More Students Increase Demand for Scholars

By Somini Sengupta
The New York Times, June 9, 1999
©1999 The New York Times Company

The historian Evelyn Hu-DeHart sees a paradox for Asian American college students: they are flocking to campuses in greater numbers, but see little of themselves in the curriculum. 

"They're visible and invisible at the same time," said Ms. Hu-DeHart, who heads the ethnic studies department at the University of Colorado and studies Asians in the United States.

But that is beginning to change. Largely in response to students' demands, colleges are establishing programs in Asian American studies and hiring a record number of scholars specializing in those subjects. 

Today, there are at least 43 undergraduate programs -- twice as many as a decade ago -- at campuses from Columbia to the University of Texas to the University of Pennsylvania, according to the Association for Asian American Studies, a national academic group.  Most of the new programs allow undergraduates to earn minors in the area; a few allow majors.

"It's never been hotter," said John Kuo Wei Tchen, a historian who studies Chinese Americans and one who was hired in 1996 to begin the Asian-Pacific-American Studies program at New York University. "On the one hand, it's driven by demographics. On the other hand, there are intellectual arguments" for offering these programs.

And with the increased demand for scholars to teach the new courses, some institutions are hiring adjunct professors without advanced degrees, or academics who once specialized in Asian subjects like postcolonial Indian literature, rather than in Asian American studies.

The field itself has undergone rapid changes. Once primarily focused on the history and literature of Americans of Chinese and Japanese ancestry on the West Coast, courses are now as likely to explore the history of Indians in Britain as they are to study the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

The University of Colorado, where Ms. Hu-DeHart teaches, offers an undergraduate major in ethnic studies, which includes courses in Asian American studies. The University of Texas approved the creation of an Asian American studies program several years ago, but recently became embroiled in a battle with its students, over whether the students could have a voice in the selection of a program director; in May, student protests resulted in 10 arrests.

At Columbia University, where Asian American and Hispanic students staged protests in 1994, programs in both areas were established last year in the interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. An alumni group has raised about $1 million to support Asian American studies.

The demand for such courses is hardly surprising. Since the late 1980's, Asian American students have been arriving on campus in record numbers.   (Many are the children of immigrants who came to the United States after the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965.) 

At New York University, for example, 21 percent of undergraduates this year identified themselves as Asian-American, up from 10 percent in 1980. At Columbia, the number is close to 17 percent, and at the University of Pennsylvania 19 percent.

In 1996, Edward Chang, then a sophomore, took his first course in Asian-American literature. He says he read novels that he identified with for the first time; he remembers in particular a literary mystery called "Native Speaker," about a young Korean-American man exploring his racial identity.  

"I could really identify with the characters," said Chang, 21, who graduated last month with a minor in Asian American studies and plans to attend law school.  "Dual identity, searching for who you are, conflicts of ethnicity."

The boom in Asian American studies is relatively recent, but its origins go back three decades -- to California in the late 1960's, when Asian American students, following their black peers, successfully pressed for classes exploring their own history and literature.

In the next decades, Asian American curriculums, like other ethnic studies programs, have repeatedly come under fire from conservatives, who say such efforts fragment what should be a standard curriculum of American history and culture. In recent years, a handful of colleges, like Princeton, have begun to incorporate Asian American studies under the banner of American studies.

And scholars in the field, like Gary Okihiro, the director of Columbia's Asian American studies program, say they must contend with an intellectual dilemma. As a historian, Okihiro says he studies Asian Americans as members of a racial minority because that is how they are seen by the white majority.  But he also struggles against the notion of studying history only through the lens of racial categories. "While they empower," he says, "they may also disempower by precluding solidarities across those racialized borders."

Three decades ago, there was a thick wall between those who studied Asia and those who studied Asian Americans. In fact, many Asian-Americans vigorously resisted merging the two disciplines, saying it would only reinforce the stereotype of Asian Americans as foreigners.

Now, with technological advances connecting Asian Americans both to Asia and the many countries where Asians have settled, its scholars no longer seem overly concerned with study of the United States. 

"We're looking very seriously at the forces that provoke immigration, how they work in both directions, how people go back and forth," said David Palumbo-Liu, a professor of comparative literature at Stanford and the author of a book that explores how relations with Asia have shaped modern American history.

But the broader focus can also be risky, some scholars say. Focusing on "the Chinese diaspora," for example, can blur the distinctions between people of Chinese extraction living in different countries, contends Arif Dirlik, a historian who studies China at Duke University. This "whimpering preoccupation with the location of home," can ultimately create fertile grounds for racism, Dirlik writes in the forthcoming book, "Across the Pacific: Asian Americans and Globalization" (Temple University Press), which was edited by Ms. Hu-DeHart.

Instead, he writes, "what is important is to enable people to feel at home where they live."