Asian Americans Subjects of Study
When Anthony Maraschi, S.J. founded the University of San Francisco in 1855, he spelled out the needs of his European-descended students in a Western-style curriculum: Greek, Latin, Mathematics, and Geography. At that time, the need for an Asian American psychology class would have been as baffling to the founder as a San Francisco with more Chinese than Italians.
What was impossible nearly 150 years ago, however, has become history. Last spring, the curriculum for an Asian American studies certificate program at USF was born; the same year the U.S. Census announced San Francisco was the first American city in which the Asian American population equalled whites as the largest ethnic group.
“The idea is developing courses that are immediately relevant to our student population and reflect the demographics of San Francisco,” said David Kim, director of the new Asian American Studies program.
With 23 percent of USF's undergraduate population of Asian descent, greater relevancy had been a long time coming. Before the introduction of the new program last spring, there were only two USF courses that focused on Asian American issues. The new program, which awards a certificate upon completion, added five more classes spanning five disciplines, including a sociology course on Asian American culture and society taught by Assistant Professor Rebecca King, an Asian American film class taught by Assistant English Professor Eileen Fung, and a class on the burgeoning field of Asian American psychology taught by Assistant Professor Kevin Chun.
In Kim’s words, a “critical mass” had been reached as the University’s Asian American faculty expressed more interest in teaching classes that united their ethnicity and their work. Last year, Kim informally chaired a committee to create a curriculum and received the dean’s approval just before spring enrollment began. The courses’ popularity was immediately apparent: Fung and King’s classes quickly filled to capacity with more students on waiting lists.
Considering that USF reached across the ocean with courses offered by the Center for the Pacific Rim starting in 1989, its Asian American program has had a rather belated bloom. The reason being, administrators said, the slow growth rate of any small university.
“We simply didn’t have the faculty,” said Stanley Nel, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. “New faculty just proposed it.”
The University has offered a certificate in ethnic studies for the last 10 years and in Latin American studies for more than 20 years. Beginning this year, the College of Arts and Sciences boosted that curriculum to a major and minor degree offering.
The fact that Asian American studies wasn’t embraced as early as the others may be due to cultural perspective, according to Kim.
“Any student needs to know the active role Asian Americans have played in American culture and democracy,” Kim said. “I think the stereotype of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners has exerted a very subtle force on academic curriculum.”
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