An Open Letter to OSU President Karen A. Holbrook and Interim Provost Barbara R. Snyder
Asian American Studies is in a state of crisis at The Ohio State University. Within the past two years, OSU has lost eight faculty members who have scholarly expertise and have taught courses in Asian American Studies. We lost four of them to other institutions that recruited and provided more lucrative positions; two did not receive support from their departments and failed to receive tenure, and two retired after numerous years at OSU.
As OSU undergraduate and graduate students who actively engage in Asian American scholarship, research and advocacy, we are deeply concerned about the invisibility of Asian American Studies faculty, not to mention the lack of courses that address the narratives and experiences of diasporic peoples of Asian and Pacific Islander descent in the United States and in the Americas.
In comparison to other Big Ten institutions, OSU lags behind in the number of professors, courses and research productivity in Asian American Studies. While OSU only has two tenure-track faculty members (in History and Comparative Studies) who have extensive training in Asian American Studies, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has 17 professors and two postdoctoral fellows. The University of Wisconsin at Madison has 10 faculty members, and the University of Michigan has eight professors and two postdoctoral fellows in Asian American Studies.
For OSU, the active recruiting, promoting and retaining of Asian American Studies professors in the Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Education, Arts, Law, Business and Health Sciences can serve multiple purposes. These professors can strengthen various departments’ areas of study, and provide nuanced and intersectional analyses on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and economy.
They can offer insights that interrogate and explain policies, programs, living conditions and representations of Asian and Pacific Islanders within the U.S. geo-political boundaries as well as from transnational and postcolonial vantage points. They can help to recruit and create an intellectual and social support network with other professors and students of color.
They can reach out to the rapidly growing Asian American communities in central Ohio. Finally, they can offer new courses that ensure high enrollment due to the demands for and the lack of courses in Asian American Studies on campus.
According to the 2003 OSU statistics, Asian American students – not including international students from Asia – make up 4.6 percent of the total student population and are the second largest racial minority group on campus.
Undergraduates have pushed for more courses in Asian American Studies. A number of graduate students are pursuing research about Asian American psychology, education, literature, folklore, law and health care, often without the mentorship of experts in Asian American Studies. Although there is a newly created minor in this area, the courses are not offered regularly .
As administrators and scholars, you are in the position to champion the values and benefits of intellectual and socio-cultural pluralism. You have shown your interest in Asian American communities by sponsoring Eric Liu’s visit to OSU this year and by speaking at the Day of Remembrance event the previous year which commemorated the unlawful incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.
We are relying on you to be visionary and determined leaders for the recruitment, promotion and retention of Asian American Studies faculty. We anticipate hearing from you regarding how you and your colleagues will address the invisibility of Asian American Studies at The Ohio State University. More importantly we look forward to your commitment to multiculturalism that fosters diversity not only in the texts that we read but also in the realities that we live in.
Asian American Students at The Ohio State University
