Although the Asian American Curriculum Transformation (AACT) has been lobbying for the inclusion of an Asian American Studies Program at Tufts since 2001, they have recently turned up the heat on campus by both meeting with University Provost Jhamed Bharucha and staging a protest last Wednesday.
"Asian American history completes a picture of American history. Without that picture, Tufts students would have a false and incomplete idea of American history," senior Wen Cai said.
Six AACT representatives and several faculty members from the Oversight Panel on Race met with Bharucha, Dean of Arts and Sciences Susan Ernst, and Dean of Academic Affairs Kevin Dunn.
The students demanded that the administration commit to hiring both one tenure-track and one junior professor who taught in the field of Asian American studies.
Bharucha said that the meeting "clearly showed the depth of commitment by all parties" towards advancing Asian American studies at Tufts.
According to Cai, Bharucha said he was willing to discuss issues of race and identity at Tufts, but that "he rejected our demands of taking action now to finally move forward on an eight-year-old proposal."
Following the meeting, around 40 students protested in front of Ballou Hall and marched through campus, bearing signs urging the University to include Asian American Studies as part of the curriculum.
In 1997, the Task Force on Race recommended that the lack of Asian American, Latino, and Native American Studies in the curriculum be addressed. They set the years of 1999-2002 as "focus years" for developing an Asian American Studies curriculum.
History Professor and member of the Task Force on Race Steven Marrone said that disciplines such as Asian American and Latino studies are "of both general intellectual importance and of importance to the segments of the population they study, because they help people from these groups to get a real sense of their history."
According to Marrone, the Task Force's job is to encourage the University to implement such disciplines, but "to my great sorrow, we have not moved forward."
Students emphasized the lack of progression. "We've been trying for five years and nothing has happened," Cai said. "Eight years ago, Tufts itself recognized the need [for Asian-American Studies], and nothing has happened."
Bharucha said he disagreed, and that the University "took an important step forward" this year by permitting classes dealing with Asian American and Latino subjects to count toward the Culture Option of the Foreign Language requirement. He also said that the "American studies major offers a concentration in Asian American studies" and that departments such as child development, English, and history include a good deal of Asian American subject matter.
According to Bharucha, in the last three years, Tufts has hired 13 additional full-time Asian or Asian American faculty in Arts, Sciences, and Engineering. "Through their experience and knowledge, they serve as educators, role models, and mentors for all of our students," he said.
The members of AACT, however, said that such an assertion misses the point.
"We were particularly upset because the Provost kept blurring the line between Asian and Asian American," sophomore and AACT member Ivy Cheng said of the meeting.
In Spring 2002, the administration approved a joint proposition between the American Studies Program and the English Department to hire a tenure-track professor specializing in Asian American Literature.
American Studies Program Director and biology professor Francine Chew said that "the candidate we all agreed upon got hired out from under us." After that, the program and department were unable to agree on another candidate, and the search never came to fruition.
During the Spring 2004 semester, the history department and American studies program submitted a joint proposal to hire an Asian American professor. The administration rejected this proposal, but according to Marrone it was not "finally rejected," meaning the proposal can be resubmitted. The proposal was intended to be resubmitted this spring, but that has not yet happened.
Professor Anne Gardulski of Geology, a member of the Oversight Panel on Race, said that AACT students have been meeting with such departments as political science and English to see what can be done.
"AACT has played nice and tried hard in good faith to work with the administration," she said. "And it hasn't gotten us anywhere."
"Tufts has talked the talk for the past eight years but still to this day refuses to walk the walk," Gardulski said.
Chew said that the lack of Asian American studies is a particular problem at a school where Asian Americans make up the largest non-white demographic (13 percent).
"It reproduces the pervasive 'mainstream' view that Asian Americans are invisible and can be valued for their labor but not treated as full citizens," she said.
"Above all, our Asian American students enrich our community through the experiences they bring to Tufts," Bharucha said.
Gardulski said that the Asian American Studies discipline is very interdisciplinary, and requires a lot of cooperation among different departments and the administration.
"I guess I'm too much of an eternal optimist, but I believe that this will eventually come to pass," she said.
