Widening the Circle

Under the leadership of groups such as Concilio Latino and the Ethnic Studies Coalition, students have been pushing in recent weeks for more academic offerings in areas such as Latino studies, Native American Studies and Asian American Studies. These groups cast their efforts to expand Harvard’s academic offerings as a long-overdue measure in a nation increasingly composed of people who do not trace their families back to Europe.

Currently, an ad-hoc Committee on Ethnic Studies, headed by Professor of Afro-American Studies Werner Sollors, tries to help interested students find relevant courses and advisers. Though the committee’s website lists courses that fall under the ethnic studies rubric, it is a weak framework into which students with a wide variety of passions are corralled. Supporters of ethnic studies have rightfully continued to push the University to establish at least a certificate program and hope to establish fully independent departments for various ethnicities someday.

We laud these students’ efforts; the current system does a great disservice to undergraduates interested in ethnic studies who are forced to compromise their academic interests by concentrating in other tangentially-related fields. But at the very least, it would be logistically impossible for the University to create multiple new departments overnight. Instead, the University should allow new departments to evolve from a strengthened and revitalized ethnic studies program.

University President Lawrence H. Summers should work with the next Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to create a broad ethnic studies department that would introduce students to the study of ethnic identity and allow them to specialize in areas that suit their interests. In the beginning, this department could be structured much like the Department of Government is now; undergraduate concentrators would first gain a theoretical background in the study of ethnicity and identity, and then they would be able to branch out and choose one or more specific ethnicities to study in depth.

As the department’s areas of specialization gain professors and other resources, they could be spun off as degree-granting committees—and eventually as their own independent departments. Such departments could use the Department of Afro-American Studies as an excellent model for the sorts of programs they should try to offer in each of the ethnicities under their purview.

Some opponents of establishing stronger ethnic studies programs say such topics can be addressed by existing departments. However, the study of identity is an increasingly important subject in a nation that has begun to throw off the model of the “melting pot” and embrace many different cultures and ethnicities as being central to American life. By eventually establishing formal departments in ethnic studies, these issues will receive the attention that they deserve.