The primary mission of the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity (CSCRE) is to prepare students to live in a multiracial and polycultural world by understanding how race and ethnicity shape an individual's identity and life chances.

To this end, the Center offers courses that engage with the experiences of ALANA people (African-Americans, Latino/a-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Native-Americans) who are generally marginalized, under-represented, or misrepresented in the U.S. as well as in the curriculum.

Although courses differ in their theoretical orientation and focus, cumulatively, they allow students to study the historically constructed and contested nature of racial identities on the one hand and social movements, diasporas, and encounters between different racial groups on the other. Such an exercise enables students to understand overlapping relationships between self/other, national/global, and white/black, while also interrogating the usefulness of such binaries.

The Center's mission also includes hosting a year-long discussion series on a different topic each year so as to promote a meaningful dialogue on themes that may not be well covered in the College-wide curriculum.

The Center, which was founded in 1999, has four faculty lines and is governed by a permanent steering committee and several advisory committees composed of faculty and administrators drawn from across the campus.