Class Consciousness : Education: The founding of a CSUN Asian-American studies department comes 21 years after Chicano and Pan-African studies.

More than two decades after it established Pan-African and Chicano studies departments, Cal State Northridge has founded an Asian-American studies department, in part to serve the campus’s largest ethnic minority population.

The first course, a survey of the Asian-American experience, is planned for the spring with several more classes in subjects ranging from history to literature expected to follow next fall, said the chairman of the new department, Kenyon Chan.

“It’s in a sense overdue,” said Carlos Navarro, acting associate dean of the School of Humanities, where the new department will be housed. “We have the largest Asian-American community in the U.S., growing at a faster percentage rate than any other community, and it’s important that we begin to get some understanding of this vast group of people.”

The Pan-African and Chicano studies departments were formed in 1969 in the wake of student and community protests. But Chan said the new department evolved from a quieter, yet equally determined, movement.

During the past five years, while the idea of an Asian-American studies department was being studied by faculty committees, there also was growing interest in such a program among the 3,700 or so Asian students on campus, Chan said. Asian students make up more than 12% of the CSUN student body. Registration records indicate that another 11% of the students identify themselves as Latino and 5% as black.

“Students are the catalyst for much of what’s happened,” Chan said. “The courses are designed for the general student body, but we assume that many, many Asian-Americans will take these courses out of . . . curiosity about their own heritage.”

Asian and Asian-American students also welcomed news of the department’s creation, saying that they hope it will foster better understanding among students of different ethnicities.

“Japanese learn about American and European fairy tales, Hans Christian Andersen for example,” said Toshi Kuramatsu, 24, a senior from Japan majoring in sociology. “But most Americans know nothing of Japanese fairy tales, and that is knowledge that builds an understanding of culture.”

Chan, trained as an education psychologist, will teach the spring course and will hire additional faculty for next fall. Until he was recruited by CSUN, Chan worked as a psychologist and consultant. In the past he was on the faculty at UCLA, where his research focused on Asian-American children, and he served as coordinator of national policy studies at the National Center for Bilingual Research in New Mexico.

“The field of Asian-American studies has grown so much in the past 10 years,” he said. “This is an exciting opportunity to start something up.”

Many of the new courses will be added to the list of classes that can satisfy a graduation requirement of nine units in cross-cultural studies, said Donald J. Cameron, executive assistant to the college’s vice president for academic affairs.

Asian-American studies will be the sixth department in the School of Humanities. Plans call for offering a minor in the new discipline within a few years and possibly expanding its offerings to include a major.

Other four-year public universities in Southern California offering Asian-American course work include UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, San Diego State and Cal State Long Beach.