Ethnic Studies Department Creation at UCSD Backed

The establishment of a department of ethnic studies, long debated at UC San Diego, took a critical step forward Tuesday when the campus Academic Senate voted overwhelmingly to recommend its approval.

At one of the largest faculty meetings in years, professors voted 94 to 14, with 9 abstentions, to ask Chancellor Richard C. Atkinson to move forward with the proposal. Veteran sociology professor Joseph Gusfield spoke for many during a spirited, sometimes contentious discussion in describing the issue as a “moral as much as an intellectual question.”

While Atkinson must agree with the recommendation and send it to the University of California Board of Regents for final approval, acting Chancellor Harold Ticho said after the vote that a dissent by Atkinson would be “pretty unusual” given the strong advisory role of the Academic Senate. (Atkinson is on leave through June to discuss science-related issues in Washington.)

A new department, offering both an undergraduate major and a master’s degree in ethnic studies, could be functioning as early as September with a small nucleus of professors, said Ramon Gutierrez, a professor of history who will join the new department.

The proposal approved Tuesday brings to a close more than two years of debate over whether existing programs in Chicano and contemporary black studies should be consolidated in a department to include other ethnic groups in America and be studied in a comparative, interdisciplinary manner.

Students would take a one-year introductory course in American immigration history and in race and ethnic relations, as well as courses in theory, history, language and literature of at least two ethnic groups.

The committee set up by Atkinson to explore the issue, chaired by Gutierrez, said in its report Tuesday that ethnic studies is a legitimate discipline with an interdisciplinary nature that at times encompasses history, anthropology, political science and sociology.

The report deliberately recommends a department of ethnic studies, rather than elevating black or Chicano or Asian studies to department status, in order to avoid what Gutierrez said were both academic and political problems associated with individual ethnic studies departments at campuses such as UCLA and UC Santa Barbara.

Even at UC Berkeley, with one of the nation’s best-known ethnic studies departments, students in the black, Chicano and Asian units that make up the department tend to do limited studies outside of each unit, he said.

The report says: “The perspectives that ethnic studies scholars bring to the debate on the meaning of America’s past, and which uniquely define the method and discipline, look at social tensions from the bottom up, from the vantage point of those who are powerless . . . and are rooted in the lived historical memories of slavery, racism, victimization and physical and psychological damage.”

Well-known political science professor Sanford Lakoff spoke strongly and caustically for those against the proposal, calling the concept “political mush” that contends that all study of ethnicity until now has been “nothing but the biased observations of middle-class Eurocentric white males.” He said minority students will not want to study in such a department because it will offer no skills to prepare them for careers to raise them “and their families out of poverty.”

But history professor Edward Reynolds, “speaking from the heart,” recounted being told when he began to teach African history at Yale University that “there was nothing to teach before the coming of the Europeans. . . . There is a lot of silent suffering by minorities on this campus. . . . This is a great opportunity to do something that is lacking and recognize diversity.”

The planning and budget committee, chaired by biology professor Douglas Smith, said ethnic studies must be set apart from the need for more ethnic and racial diversity at UCSD.

“It would be a disaster for UCSD if a department of ethnic studies were viewed as the ‘home’ for achieving affirmative action goals. We are decidely against any implication that faculty members of a (department) must also be of minority background,” Smith wrote.

Gutierrez said he is aware of those views. “It’s not going to be the department of affirmative action,” he said.

Gutierrez said he and music professor Cecil Lytle, the provost of UCSD’s Third College, will join the department. In addition, a well-known scholar of Asian-American studies, Yen Espiritu, as well as George Lipset, an expert on European ethnic experiences in America from the University of Minnesota, have been recommended for appointment.

The ability to attract top professors in a relatively new field with few experts was at the heart of the committee’s argument not to leave ethnic studies as a program, dependent on the good will of departments to provide professors for ethnic studies courses.

Some opponents asked that the ethnic studies begin as a program and only gradually move to department status, even though they conceded that most interdisciplinary programs at UCSD have suffered from a lack of resources and attention.

History professor Ramon Ruiz said all new academic departments have faced similar questions of legitimacy.

In addition, he asked his colleagues to “remember that we are living in a state where the majority of the population” will soon be nonwhite.