By Mary Tallon with Matt Stensland
The Daily Illini
July 29, 2003
After years of campaigning for their own cultural center, Asian-American student groups received word from the University last week that it plans to construct an Asian-American Cultural Center — possibly as soon as this fall.
"This is a great step for our community," said Karen Wang, a co-director of the Asian Pacific American Coalition, who attended the July 21 meeting where Provost Richard Herman and Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Patricia Askew announced the University had plans to go forward with the center.
"One of the things we have been doing over the past few years is investing considerably in cultural studies," Herman said. "(The center) is something that has long been desired and something the students played a great role in bringing about by keeping this issue in the front of everyone's minds."
Students will be heavily involved in designing the center, as well as its programming, Herman said.
Sherwin Yen, who also attended the meeting and is a member of the ad hoc committee of students that is planning for the center, said this decision is important because it means Asian students on campus will now have a centralized location where they can meet and share resources.
Yen said he hopes the Asian-American Cultural Center can serve Asian Americans the way La Casa Cultural Latina and the African-American Cultural Center have served those minority groups by combatting problems of freshman retention and racism at the University.
He also hopes that the center could prevent some people from stereotyping Asian Americans as the "model minority" and to show people that real problems do exist for members of the Asian community, such as the rash of attacks on Asian-American women that took place on campus last fall.
Herman said he expects the building to cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars to construct, and the initial year could cost more than $100,000 for hiring staff and developing programs.
Wang said she was grateful to the provost and vice chancellor for supporting the construction of the center at a time when many services and courses are being cut from the University as it grapples with $63 million less in state appropriations than it saw last year.
But she also said the committee is concerned that the building the University is proposing — a pre-fabricated structure with only 1,400 square feet — will not give the center enough room for much more than a couple offices and a meeting room. And because the structure is going to be a manufactured building, the University will not be able to add on to the building if the center needs to expand, Yen said.
"We're still going to try to present to the University what we think we need," Yen said.
