View of UCI and Asians Is Misleading

I would like to respond to the article “UCI Is Letting Them Down, Asians Say” (April 17). I believe that this article gave a somewhat misleading picture of efforts to attract scholars working in East Asian studies to UCI.

In particular, over the past three years, in the School of Social Sciences, the Department of Linguistics has recruited four faculty members working in East Asian linguistics. These scholars--C.T. James Huang, recruited from Cornell University; Naoki Fukui from the University of Pennsylvania; Moira Yip from Brandeis University, and Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology--are among the world’s most outstanding researchers studying East Asian languages. They form the core of the Theoretical East Asian Linguistics research project at UCI, which in its first year has undertaken an active program of scholarly conferences.

Starting next year, the Department of Linguistics will be offering courses in the Structure of Chinese and the Structure of Japanese, and we will be expanding our course offerings in East Asian linguistics over the coming years. We have been able to attract these scholars to UCI in large part because of the large representation of East Asians in our student body, which makes it a natural home for a research center on East Asian linguistics.

We believe that these recruitments indicate the efforts being undertaken at UCI to develop the study of East Asian languages and to establish programs of scholarship and pedagogy of the highest quality in this area.

ROBERT MAY

Chair, Department of Linguistics

UC Irvine