From the issue dated April 2, 1999
A New Momentum in Asian-American Studies
Many colleges create new programs; many programs broaden their courses and research
By PETER MONAGHAN
Decades before the Chinese dug for gold in California, traders from Asia came to New York and New England in the 1700s. In a modern-day academic echo of those exploits, Evelyn Hu-DeHart now travels to every American port of call where she thinks her wares might sell.
But it is Asian-American studies that she plies. And colleges and universities are buying like never before.
The field is not only expanding in California, where Asian-American studies was born out of student protests in the late 1960s. Its sudden sprawl is happening in such unexpected locales as Arizona, Illinois, and Texas, and comes just as the field enters its fourth decade.
"The momentum is so strong that it cannot be turned back," says Ms. Hu-DeHart, head of the department of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In the last year alone, she has traveled to several dozen campuses where people are pressing for new or expanded course offerings about Asian-American history and culture.
In the 1980s and early '90s, the field grew only slowly on the West Coast, and in fits and starts in the East. But the last few years have witnessed the emergence of many new programs, and the past year has been a banner one for the hiring of Asian Americanists. Among the campuses recruiting faculty members in the field are Oberlin and Williams Colleges, the Universities of Chicago, Illinois, and Utah, and Wesleyan University.
The field's improved prospects are due largely to enrollment and student pressure. Asian Americans account for 4 per cent of the U.S. population, but about 6 per cent of campus enrollments nationwide. At many of the largest state institutions, and at the most prestigious private campuses, such as Stanford University and some of the Ivy League institutions, their numbers are as high as 30 per cent.
No wonder, then, that a directory of Asian-American programs lists 41 of them -- 15 more than in 1995, and 22 more than in 1990. The directory was compiled at Cornell University, the headquarters of the Association for Asian American Studies and, in 1987, the first Ivy League institution to start a program in the field. The University of Pennsylvania last year became the latest.
What is striking about the recent growth, says the much-traveled Ms. Hu-DeHart, is its geographic scope. New programs have taken root at the University of Connecticut (1993), the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (1994), Loyola University Chicago (1995), New York University (1996), and Arizona State University (1998), among many others.
John Kuo Wei Tchen sees an "Asian-American renaissance" afoot in the arts, politics, and public life, and now in academe. An associate professor of history at New York University, he was hired in 1996 to direct the university's new program in Asian-Pacific-American studies. "It's all generated by demographics," he says. "We've never had the numbers that we do now."
The field originated in the social unrest of the late 1960s -- first at San Francisco State University and the University of California at Berkeley, and soon at other California institutions. Asian-American undergraduates, graduate students, and professors -- most of them American-born and of Chinese and Japanese descent -- joined the demands of blacks, Latinos, and other minority groups for greater representation in all aspects of campus life, including course content.
In the field's early days, most students were Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans, so most courses were focused on those populations. But browse the course lists around the country now, and the number of courses on other Asian populations jumps out: Filipino, Korean, South Asian, and Vietnamese American. When some 500 members of the Association for Asian American Studies meet in Philadelphia this week, one of the themes they will address will be "marginalization and ethnic hierarchies within Asian America."
At the same time that scholars are designing some courses more narrowly to focus on particular populations, they are designing others more broadly.
Comparative approaches are on the rise, with courses offered on "Asian Minorities in America," "Growing Up Ethnic in America," and "Immigration to the U.S." Others compare the Asian and African diasporas, for example, or explore the connections between Asian America and Asian area studies. Still others focus on the Asian-American experience of war, or the theme of "home."
Scholars are trying to rethink Asian-American history to bring it into a more international framework, says Mr. Tchen of New York University. Concentrating only on the current borders of the United States, he suggests, excludes the history of indentured laborers from China and South Asia brought to the Caribbean in earlier centuries, and of the first Filipino and Chinese sailors who came to the Americas in the 16th-century Manila-Acapulco trade.
"With a broader understanding of the circulation of people and influence and goods, we have a much richer cultural background with which to understand contemporary conditions," he says.
That's not just an exercise in making faculty teaching loads more varied and enjoyable, Asian Americanists insist. Rather, they say they have been trying to work out ways to hook different kinds of students, and more of them.
As courses have sprung up away from the powerhouse programs on the West Coast, one pedagogical challenge has been to find texts that make sense to students.
When Siva Vaidhyanathan, now a visiting assistant professor of history at Wesleyan University, began to teach Asian-American studies courses at the University of Texas at Austin, he noticed an odd fact: The only texts he found were "straight Californian and Hawaiian history."
"At first, it was a bit of a stretch to get students to make the connections," he says. But comparing Texas and California, he says, "allows students to get beyond the simple assumption that because people share some phenotypes, they might share the same experiences and beliefs, too."
Even programs in California have broadened beyond their earlier "California-centricity." The state still has 18 of the field's 41 programs; several were new this decade.
At the University of California at Los Angeles, whose program began in 1969, students can choose among over 60 undergraduate and graduate courses annually, with titles like "Asian American Independent Media" and "Asian American Gay and Lesbian Studies." They can complete an undergraduate specialization, a minor, a bachelor's degree, or a master's degree in the field.
Size frees programs to broaden their offerings. Like U.C.L.A., the University of California at Irvine, whose program began in 1991, offers varied courses in Asian-American literature and film. The program is now looking to hire new instructors in Asian-American art and religion.
Although the field is flourishing, professors say, many of the new programs continue to be started as a result of student protests, and even hunger strikes. That was the case in 1994 at Columbia University, where an Asian-American studies program is still struggling to get off the ground.
The struggle is over at the University of Texas at Austin. Richard W. Lariviere, the associate vice-president for international programs at Texas and a professor of Asian studies, heads a committee that is putting a new Asian-American studies program in place. Before the university's new president, Larry R. Faulkner, arrived last year, a proposal approved in concept by the previous president had lain idle.
Asian-American students would not settle for that. "They were really tough," says Mr. Lariviere, "but they never got sidetracked by the wish to make empty gestures. They kept their energies focused on getting this program started."
The students did not all agree on what they wanted. Some hoped for a full-blown Ph.D program in Asian-American studies -- something that no campus in the country has yet. "Others recognized that that was overly ambitious and naive," Mr. Lariviere says. Texas is expected to hire five new full-time faculty members in the field during the next few years.
"The demand was always there," says John M. Liu, an associate professor of Asian-American studies at Irvine and a veteran of the field. "It's the administrative response that is more receptive."
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has certainly become more receptive. It announced last August, after extensive deliberation and repeated student demands to officials, that it would hire six Asian Americanists within three years.
"That is really something -- a bold and big gesture," says Stephen H. Sumida, who heads the Asian-American studies program at the University of Washington and is president of the field's national association. "It makes it difficult for anyone to go on thinking that the Universities of Michigan and Wisconsin were anomalies," he says, referring to two other large midwestern campuses where Asian-American studies began in 1994 and 1991, respectively.
But tensions persist.
At many campuses, notices of position vacancies are getting plenty of applicants, but not necessarily qualified ones, and hirings have been postponed at several campuses. Last year, the Asian-American studies program at California State University at Northridge postponed a search after it failed to produce any candidates who were Asian Americanists. Arizona State and other institutions say they are getting lots of applications from candidates who have yet to finish their dissertations.
The pool of experienced scholars in the field has been drained. "It's gotten to the point we've already drawn the best Asian Americanists into the field," says Mr. Liu of Irvine.
Another hitch: "Being an Asianist isn't the same thing as being an Asian Americanist," he says, noting that some of the former are posing as the latter in an effort to vie for Asian-American-studies positions.
So, who is training the next generation of Asian Americanists?
Many young scholars are coming along, senior figures say. But not without some difficulty. Ph.D.'s who specialize in Asian-American studies are, at present, coming only from traditional doctoral programs. That may soon change, if a proposal to establish a Ph.D. program in Asian-American studies succeeds at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Several institutions offer joint doctoral programs in which students earn a doctorate in a traditional discipline and specialize in Asian-American studies. That's the case at Berkeley, Los Angeles, and San Diego campuses of the University of California, the University of Michigan, and Yale and Brown Universities.
But two commonly cited shortcomings of such arrangements are that young Asian Americanists often come up with no real mentors, and that they are often on campuses that have small local Asian-American populations.
Starting new programs has proved problematic, too, when campus officials pin their hopes on landing a senior scholar with a magnetic reputation. It's well-known that the same handful of people get all the offers -- scholars like Gary Y. Okihiro whom Columbia is trying to lure from Cornell, and Mr. Sumida and his wife, Gail M. Nomura, whom the University of Washington this year did lure from Michigan. "A lot of senior people don't want to move," says Mr. Liu, of Irvine. "We've been through the battles of starting programs, and we don't want to have to go through that again."
For most new programs, a more feasible approach has been to start from the bottom up, although that puts the pressure of program building on a junior faculty member who has yet to clamber over the challenging stile of tenure.
Mr. Tchen, the N.Y.U. professor who was hired in 1996 to head its new Asian-American studies program, is a case in point. When the university hired him, it also gave him a visiting position in the history department. Earlier this year, a campus-wide promotion committee voted to deny him tenure, partly because of a letter from a colleague in history criticizing Mr. Tchen's research. A week later, 50 supportive letters from scholars, near and far, helped persuade a university dean to offer him a tenured joint appointment. The history department had voted 17 to 1 in favor of tenure.
The episode was a chastening one for scholars in Asian-American studies. "It shocked a lot of us," says Lane Hirabayashi, a professor of Asian-American and ethnic studies at the University of Colorado. "Everybody knows Jack and respects his work."
Mr. Tchen is philosophical about his difficulties. He notes that the man he considers the dean of Chinese-American studies, Him Mark Lai, now in his 70s and living in San Francisco, never could find a position at a university, but worked as a professional engineer.
The practice of creating faculty jobs in Asian-American studies but placing the positions within traditional departments is widespread.
"That is the structural weakness," Ms. Hu-DeHart says. "Often it means that programs lack continuity, and coherence. If you have to borrow faculty, you're at the mercy of other departments." And the tenure time bomb begins to tick, she says, bringing with it all the talk of Asian Americanists not meeting the traditional discipline's expectations and "not publishing in journals we know."
Administrators say such critics need to be realistic about what's possible at a time when new faculty positions are hard to come by in academe. And a growing number of senior Asian Americanists say the field's visibility improves when it is integrated with other fields like American studies.
As coordinator of Asian-American studies at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, Peter Nin-Chu Kiang relies on faculty members housed in traditional departments. That doesn't seem to bother him. And in fact, he views his own joint appointment -- in education and Asian-American studies -- as useful, since it allows him to steer students in his Asian-American studies courses into education. "I can have a pipeline from the undergraduate Asian population to try to address the real shortage of Asian-American teachers in public schools," he says.
By using faculty members from across the university, Mr. Kiang says his program can now list four to six classes a semester that fill up quickly. Each course enrolls some 30 to 40 students, many of them 1990s immigrants from Vietnam and China. "We're building like crazy; it's wonderful," he says.
The field has brought some of the challenges it faces upon itself. Asian-American studies may be thriving, but its association has been the site of bitter divisiveness in recent years.
Tensions came to a head at last year's meeting in Honolulu when the Filipino graduate-student caucus (aided by the association's highly unusual practice of granting equal voting rights to all members, graduate students and faculty members alike) led a revolt against the awarding of the association's annual literary prize to Lois-Ann Yamanaka's 1997 novel, Blu's Hanging (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), which some members of the association considered disparaging of Filipinos.
The issues were quite complex, but all but one member of the association's board, clearly appalled by the strong-arm tactics of the Filipino caucus, resigned over the incident, leaving the ship rudderless and adrift. In the fiasco's wake, all the former presidents of the association conferred, over the course of six months, to discuss what should be done. They asked Mr. Sumida, of the University of Washington, to accept a nomination as president.
Anticipating factionalism, he hesitated, but finally accepted and prepared a campaign speech to deliver at the annual meeting in Philadelphia this week. Among the points he included: "Even abrasion and conflict are good in some ways, and we ought to harness them for our scholarship."
It turns out, however, that he will be giving the speech not as a campaign pitch but as an acceptance address. No one else agreed to be nominated.
Copyright © 1999 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
