Conference Calls for More Ethnic Studies

At a Paine Hall discussion for the Visions '89 Conference on Saturday, Stanford University graduate Rudy Fuentes declared that last year's mass minority protest against the school's Western Civilization requirement was not an isolated event but part of a movement toward "changing the concept of education at Stanford."

If coalition building dominated this weekend's network of minority conferences, then curriculum change provided the most immediate outlet for the nascent cooperative activism. While longer-ranging social change clearly occupied the minds of all delegates, immediate boosts in women and minority faculty recruitment and ethnic studies course offerings filled the agendas for all five minority groups. The capacity crowd in Paine Hall and the unanimity of support for the aims testify to the urgency of the demand, leaders say.

Harvard's hosting of the groundbreaking conference itself contributed to the sense of timeliness, given the imminent release of the highly-publicized Verba committee report on faculty recruitment and Harvard's announcement last fall that it would begin a visiting professor program for ethnic studies. Similar programs are now in place at other universities, especially in the South and West in response to growing Hispanic communities.

But the difficulties that lie ahead still loom large, given past obstacles, leaders at Harvard say. La O, Harvard's Puerto Rican students' association, and Raza, the University's Mexican-American organization, announced they have been negotiating with Harvard for more than a year to provide courses on Hispanic studies. According to La O leader Wendell C. Ocasio '90, La O even presented Harvard officials with the name of a professor at Puerto Rico University who could teach such a course.

But Ocasio said the University did not approve of La O's choice and has not acted on this information. He labeled administrators' inactivity as "neglect," and said, "We cannot accept this kind of statement that says `In order to hire minority faculty we [are lowering] the standards.' We can't accept this and we won't."

Yet the Stanford activist points to the successes at Palo Alto as a harbinger for more change. Fuentes, a special assistant to San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros, graduated from Stanford last year after helping lead the movement to diversify a Western Civilization core curriculum that protestors said studied only white men.

Protesters succeeded in their effort to insert books by and about women and minorities into the canon by mobilizing broad support, Fuentes says. The Stanford faculty senate passed a revised program that will begin this fall.

Other students who spoke with Fuentes on Saturday's panel point to the need for coalition members to infiltrate administrative bodies on both student and faculty levels.

At Stanford, for example, "the people who were in student government were from the people of color organizations," says Vivian Wu, who is a Stanford graduate and former member of the student government.