Correction appended
The appointment of College President Jim Yong Kim was celebrated as a landmark for Asian Americans. It seems unbelievable that, over the last century and a half, the federal government was responsible for race-based imprisonment and immigration bans. Since the repeal of such discriminatory acts, Asian Americans have made significant progress in this country but not without impediments. Ignorance and discrimination toward Asian Americans are still pressing issues, even at Dartmouth. Thus, it is imperative for Dartmouth and the entire Ivy League, to which the rest of the nation looks as a model for education to provide students with an education on the history of Asians in America and the outlook necessary to break the racial barriers that divide our country.
I came to Dartmouth with the misguided presumption that the Asian-American population here would be immersed in the bubble of the Ivy League and disconnected from their respective communities. This was not the case. Asian Pacific Americans for Progress, a group unifying Asian Americans for political action, and Angry Asian Man, a blog that covers Asian-American current events, recently selected Dartmouth as a top school for Asian-American and Pacific Islander students, citing diverse campus organizations and resources for developing Asian-American leaders.
Hillary Cheng '11, president of the Dartmouth Asian Organization, said in an interview that "the Asian and Asian-American community at Dartmouth is really diverse."
"Specifically, in terms of ethnic diversity, we have a lot of different groups," she said. "And I think that's a result of these ethnic groups reaching a critical mass at Dartmouth and thus choosing to form an organization that is geared toward their unique cultural interests."
DAO has been an advocate when Dartmouth students have discriminated against Asians. The group responded to a comic printed in The Dartmouth in the spring of 2008 depicting an Asian student as a communist mail-order bride. Similar organizations at Harvard University and Brown University have participated in local activism, ensuring that Asian Americans are provided fair access to polls and protesting racism in Providence, R.I., respectively.
Discrimination against Asian Americans, however, is still apparent at Dartmouth, considering last winter's Generic Good Morning Message depicting Kim as a job-stealing immigrant ("E-mail on Kim stirs controversy," March 5). With such strong Asian-American presence, community and activism, the question remains: Why have our schools fallen short in providing an education that would help advance relations for Asian Americans?
Perhaps the visibility of Asian Americans is at fault. Major media outlets rarely publicize incidents involving Asian Americans, creating a false impression that few troubles affect them. Take, for example, the coverage of the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. the controversy lasted weeks, ending with a presidential "beer summit." Most news networks, however, made no mention of an incident where Central Connecticut State University professor Ravi Shankar was informed there was a warrant for his arrest, thrown into a squad car and told, "Always a good day when you can bag a sand [expletive]," according to National Public Radio.
Shankar was released after it was found that the warrant was for a Caucasian male four inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter.
Although fighting such indifference will be challenging, we can start here at Dartmouth by addressing the lack of educational programs devoted to Asian-American issues.
In my interview with Cheng, she questioned the disproportionate size of Asian-American studies at Dartmouth in comparison to some other departments. The College boasts a comprehensive Latino studies program and one of the oldest African-American studies program in the nation, but it is not even possible to minor in Asian-American studies at the College, she said.
Other schools have built model programs, including the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University exceptions within the Ivy League and the University of California at Los Angeles, home of the nation's largest Asian-American studies department.
Various groups at the College have attempted over the past five years to build such a program, but the most recent effort to recruit a professor to develop the program succeeded only momentarily, as professor Jiannbin Shiao left Dartmouth a year after arriving.
Associate dean for interdisciplinary studies Lindsay Whaley chairs the Special Advisory Committee on Asian-American Studies, which was formed to build an Asian-American Studies program at Dartmouth, and is a strong advocate of the need for the program at the College.
"The growth in Dartmouth's Asian-American population over the past two decades changes the visibility of the question of whether or not an Asian-American studies program should exist," Whaley said in an interview. "One value of a program in Asian-American studies would be to improve our understanding of the Asian diaspora to North America and to teach students about how it has reshaped American society."
Truly, Asian-American studies at Dartmouth are overdue, and the continued absence of a comprehensive program will not only hurt the Asian-American community, but other students potentially interested in effecting change in racial relations.
