Columbia University has taken the next step in its plan to add new multicultural classes to its core curriculum, the great books undergraduate program.

The university announced it would spend $50 million on a project to enhance the core curriculum’s multicultural offerings last fall, shortly after students conducted a week-long hunger strike to protest the weakness of the classes. Now Columbia is assigning a young professor of Western civilization, Roosevelt Montas, 34, to direct the effort.

It will not be an easy job. The position will involve balancing the concerns of academics who worry that the university could veer from its focus on a canon of Western texts and students who have been pushing the university to make the core curriculum, called the Core, more inclusive.

Mr. Montas, a Dominican immigrant who moved to New York in his teens and attended Columbia as a scholarship student, is quick to acknowledge that his ethnic and economic background “embodies diversity,” which some believe is missing from the core curriculum. Yet he is also one of the Core’s most passionate defenders.

“I don’t represent the tradition of dead white males that the Core is associated with,” Mr. Montas said of his new role. “I think it helps to undo or challenge the idea that this is a white curriculum.

“But the idea that a core curriculum ought to be representative based on the way that, say, Congress is representative, that it should be demographically representative, that’s just apples and oranges,” he said. “The core curriculum represents and embodies the most important ideas that have shaped the institutions and values of our culture. And it ought to represent those ideas.”

Mr. Montas, who teaches a Core class on contemporary civilization that surveys Western moral and political thought, beginning with Plato, said being somewhere in the middle of the often heated debate on the curriculum makes him well-positioned to mend the rift between the two sides — or at least foster a friendlier discussion.

The professor was born in a rural village in the Dominican Republic. While neither of his parents graduated from high school, he attended one of New York City’s most diverse high schools, John Bowne in Queens, though he graduated with only a minimal command of English. He described his first school field trip, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as “bewildering” because he had never seen so many white people before.

He used the same word to describe his first two years at Columbia. “I doubt there are very many people who enter college in the same state of bewilderment and ignorance that I did,” he said. It was the Core that helped him climb out of his state of confusion and become a lifelong academic, he said.

“The core curriculum worked very well for me because I was trying to make sense of the world into which I was thrust,” he said. That world, he acknowledged, was mostly white and upper class.

He wrote a master’s degree thesis on Plato and his doctoral dissertation on abolitionism and national identity, and has presented papers on such topics as the challenge of “Moby Dick” to race and gender.

But he was quick to add of the Core: “It’s a systematic and rigorous approach to some of the fundamental questions about what it means to be human — questions that every human being must ask his or herself. They have been asked over and over again in history.”

That philosophy of the core curriculum will likely sit well with conservative academics like the administrators of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, who have lauded Columbia’s great books program and have criticized other universities, such as Harvard, that have moved away from the approach.

“We wouldn’t want any effort to water that down, or to succumb to some political pressure,” the institute’s director of university stewardship, Richard Brake, said. “We don’t want some kind of very rigid multicultural perspective.” As long as the plan is not to replace Shakespeare with Eastern philosophy texts, however, Mr. Brake said the institute has no complaints with strengthening supplementary multicultural offerings.

Mr. Montas said the structure of the core curriculum will not change. Undergraduate students will still have to take a set of 12 classes, including two Western civilization courses, literature, art, and music humanities, a writing class, two science classes, a foreign language, and a choice of one class in a “major” non-Western culture.

What will change is the offerings on the list of major cultures classes that can count toward Core credits. Mr. Montas’s job will be to work with faculty and administrators to create a set of more rigorous, seminar-style classes for that requirement, he said.

Current classes that count toward the requirement include Introduction to Japanese Painting, the Mongols in History, Buddhist Ethics, Arabia Imagined, and Salsa, Soca, and Reggae: Popular Musics of the Caribbean.

Within two years, the goal of bringing the multicultural classes up to par with the other Core offerings should be met, Mr. Montas said, though he added that he is almost as confident that the debate over what belongs in the Core and what does not will not end there. “The core curriculum is always evolving and it has to evolve,” he said. “Perhaps a better way of putting it is that the core curriculum is not a tradition of thought but a tradition of debate.”