Almost 30 years after its founding, the field of ethnic studies now finds itself in a paradoxical situation, boasting some long-established programs and departments, yet intellectually marginalized; its necessity in the academy widely endorsed yet its scholarly merits almost universally ignored.
Born of student activism in the late 1960s, ethnic-studies programs were created by administrators as “fire insurance,” to placate and appease militant students they did not know how to handle. In the mid-1990s, a new generation of students is once again demonstrating for either the creation or the enhancement of ethnic studies on their campuses.
During the past few decades, campus administrators have embraced “multiculturalism” and set out determinedly to diversify whatever they can: the student body, the staff, the faculty, the curriculum. Today, however, in the age of diversity, the field of ethnic studies is meant to be seen but not heard, its scholars sometimes treated like unemancipated children or colonial subjects without full citizenship rights.
It is time for ethnic-studies scholars to speak out strongly about their second-class status, and it is time for administrators to review and reward the contributions that these scholars are making to research and teaching. Students’ demands for ethnic-studies programs, and enrollment in ethnic- studies courses, have risen in the 1990s. At the University of California at Berkeley, for example, the ethnic-studies department and the separate department of Afro-American studies together enroll more than 8,000 students annually while turning away more than 2,000, according to administrators.
During the past 30 years, scholarship has matured in the many subfields of ethnic studies -- black, Africana, Afro- or African-American studies; Mexican-American, Chicano, Latino, and Puerto Rican studies; American Indian and Native American studies; and Asian-American studies. In 1991, Johnnella Butler, then head of the American Ethnic Studies department at the University of Washington, counted more than 700 ethnic- studies programs on U.S. campuses.
Owing a tremendous debt to such early black intellectuals as W.E.B. DuBois -- who had no academic home despite his doctorate from Harvard -- ethnic studies today can boast of distinctive contributions to scholarship. The field has its own hall of fame. While the work of Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates, and bell hooks is among the best known, we also can point to Ramon Gutierrez’s highly original study of power and sexuality in colonial New Mexico, Michael Omi’s and Howard Winant’s seminal text on racial formation in the United States, Ronald Takaki’s masterful narratives of Asian-American history, and Ward Churchill’s incisive defense of Native American sovereignty as examples of the exemplary work being done.
Unfortunately, the very success of ethnic studies appears to have prompted a backlash. We see it among members of the National Association of Scholars in the highly visible and contested arena of cultural politics, and also among administrators who seek to weaken the very ethnic-studies programs they established in the first place.
Why is the field beleaguered even as it continues to spread on U.S. campuses? Why is it being both promoted and undermined?
On most campuses, administrators have denied the field of ethnic studies the academic currency that it most needs: recognition and respect as a legitimate scholarly discipline that constructs, disseminates, and imparts knowledge in a distinctive way. They ignore ethnic-studies faculty members, whose work they largely have failed to appreciate and whose approach to scholarship they may, indeed, have difficulty fully comprehending. Ethnic-studies scholars believe that their primary responsibility is to question received wisdom and truths, particularly those presented as universal, without consideration of their context or the perspectives of the people propounding them.
Most campus administrators understand that they need ethnic studies, because an ethnic-studies program is the surest way to demonstrate commitment to diversity: It immediately puts color into the curriculum, and its largely non-white faculty promotes diversity more rapidly than the few minority faculty members hired in other disciplines. At the extreme, elite universities with extensive resources believe that they can achieve instantaneous multicultural credibility by hiring an academic star or two to launch -- with appropriate fanfare -- a high-profile ethnic-studies department, center, or institute.
But campus administrators also appear to distrust ethnic studies. Once they have established an ethnic-studies program and have taken public-relations credit for doing so, they often refuse to build it up. They appear to be afraid of strengthening a force that they never really wanted to create -- a critical mass of free-thinking, independent-minded faculty members of color, with an intellectual base of their own in ethnic studies. With academic roots in traditional disciplines, most deans and provosts never have bothered to become familiar with the knowledge produced by scholars in ethnic studies.
The undermining of ethnic studies has taken shape with alarming consistency on campuses across the country. Common practices include installing weak and pliable program directors and department heads, sometimes after rejecting strong scholars selected by the ethnic-studies faculty. The practices also include refusing to hire more than a handful of full-time faculty members in an ethnic-studies department, and then swelling the ranks with part-timers, who may be given voting rights to dilute the strength of the full-time faculty. Sometimes research is separated from teaching, for example by setting up a separate unit for research and then denying the ethnic-studies faculty control over the ethnic-studies research center. Such administrative decisions can be especially harmful to the legitimacy of ethnic studies at research universities.
Administrators sometimes employ divide-and-conquer tactics, to destroy solidarity and marginalize some faculty members, who may be driven to leave ethnic studies and join another department. Administrators also have allowed other departments to set up courses that duplicate those in ethnic studies; they have counted the minority-group faculty members hired in mainstream departments against promised positions in ethnic studies, whether or not those faculty members focus their work on minority communities. Administrators have delayed approving degree programs in ethnic studies, even when many students indicate they want to major in the field; and they have delayed granting departmental status to a program, even when it has a comprehensive curriculum and a faculty in place.
Such practices demonstrate an underlying disrespect for ethnic-studies faculty members and their work. While other faculties on a campus may experience some of the same administrative slights, the number visited on ethnic studies may be unique and can be devastating.
By contrast, look at what has happened to women’s studies over the past few decades. The number and status of women’s-studies programs and faculty members clearly have outstripped those of ethnic studies. Not only have universities created and sustained strong women’s-studies departments and programs, but feminist scholars also now reside in almost all schools and departments and in administration. Faculty members in ethnic studies can claim few such advances. Hence they are in a much weaker position to defend their gains or to win more resources.
Which brings us back to students. During the last year or two, we have seen organized demonstrations on behalf of ethnic studies by a rainbow coalition of students on campuses across the country. In a few notable protests, such as at the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Northwestern University, students staged hunger strikes. At Princeton and Stanford Universities, Asian-American students -- typically stereotyped as docile and apolitical -- occupied the president’s office and disrupted faculty meetings to press their demands for Asian-American studies.
Asian-American and Chicano students, perhaps because of their rapidly rising numbers, have been the most visible among leaders and participants in the recent wave of protests. Their greater activism, compared with that of African-American students, may reflect the fact that, among all the subfields of ethnic studies, black or African-American studies generally receives the most faculty positions and is more likely than the others to be lodged in a separate department. Similarly, few protests have been mounted by students agitating for more women’s studies.
When students of color organize politically and press for ethnic studies, they typically are not doing so at the behest of faculty members in ethnic studies; indeed, such faculty members are almost non-existent on some of the campuses that have witnessed such demonstrations. Instead, the students often see themselves as engaged in a form of anti-racist or anti-colonial struggle, not unlike the massive protests against South African apartheid that American students engaged in a few years ago. For similar reasons, progressive white students often are involved in the struggle to help ethnic studies gain space and legitimacy at their institutions.
All these students understand what most administrators and the news media have failed to grasp -- that an ethnic-studies program is not a “minority program” and is not a curriculum for members of minority groups only. At the University of Colorado at Boulder, for example, the new ethnic-studies major attracted 37 students in its first year. They were almost evenly divided between white students and students from minority backgrounds -- African American, Chicano/Latino, Asian American, and Native American.
More of us in the faculty ranks must join students in their campaigns for expanded curricula and better institutional treatment of ethnic studies. We must not allow an administration to divide us by “buying off” a few faculty members with awards or promotions, making them reluctant to criticize their patrons; instead, we must resolve to work together to let our campuses know how ethnic studies are being treated -- and we must invite mainstream faculty members to join the campaigns.
The field of ethnic studies is here to stay, because it is an integral part of multicultural education. How strong and vital will it be allowed to become? Who will control its development and destiny, define its character, and insure its survival and well-being? As long as the field remains vital and relevant, shouldn’t it be allowed to go as far as it can, and under the control of its own faculties, just as we allow chemistry, anthropology, or any other discipline to do?
As an academic discipline, ethnic studies should find its strongest allies within the faculty at large, because all professors should understand and support faculty self- governance, autonomy, and control over hiring and curriculum. Besides being good scholars and teachers, ethnic-studies faculty members also must work to dispel the noxious stereotype that they prefer to “ghettoize” themselves. They can eliminate that stereotype by participating in all aspects of campus life and seeking leadership roles in areas beyond “minority affairs.”
When appropriate, they should cross-list their courses with other departments and do the same for relevant courses in those units. They should try to disseminate their work widely, attempting to publish in a broad array of journals and attending a wide range of conferences, at the same time that they build their own publications and professional associations. Properly undertaken, accessibility and collegiality ought not to compromise their own integrity and autonomy. Ethnic studies can contribute a great deal to the task of preparing students and society to meet the challenges of our times and of the future.
If we update the language to include women, a quote from a description of Columbia University’s first core liberal- education class, offered after World War I, is no less appropriate today: “We are living in a world in which there are great and perplexing issues on which keen differences of opinion have arisen; and it is important now, not less than during the war, that men should understand the forces which are at work in the society of their own day.”
Evelyn Hu-DeHart is a professor of history and director of the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America at the University of Colorado at Boulder.