Karen Lee spent a recent Friday afternoon hanging around, on pins and needles, outside of the red-carpeted assembly room in Amherst College’s stately Converse Hall. Inside, the faculty was voting on whether to approve an Asian American and Pacific Islander studies major, for which generations of student activists like Lee had advocated.
When Lee heard the cheer go up behind the double doors, she knew the major had passed.
“It felt like a fever dream,” she said. “I’ve always just accepted it as fact that I would never see this major come about in my time, and there were so many moments where I felt burnt out and so disillusioned that I didn’t even know why I was continuing to do work on this.”
It was only a half-century in coming, but Amherst will offer the major this fall, in what several experts believe will be a first for a small liberal-arts college. Faculty members voted in favor, 138 to six, at their March 8 meeting.
The new major is a sign of renewed interest in the field in recent years, and also a reminder of its slow growth historically.
“We have Black studies. We have Latinx studies. We think these are important because these are major populations of our country who have distinct experiences,” said Pawan H. Dhingra, a professor of U.S. immigration studies who will be the program’s first chair. “The same thing applies to Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.”
Sharon G. Goto, a professor of psychological science at Pomona College, called the advent of an Asian American studies major at Amherst “really important.” “There hasn’t been much offering in Asian American studies beyond a few courses here and there at small liberal-arts colleges, historically,” she said. The major is more common at research universities, particularly on the West Coast, and several small colleges offer minors.
Goto serves as the chair of what’s known as the “intercollegiate department of Asian American studies at the Claremont Colleges.” The Claremont Colleges is a group of seven institutions in California that together offer an Asian American studies major to undergraduates, but no one college hosts all of the courses needed for the degree.
“It’s a really good liberal-arts major in many ways because it does take from other disciplines, like history, sociology, literature,” Goto added.
I’ve always just accepted it as fact that I would never see this major come about in my time.
Meanwhile, for students of Asian descent, the major can be affirming. “To really know that you are legitimated by a college is when the content of your group is in the curriculum,” Dhingra said, “because that’s when the college is saying ‘OK, this is the material we think you need to know, or at least have exposure to, in order to be an educated person from our college.’”
Decades of Student Activism
The field was founded in 1969 at San Francisco State University, where a protest by the Black Student Union led to the creation of four ethnic-studies units, including Asian American studies. Student activism was also crucial to the passage of Amherst’s new major: The Amherst Student traced calls for Asian American studies at the college back to 1972, when students published an open letter in the paper, demanding the college hire a professor to teach the subject.
A few waves of activism followed, including a large protest called Amherst Uprising in 2015. As in the racial-minority college protests of the ‘60s, Amherst Uprising was led by Black activists who sought changes to the campus culture. Inspired by the movement, some students organized what are now known as the Asian and Pacific American Action Committee and the Amherst Asian Alumni Network to advocate for Asian American and Pacific Islander studies. Since then, the two groups have been central drivers for the major.
The student and alumni groups saw an opportunity to make a renewed push when the pandemic sparked anti-Asian hate crimes across the country. To them, the incidents showed that all Americans needed to learn more about Asian American history.
Lee is a junior and a current member of the Asian and Pacific American Action Committee. She’s majoring in English and plans to ask Dhingra if she can add the Asian American studies major. Her scholarly interests include Pacific Islander studies and past efforts by Asian countries, such as Japan, China, and Vietnam, to colonize others.
Some Students’ Worries
Not all Amherst students are as optimistic about the major. Kei Lim, an editor in chief of The Amherst Student, and Noor Rahman, a senior managing editor, published an opinion essay in the paper expressing worry that the major would overemphasize East and Southeast Asian American perspectives, at the expense of Central and South Asian and Middle Eastern Americans, populations the major also purports to cover.
“That the richness of Asia and, by extension, the so-called Asian American diaspora, is boxed into a single department because of a Eurocentric designation of ‘us and them’ is both irrational and racist,” Lim and Rahman wrote.
In interviews, neither Lim nor Rahman seemed to want to shut the major down altogether, which their criticism might suggest. Lim said they want to prod the program to be more inclusive.
Rahman was particularly bothered by the “Asian American” title. Two academics, Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee, of Japanese and Chinese descent, coined the phrase in 1968 to unify populations that shared similar experiences of racism in the United States at the time.
“I had never really identified with the label ‘Asian’ because it tends to implicitly mean East Asian, at least in America,” Rahman said. Her family came to the United States from Pakistan, a South Asian country, generations ago. It didn’t occur to her to join “Asian American” student groups in college, but, she said, “it still felt wrong for these spaces to either implicitly or explicitly claim to represent me.”
She wants to see courses more specifically state what subgroups of Asian Americans they’ll cover, and doesn’t understand how a course like “Intro to Asian American History,” which is listed in the formal proposal for the major, could truly include all groups.
Dhingra acknowledged that fears about inclusivity are common in the field of Asian American studies. “It’s fruitful for students to be engaging with the major and pushing the major to be all that it can and should be,” he said.
But he thinks the major might be more encompassing than it seems at first glance. “Once the curriculum is clear and the courses are there, you’ll see a much-wider variety of options than you’ll find elsewhere, especially given our size,” he said. Faculty members at Amherst include experts in Pacific Islander studies, while Dhingra specializes in South Asian American experiences.
Faculty members in the major will have home appointments in other departments, including American studies, English, and environmental studies. Asian American and Pacific Islander studies will not get its own department. Starting a program, rather than a department, is a common first step for new majors at Amherst, said Edward D. Melillo, a professor of environmental studies who will be a core faculty member in AAPI studies.
