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Recess
A one-stop playground for weekend frivolity and fun
(09/25/98)

Recommendation wars
By Tyler Thoreson
While students increasingly sue professors for less-than-gushing letters of recommendation, professors are subtly crafting their criticism in calculated ambiguities
(09/24/98)

Confessions of Harper's serf
By Marc Herman
The secrets learned from a Harper's internship
(09/23/98)

From screaming babies to screaming college students
By Camille Paglia
"The Nurture Assumption": A rambling, anecdotal memoir
(09/23/98)

Ufology
By Christina Valhouli
Aliens invade the ivory tower
(09/22/98)

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______as American as ethnic studies

A suggested merger between two departments at UC-Berkeley has partisans on both sides marking their territory.

BY JOAN WALSH | Almost 30 years after a bitter student strike led the University of California at Berkeley to create one of the nation's first ethnic studies departments, the department's chair is proposing what seems like heresy to some: merging ethnic studies with the increasingly popular discipline of American studies.

"I see it as a way to redefine not just American studies, but what it means to be American," says Professor Ling-chi Wang, ethnic studies chair and a department co-founder.

It's also a way to redefine ethnic studies, which is struggling with challenges from within the university and without. The number of ethnic studies majors at Berkeley has been declining steadily since the early 1990s, from a peak of about 400 to less than 200 today. At the same time, the discipline has drawn the fire of anti-affirmative action regent Ward Connerly, who recently asked for an examination of ethnic studies departments, which he described as a bastion of self-imposed isolation for students of color.

Wang's proposal, which he made last spring, has nothing to do with Connerly's attack. Its result would be a new department of American studies with five "concentrations" -- African-American studies, Native American studies, Chicano studies, Asian-American studies and comparative ethnic studies -- along with the existing group major in American studies. Wang describes it as a way to transform American studies, by making race and ethnicity central to the question of American identity. But he admits it's also a way to stabilize his struggling department, which has partly been a victim of its own success. He traces some of the department's troubles to 1989, when ethnic studies proponents and others succeeded in getting Berkeley to require undergraduates to take a course in "American cultures," comparing at least two different ethnic groups and their American experience.

But where similar requirements imposed around the country mandated the study of non-European cultures and therefore benefited ethnic studies departments, Berkeley's requirement had two novel twists: It included "European-Americans" among the ethnic groups that might be studied and allowed required courses to be taught in any department, not just ethnic studies.

Since then, more than 300 American cultures courses have been offered in 40 departments. "Today you can study Asian-American literature in the English department, not just Asian-American studies," Wang notes approvingly. "Ethnic studies created the scholarship that allowed these courses to be taught elsewhere." But the innovative requirement has also allowed students to indulge their curiosity about issues of race and ethnicity outside of ethnic studies. Since the early 1990s the number of majors has declined significantly, and so has the number of students taking courses in the department -- with the exception of courses tailored to meet the American cultures requirement.

"We used to turn away 1,000 students a semester," Wang says, explaining that the decline in majors, combined with the heavy reliance on American cultures enrollment, means the department is offering fewer upper-division courses -- leading to a further decline in majors. "You don't develop a field if you don't have students enrolling in upper-division courses," he adds.

Meanwhile, the small, interdisciplinary American studies program -- which is not a department, has no full-time faculty and offers a curriculum based mostly on courses cross-listed in other departments -- has grown to more than 300 majors in just four years. Much of its popularity derives from its flexibility, which lets students tailor individualized majors from a broad list of approved courses.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. American studies camp is cool to the idea