Last semester, the Daily ran three articles on Asian American curriculum at Tufts, or the lack thereof. As a response, we submitted a Viewpoint that appeared in the Oct. 9 edition of the Daily ("Tufts Ignores Asian American Studies").
In this Viewpoint, we argued that despite the University's claim of being a diverse campus, the diversity of the student body was not reflected by the institution's curriculum. This was shown in the Tufts University Task Force on Race in 1998, and also by the simple fact that courses with a main focus on Asian American content (two in all) were sparsely offered.
In addition, these courses were not even grounded in the curriculum because the school does not have any full-time tenure track or tenured professors trained to teach in the field, creating an uncertainty as to how frequently the courses would be available.
Since the printing of that article, a committee of students circulated two petitions requesting the hiring of full-time tenure track professors qualified to teach Asian American course material to fill the vacancies left in the English and anthropology/sociology departments, respectively. We accumulated over 1,300 signatures from the student body in support, and met with the chairs of both departments to discuss these issues.
We thank all of the students and professors who have lent their time and support to this cause. Unfortunately, the upper-level administration was not as responsive in acknowledging our concerns. While it took numerous attempts in order to secure an appointment with Dean Ernst, President Bacow has declined to even meet with us on two occasions.
We hope this is not an indication by the administration that our concerns about the curriculum are not important to them at this time. Despite the results of the University's Task Force on Race, little has been done to solve this problem since the report was released in 1998.
In addition, Tufts has continued to fall behind other area schools including Boston College, Williams, and Mount Holyoke, as well as other top-level schools such as Columbia, Cornell, Penn, Brown, and Princeton, in establishing Asian American Studies. As our ever-changing country continues to move toward a more racially and ethnically diverse society, can the Tufts administration really afford to continue ignoring this issue?
History is not an objective science, but rather a weighted narrative that conveys what we as a society deem important and unimportant. For Tufts not to include Asian America in its curriculum is a clear message that Tufts does not consider Asian America worthy of study, nor the needs of students to learn about Asian America as legitimate and critical. Finding our missing history - the history of oppression and resistance of Asian Americans, for example - and including it in our curriculum not only broadens our individual education, but has the power to alter our reality in America, both personally and collectively.
While some may say that an Asian American curriculum is an Asian American issue, we disagree. We believe that a Tufts curriculum is a Tufts student issue. The current gaps in our curriculum perpetuate institutional racism by giving all of us an incomplete and overly simplistic picture of America's past, present, and future. The current gaps also perpetuates our ignorance and contributes to producing flawed citizens.
The inclusion of all ethnic and racial groups' histories, literatures, and contributions to society in our curriculum redefines our vision of what it means to be American. Only by diversifying our curriculum can we unlearn and eventually uproot the underpinnings of racism.
Aaron Chiu is a junior majoring in International Relations, and Laura Horwitz is a junior majoring in American Studies.
