35-year-old Asian American studies program given department status
By Lee Bialik
DAILY BRUIN CONTRIBUTOR
lbialik@media.ucla.edu
Correction appended
Thirty-five years after the founding of the Asian American Studies Center, faculty, staff and students will be celebrating this landmark anniversary and its recent approval as its own department during a ceremony Thursday.
From the first Asian American studies course offered in 1969 to a master's degree program and specialization established in 1976, the formerly interdepartmental program was approved in August, two years after the proposal was submitted.
UCLA is the first major research university to have a department of Asian American studies and is now eligible for the resources and funding available to a department, said Don Nakanishi, director of the Asian American Studies Center.
Nakanishi said many administrators, including the chancellor, expressed their support for departmentalization, agreeing that the department had outlived its interdepartmental status.
"Over time we have produced more scholars and writers for the field than any other university," Nakanishi said.
Before Asian American studies became a department, it was the largest interdepartmental program on campus, offering 60 classes a year, a summer program in Hawaii, an undergraduate major, a minor and a master's program.
Nakanishi estimated there are 3,000 students who take classes through Asian American studies classes, most of whom are undergraduates.
He said the new department will continue to be interdisciplinary and work with the community, in addition to being more influential on a national level.
"This will allow us to have even greater impact in terms of future national development of Asian American studies," he said.
Professor King-kok Cheung, a professor in both the English and Asian American studies departments, said the new department status could allow the program to establish a doctoral program and hire faculty that would be fully affiliated with the department.
Currently, all Asian American studies faculty are affiliated with other departments on campus, except Professor Robert Nakamura, who is expected to fully devote himself to Asian American studies.
Though the center will continue to exist and work closely with the department, Cheung added that the department will feel more like a community than the interdepartmental program.
"As opposed to always having to go to a different department to see their advisor, (students) will have more of a sense of home," she said.
Ajit Mal, a professor of Engineering and member of the Academic Senate, worked on the committee that approved the department and said the senate was supportive overall.
"Academically, they are doing extremely well. The programs are excellent," he said. "I think it's a good thing for the university to have such a program."
Nakanishi attributed the long two-year approval process to the attention devoted by faculty governing committees two years ago to the semester or quarter system debate.
"They just put everything on a back burner," he said, referring to faculty governing committees.
Nakanishi said he saw approval for the department as symbolic evidence that the field had established its roots in the American community and in higher education.
"(Higher education), for so long and throughout so much of our history had excluded us or had not really provided us with equal access or representation, has now begun to afford us that equal opportunity," he said.
Correction: Wednesday, October 20, 2004
In "35-year-old Asian American studies program given department status" (News, Oct 19), the program has existed for 26 years, while the Asian American Studies Center is 35 years old.
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