Ethnic Studies Stays Stuck in Committee

Students hoping to see a certificate program in ethnic studies at Harvard rejoiced last spring when they thought their proposal for a certificate program had been approved.

One e-mail circulated among the group last May announcing that the proposal had been approved and that only a few final details remained to be ironed out.

But when classes resumed this fall, those once filled with hope were in for a “rude awakening,” as one student put it.

No such certificate program existed. Students were told their proposal was still in committee, where it had been left last spring.

The College currently offers several departmental courses that fall within the rubric of ethnic studies, but no formal program has ever existed. Student campaigns for a department or a concentration in the field have occurred sporadically since the 1970s.

Now, students are questioning whether last spring’s attempt will just be added to the list of failures.

Currently, the Faculty Committee on Ethnic Studies (CES) is involved in lengthy discussion over the proposal that students thought was a done deal.

“It was approved as far as the people who attended the meeting were concerned,” says Yunte Huang, a commitee member and an assistant professor of English and American Language and Literature. But the committee’s composition has changed since the approval, and the proposal must be reviewed and discussed once again.

What’s worse, students say, is that they are being frozen out of the process.

Ethan Y. Yeh ’03, chair of the academic affairs committee (a subsidiary of the Harvard Foundation), who spearheaded the student effort to create a certificate program, says the new CES chair has made it difficult for students to be involved.

According to Yeh, new CES Chair and Afro-American Studies Professor Werner Sollors has not responded to students’ requests to attend the meetings they frequented last semester.

“I feel like we should at least get some some communication from [Sollors] as to what they’re trying to do, what the current status of the proposal is, even at least that they’re working on it and that we have nothing to worry about,” Yeh says. “Instead, they’re just having us sit here while the semester moves on.”

In addition, Sollors “just totally ignored” a petition calling for more student involvement that was signed by the presidents of all the ethnic student groups on campus, according to Yeh.

Sollors says he never received the petition and that, contrary to Yeh’s claims, he has actively pursued student input.

“From the day I took on the role of chair of Ethnic Studies, I have contacted students who work in the area of Ethnic Studies in various concentrations and scheduled a meeting with those students among them who have expressed an interest in a meeting,” Sollors wrote in an e-mail. “And I have invited students working in Ethnic Studies to serve as student liaison on our committee.”

Several other committee members dismiss Yeh’s complaints, pointing to Yeh’s upcoming meeting with Sollors as well as their own unofficial, informal open-door policies as proof of student involvement.

“There’s been student input in that students have met with various members of the committee and also, the students drafted a proposal which we have in front of us,” said Professor Mary C. Waters, chair of the sociology department. “There are definitely avenues for students to make their thoughts known and definite openness on the part of Faculty members.”

Some professors even question whether students should be allowed to attend the committee’s meetings.

“It’s a Faculty committee,” says Elizabeth Doherty, a CES member and assistant dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for Academic Planning. “It’s for the members of the committee which will award the certificate to talk through those details.”

The particular difficulty CES faces in creating a certificate program for ethnic studies revolves around what some Faculty say is the nebulous nature of the field. Unlike other certificate programs, such as African Studies and Latin American Studies, whose courses are somewhat bounded by geography, the field of ethnic studies has a less concretely defined domain.

New CES member Jennifer L. Hochschild, a professor of government and African-American studies, says committee members are having difficulty determining what set of courses could count as requirements for a certificate, as well as facing problems with creating an advising system.

“On the one hand, dozens of courses could plausibly [count]...but that’s a meaningless certification,” she says.

Still, several major universities—Brown, Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley and Yale among them—have programs, if not departments, devoted to ethnic studies. Some, like Berkeley, even have Ph.D programs.

Hochschild says she thinks students have little to worry about.

“My general feeling is that all of us are sympathetic to the idea, to the concept of ethnic studies, but all of us also saw some pretty substantial logistical problems with any proposal,” Hochschild said.

She says those logistical problems are exactly what must be solved in order to get the program running.

Ronald Takaki, chair of the Ethnic Studies Department at Berkeley and one of the field’s pioneers, says the changing demographics of the nation alone should cause universities to reconsider the importance of ethnic studies.

“We’ve entered the 21st century,” Takaki says. “No longer do we think of race as the black-white binary.”

“As a premier institution in higher education, Harvard has this obligation and also this opportunity to lead. By just sticking with the black and white paradigm in scholarship and in teaching, it’s not leading,” he adds.

The most recent concerted effort to bring ethnic studies to Harvard was in 1995, when the academic affairs committee submitted a proposal to the College for an ethnic studies concentration.

Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles dismissed the feasibility of the roughly 150-page proposal in a letter to students, citing philosophical questions over how to study a variety of ethnic groups and financial obstacles to hiring new Faculty members. Instead, Knowles advocated studying ethnicity within the departments, sticking to the system that was already in place.

In 2000, a group of students calling themselves the Campaign for Ethnic Studies passed out more than 600 green ribbons in support of ethnic studies at that year’s Cultural Rhythms. They also obtained more than 200 signatures, including that of Rhythms host Matt Damon, Class of 1992, on a petition calling for ethnic studies.

But none of the past efforts have ever come as close to establishing a formal program of ethnic studies at Harvard as the certificate proposal.

“It’s just frustrating,” Yeh said. “We had word last semester that it was going to start this fall and while it’s understandable that they’re trying to work this out, it’s just the feeling that we’ve taken a step back.”

—Staff Writer Juliet J. Chung can be reached at jchung@fas.harvard.edu.