Zoe Towns

year after the ad hoc coalition Stop Hate On Columbia’s Campus demanded more resources for the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER), among other things, the Center has undergone a number of developments that do not include increased the resources or a fixed curriculum. The people, ideas and money floating around at any given time come together to make what Comparative Ethnic Studies concentrator Bryan Mercer calls “the magic” that the program runs on. In the fall, CSER met its third director in three years, a new assistant director and undergraduate director, who will oversee a symposium on Native American Studies on April 20^th and the second annual Columbia-Lang Ethnic Studies Conference. Despite positive developments, just three classes were offered by the Center this spring. Additionally, the Introduction to Ethnic Studies course required for majors was canceled at the last minute. For this and other reasons, a group of students decided to take matters into their own hands by starting a self-taught seminar on ethnic studies.

Ethnic Studies Independent Study (ESIS), which meets for two hours every Tuesday night in the Intercultural Resource Center, hopes to interrogate the meaning of ethnic studies as a field at large and as it exists specifically at Columbia. Every week, one or two students are responsible for assigning reading and facilitating discussion. Students use historical and contemporary examples in Asian-American, Arab-American, African-American, Native American, Latino and comparative ethnic studies to explore the ways in which ethnic studies is an intellectual, institutional, academic, and activist pursuit.

A critical understanding of ethnic studies’ place in academia includes an investigation of seemingly nonacademic details, like administrative politics and funding patterns. Much of the information gathered and discussed in the seminar has to do with practical university policies and politics. It is rare that students are held responsible for their education in such a menial manner.

The class was first imagined in the fall of 2006. African-American Studies major and Anthropology concentrator Christien Tompkins (CC ’08), a principal organizer of the seminar, says it came as a response to a “general dissatisfaction with the way the University was treating the Center.” He said, “One thing we could do was arm ourselves with a scholarly knowledge of the history of ethnic studies that could help us in advocating for it.” Mercer, who is also in the seminar, said, “There were a number of students that saw that this is a moment when ethnic studies and its state and its future needs to be in question.”

Ethnic studies is only ever as strong as its students. To some extent, this is true across other disciplines and departments, but because institutional support of ethnic studies is so limited, as Mercer said, “It’s up to us.” The initiative and sacrifice of students has been and continues to be the first and final say in the survival of ethnic studies. Nearly 10 years ago, students demanded and defined the program at Columbia through a hunger strike, teach-ins, speak outs, and the occupations of Low Library and Hamilton Hall. These efforts forced the administration into negotiations that gave birth to the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race.

Ten years later, however, CSER still isn’t what students had originally demanded – a full department. The difference between a center and a department is a crucial one: departments have hiring power, and centers do not. The lack of departmental status means a lack of full-time faculty. CSER has had to depend upon poorly paid adjunct faculty and faculty whose primary responsibilities and interests are in other departments. Last year’s search for a new director was limited to professors who had been offered positions in other departments. The new director, Claudio Lomnitz, is a tenured professor in the Anthropology Department.

KATE KRIEGER

Because majors in Comparative Ethnic Studies, Latino Studies, and Asian-American Studies are interdisciplinary, students are able to satisfy credit requirements mainly with cross-listed classes, and because of the limited classes offered through the Center, this has been exactly what students have had to do. Since he has arrived, Lomnitz has been working to address the urgent need to increase the number of classes. Lomnitz is forging relationships with departments across the University through cross listing more classes and bringing in faculty from other departments to teach ethnic studies classes. The extended curriculum for next year is a promising start, and not one to be taken lightly. Next year’s fall bulletin boasts 10 classes taught through the Center, as well as a number of additional cross-listed classes through departments like History, Anthropology, and English, but the concern remains that beefing up the curriculum with classes offered outside of the Center potentially waters down ethnic studies’ distinct methodology and pedagogy.

As this lack of classes seems indicative of a lack of understanding and acceptance of ethnic studies as a legitimate field, one essential goal for ESIS is to articulate what makes an ethnic studies class important and distinct from another class on ethnicity and race. May Lin (CC ’07), an ESIS student and Comparative Ethnic Studies major, said a class on ethnicity and race she took through another department was “couched in this totally multiculturalist framework that never delved beneath the surface of what racial formations really are and really mean for understanding U.S. society.” Ethnic studies seeks to undermine the rhetoric of diversity and multiculturalism, in which all ethnicities and races are celebrated for cultural differences with no interrogation of the histories of violent and oppressive racial formations of different ethnic groups in the United States. Instead of the lecture halls and seminars of so many majors that rely on a teacher-student power dynamic, Lin points out that “ethnic studies classes use dialogical approaches to knowledge.”

In some ways, ESIS has acted as a supplement to the current, thin curriculum, but for students in the seminar, concerns extend beyond filling a credit gap. The seminar is about ethnic studies for ethnic studies, and taught in the tradition of ethnic studies. Student teaching, in itself, tugs at an essential aspect of ethnic studies. In the class, students have a space where they can speak for themselves and about themselves, because as participating student Brett Murphy (BC ’07) said, ethnic studies questions “who is speaking for whose experience.” ESIS also centers activism, an essential aspect of ethnic studies, both by studying the history of activism in ethnic studies and by actively engaging in the push for ethnic studies at Columbia today. ESIS hopes to create a body of knowledge that can be used to support the Center, influence the University and be archived for generations of students to come.

Tompkins notes, “one thing [the class] speaks to is the level of commitment and centrality of student voice in ethnic studies in a way that students are not present or that important in determining, say, history or economics. Our dedication and will to do this project is something the University should take note of.” Ethnic studies scholars are held ever more responsible, because they must continually interrogate their field and their opposition in order to survive and attain institutional space and resources. As one previous CSER adjunct professor, Sujani Reddy, articulated, “I think in many ways what we as ethnic studies scholars have to face is the fact that even as we desire institutional authority, we also have to be aware that this is never a done deal.  It will require our constant vigilance. There will never be a time when the struggle is over.  It will be – must be – an ongoing battle to maintain our meaning and to recognize that as the world changes, so must our objectives.”

ESIS does not stand alone in its attempt to provide space for, and make meaning of, ethnic studies. The Asian-American Alliance Political Committee is mounting an Asian-American Studies Campaign in response to what Asian American concentrator Christina Chen (CC ‘09) calls the “scarcity of courses and resources.” This spring, no Asian-American classes were offered through the Center; a single Asian-American literature course was independently offered through the English department. The AAA Political Committee campaign includes, among other things, a teach-in in April with graduate students and professors from other universities. Of student teaching, Chen said, “[trusting] passionate, intellectually curious students to define that which has been written out or glossed over by mainstream historical narratives is empowering and very intellectually rewarding.”

Changes in faculty for the upcoming school year once again epitomize the constant give-and-take that the Center must come to terms with. Professor Nicholas DeGenova, ESIS’s faculty advisor and a much relied-upon resource and teacher in the Center, will be on leave, rendering the already small group of core faculty in the Center even smaller. However, Professor Lomnitz has scheduled two courses taught by new history professor Mae Ngai, a crucial voice in immigration analysis and an important ethnic studies academic. The Center will also welcome back Professor Gary Okihiro, founding director Center, from a two-year sabbatical and open a search committee for a senior faculty member for CSER.

Ethnic studies is about holding the University accountable for the education it offers but, possibly more essentially, it is also about students holding themselves accountable for their own education. Ethnic studies is, among so many other things, about hearing previously silenced voices. Students of ethnic studies have an obligation to uncover these voices, and, in doing so, to offer up their own voices. The teach-ins and seminars in the works are most certainly a reaction to a blatant neglect of ethnic studies and an institutional disregard of the histories and voices of people of color and other marginalized groups. However, they are also reflective of students who hold themselves accountable for their own education. As ESIS student and Comparative Ethnic Studies major, Desiree Carver-Thomas (CC ’09), said, “I feel empowered in being able to have agency in learning.”