As Shirley N. Weber built the Africana-studies department at San Diego State University in the 1970s, she spent lots of time defending its existence.
Eventually, shaped by her studies of Black social movements, the professor and longtime department chair realized that her defensive posture was self-defeating. She decided to stop answering questions from, as she put it, “old white men.”
“The smart thing,” Weber said recently in a Zoom interview, “is to be on offense — is to ask the question, not to answer the question.”
Weber, now a Democratic member of the California State Assembly, is taking that offensive strategy to unprecedented territory this week as she campaigns for the governor to sign into law a measure that would make ethnic studies a requirement for undergraduates in the country’s biggest public-university system.
Weber’s proposal, which if enacted would apparently be the first law of its kind, is embroiling the California State University system in a conflict between the competing values of racial justice and academic freedom. Supporters of the bill, including ethnic-studies faculty leaders, student activists, and Black Lives Matter organizers, view it as a key lever in the national uprising against racism. Opponents, including Cal State administrators, system trustees, and the systemwide Academic Senate, portray it as a legislative intrusion into teaching.
The conflict could be a taste of what’s to come on other campuses, as student activists nationwide intensify their fight to diversify curricula. Already this year, Emory University, responding to a longstanding demand by Black students, adopted a race and ethnicity graduation requirement. Meanwhile, the nine-campus Los Angeles Community College District is considering an ethnic-studies requirement, and students at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst are calling for a social-justice course requirement.
Under Weber’s bill, AB 1460, students in the California State system would have to take a course concerning one of four groups at the core of the ethnic-studies field: Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latina/o Americans. Ethnic studies uses interdisciplinary methods to examine racism and its intersection with various types of oppression, such as nativism and patriarchy, said Tracy Lachica Buenavista, a professor of Asian American studies at California State University at Northridge.
Weber acknowledged that wielding a state law to change curricula defies campus traditions of self-governance. But the ethnic-studies community, she noted, has often challenged traditions in its half-century struggle to secure an institutional foothold.
Roots of a Discipline
Ethnic-studies programs grew out of protests by students of color in the 1960s and 1970s to reform colleges and universities that were failing to offer classes relevant to their lives. Weber, who earned a doctorate in speech communications from the University of California at Los Angeles, was hired to help develop Black studies at San Diego State after demonstrators there burned trash cans in front of the president’s office.
The roots of Weber’s AB 1460 fight date in part to a 2013 attempt by administrators at Cal State’s Long Beach campus to downgrade Africana studies from a department to a program. That kind of administrative move, protested by students and professors, was familiar to Weber. As she recalled in a 2008 interview for a San Diego State oral-history project, any time her own university had faced budget cuts, campus leaders turned to Black studies and said, “Why can’t we get rid of them?”
Against the backdrop of the Long Beach unrest, the system’s chancellor, Timothy P. White, created a task force to review ethnic studies statewide. Its 2016 report found student interest in ethnic studies was increasing even as the units’ resources had shrunk, and almost all of them had dealt with attempted demotions like the one at Long Beach. The report recommended that ethnic studies become a requirement throughout the system’s 23 campuses, a step the field’s professors say would buttress their units’ financial stability.
Weber described herself as a champion of frustrated students and professors eager to reform an institution whose leaders, in her view, had failed to heed the recommendation of their own commission.
“Ethnic studies did not come into existence because the CSU decided it was a great idea,” Weber said. “It came into existence because students protested, burned trash cans. Many students got thrown out of the university to bring ethnic studies into existence.”
That tradition of protest continues. In pre-pandemic times, student activists fought for Weber’s bill by marching through their campus and lobbying lawmakers in Sacramento. This week, they used Zoom and social media in one last attempt to pressure the governor, Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, into signing the bill. (It’s unclear whether he will do so.) They spoke in personal terms about how ethnic studies changes lives.
Melys Bonifacio-Jerez is an Afro-Latinx senior studying sociology at California State University at Chico. Bonifacio-Jerez described how students of color at Chico, which is located in a conservative county, are routinely exposed to hateful and violent language and images, such as white-power symbols. Students’ complaints about microaggressions are typically disregarded or described as a “leftist agenda,” said Bonifacio-Jerez, who uses the pronoun they.
Ethnic-studies classes are a refuge. Bonifacio-Jerez seemed near tears as they conveyed the comfort and empowerment they had derived from a Chicanx-literature course taught by a Chicana professor. They saw themselves reflected in their peers and professor.
“That classroom was the only place in Chico where I felt safe,” they said at a news conference on Tuesday.
Beyond exposing students to new subject matter, ethnic studies corrects the miseducation students receive in public schools, said Melina Abdullah, a professor of Pan-African studies at Cal State’s Los Angeles campus. Abdullah recalled teaching the history of chattel slavery to a Latinx student who thought Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. had worked together. Admitting that ignorance brought the student to tears. She had graduated from high school with a 3.8 grade-point average.
Abdullah, a Black Lives Matter organizer, likened the campaign for AB 1460 to the civil rights era’s fight against segregation.
“We didn’t ask Woolworth’s to desegregate their own lunch counter,” she said. “We needed government intervention.”
The Alternative Approach
Cal State’s leaders, however, argue that they have a better way to elevate ethnic studies — without a new state law.
The Board of Trustees last month approved a new systemwide ethnic-studies and social-justice graduation requirement. Administrators called it a more inclusive policy than AB 1460. Students might fulfill it by learning about other “historically oppressed groups, such as Jewish, Muslim, and LGBTQ populations,” according to a description shared by a system spokesperson.
Students could meet the requirement without taking an ethnic-studies course, a fact that has outraged scholars in the field.
But Jeffrey Blutinger, director of the Jewish-studies program on the Long Beach campus, praised the system’s approach for fixing what he described as “a major flaw in AB 1460”: Jewish exclusion.
“The current definition of ethnic studies is trapped in a limited conception from the late 1960s,” Blutinger said during the trustees’ July meeting. “It is time California moved into the 21st century, and not only broadened its definition to include the other ethnicities who make a home here, such as Jews, Armenians, Arabs, and South Asians, but also recognize that social justice includes other groups, such as women and LGBT. At a time when racism and anti-Semitism are rising in our country, an ethnic-studies and social-justice requirement should provide students the tools to understand and confront this danger.”
The trustees argued that Weber’s bill would take the system down the dangerous path of letting legislators set the curriculum. Those legislators might be progressive today, they said, but that could change. What if future lawmakers mandated the teaching of creationism?
“I can imagine if we were in a different state that we would be scared out of our wits by the idea that the Legislature would be telling us what we should be teaching,” said one trustee, Rebecca D. Eisen.
Cal State administrators raised a further concern about Weber’s ethnic-studies bill: the price. They called it an “unfunded mandate” that would cost about $16 million to carry out at a time of financial hardship brought on by the pandemic.
Weber, speaking with The Chronicle, leaned forward into her Zoom camera and smiled at that complaint. Cal State officials, she said, like to defend their use of adjuncts over tenured professors on the grounds that cheaper adjuncts allow universities to pivot: to change curricular directions without cost.
Now, she said, they can pivot to ethnic studies.
As for inclusivity, Jewish, Palestinian, and other communities didn’t want to be classified as ethnic in the past, she said. The term “ethnic” — whenever it comes up in a negative context, like failing students — always is interpreted as “Blacks and browns and Native Americans,” she said.
“If I say, ‘I have a couple of dollars to give to the ethnic students,’ everybody becomes ethnic at that point,” she said.
“Nobody’s ethnic until you’re handing out candy.”
