Thirty years ago, Bob Marley’s reggae, the Sex Pistols‚ punk and the disco beat of Saturday Night Fever were popular on college campuses. Women were just starting to be admitted to elite formerly all-male schools, but they already had won 13 of the coveted 32 Rhodes Scholarships granted in 1976. Socially aware Asian Pacific American students were concerned about apartheid in South Africa and attacks on affirmative action. Campuses and communities were alive with the identity and liberation movements that were also prominent in the black, Latino and Native American communities.
In 1977, 150 APA students gathered at Yale University to develop a way to increase communication and provide mutual support to APA student groups across campuses. An interim organization, the Inter-Collegiate Liaison Committee (ICLC) was born.
ICLC members rallied against the Bakke decision on their respective campuses, and started organizing for a conference at Princeton University the following spring. In March 1978, an “Asian Student Unity” conference was held at Princeton, with 275 students from 35 colleges attending. The resulting East Coast Asian Student Union (ECASU), since renamed ECAASU (East Coast Asian American Student Union), was dedicated to education, empowerment and collaborative action on APA issues. Its mission was to strengthen relations between Asian Pacific American organizations across campuses and build coalitions between APAs and people of all races.
Thirty years later, ECAASU held another conference at Yale on February 9 and 10, and the changes from the 1970s were readily apparent. An Asian Pacific American (Harold Koh) is now dean of the Yale Law School, Asian American studies courses are now taught at Yale and many other schools, and a network of APA organizations provided some of the speakers and attendees. Thirty years of ECAASU alumni who are APA entertainers, business executives, lawyers and others shared ideas with current students as they pulled together a multifaceted conference.
Over 100 universities and 1,000 students came to Yale’s campus in New Haven, Conn., on a wintry weekend to hear speakers like Nusrat Durrani, the general manager of MTV World, watch cutting-edge APA films such as Eric Byler’s Americanese, and enjoy entertainers like Chinese American rapper Jin.
Workshop and panel topics showed both that a lot had changed in 30 years and not much had changed at all. The assaults on affirmative action still merited a workshop, as did the growth of Asian Pacific American studies. Newer topics that were not on the menu 30 years ago were interracial dating and how to get involved in the electoral arena.
One of the most positive developments over the past 30 years since the first ECASU conference was the development of other student networks to facilitate communication and cooperation among campuses. For example, the Midwest Asian American Students Union was started in 1990 by students from 20 universities in the Midwest that had formed APA organizations.
Alice Wang, one of the Yale student organizers of the conference, explained how she used alumni contacts to make the conference happen: “Through a series of flukes and strokes of luck, I somehow ended up working with a fantastic group of people [classmates that I might not have otherwise met], and I was so excited about all of the wonderful speakers who agreed to participate in our conference. I myself have certainly become much more aware and conscious about the issues that we face as Asian Americans.”
Toby Wu, of Swarthmore College, said: “A couple of student dance teams incorporated hip hop in their bhangra dance performances. The concert was an exhilarating experience, because I got to see how some of my peers are almost reinventing their heritage and making it their own in these creative ways. I also thought about the different ways in which I could participate in the greater APA community through public policy [speakers Pauline Park and Khin Mai Aung] and entertainment/journalism [speakers Jeff Yang and Eric Byler].”
No one can predict where APA students will be in 30 years. But if this year’s conference is any indicator, they will continue to be on the cutting edge, mixing arts, activism and good old-fashioned fun.