Asian-American Wins Fight for Tenure at UCLA

Ending a 3-year-old cause celebre in the Asian-American community, UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young announced Thursday that he is granting tenure at the Graduate School of Education to Don Nakanishi.

Young’s decision means that Nakanishi, an expert on Asian-American affairs, could have a lifetime appointment. The move caps an unusual campaign of petitions, letter writing and lobbying on Nakanishi’s behalf by supporters who claimed that he had been a victim of racial prejudice and overly conservative scholarly standards when he was denied tenure earlier.

Nakanishi, the son of Japanese immigrants and the only Asian-American at the graduate school, fought through three complicated appeals. “I could not have predicted it would have gone on this long,” he said Thursday. “But now I’m glad I did it.”

His case, Nakanishi said, came to symbolize issues of ethnic and intellectual diversity at American campuses.

Some professors said his work was outside the education school mainstream, such as his studies that show low levels of voter registration among Asians in Los Angeles County. Detractors dismissed claims of racial prejudice and said his research was below UCLA’s standards.

In a prepared statement, Young said: “Clearly this case has attracted an extraordinary amount of public and media interest. It is my hope that, now that the decision is made, Professor Nakanishi will be able to pursue his work here at UCLA without the added burden of the public spotlight.” Young said he would not discuss specifics of the complicated case, citing confidentiality surrounding tenure.

The decision was greeted happily by Nakanishi’s supporters such as state Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles), who chairs a committee on UC admissions. Torres said Nakanishi deserved the appointment all along. According to the senator, Young is “a pretty independent academic” and would have resisted the political pressure if Nakanishi had been a mediocre candidate.

Nakanishi, 39, grew up in East Los Angeles and earned his undergraduate degree at Yale and his Ph.D. in political science at Harvard. He became an assistant professor at UCLA in 1982 and his tenured title will be associate professor.