be facing increasing pressure, both intellectual and political, to provide similar types of programmes at York University in the not-too-distant-future.

It would be a mistake, however, to wait for such programmes to provide "the answer" to the professional gauntlet that diversity throws down before us. To be better teachers we need to understand our students, and the cultural traditions their families hail from, more fully. This in turn challenges us to be more wide-ranging and comparative in our approaches, and more open to the types of knowledge that our students bring with them to class. If York, as statistics suggest, is one of the most diverse institutions of higher learning in the world, then it is up to us to develop pedagogical strategies that take full advantage of that fact. Such a process, I would suggest, will enrich us intellectually even as it strengthens the fabric of society and the culture in which we live.