The Fight for Asian American Studies Continues
January 28, 2008
In 2003, students at Harvard University surveyed the university’s hallways and meeting areas and found four centuries of portraits of esteemed scholars and benefactors. Three of the 302 portraits were people of color.
To their credit, Harvard administrators recognized a problem. They came up with $100,000 to commission a Harvard Minority Portraiture Project to add some new faces in prominent locations on the university’s walls.
When it comes to allowing the curriculum to embrace the study of Asians in America, however, the Harvard administration has shown more reluctance. Part of the reason is that Harvard sees itself, and is seen by many outside the university, as an institution that has been at the forefront of educational innovation since its founding in 1636.
When it was first chartered as America’s first college by the Massachusetts Colonial Legislature as a source of educated clergy for the American Colonies, the curriculum was based on the European model. It included four years of grammar, rhetoric, logic, ethics, natural science, metaphysics, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and history. Students also learned Latin, Greek and Hebrew to prepare them for the additional three years of study that many graduates undertook in theology studies.
As time went on and other early 19th century colleges continued to produce clerics and students more prepared for life in medieval Europe than the growing United States, Harvard started to invite scientists, economists and other secular professors. By the mid-19th century, only 10 percent of Harvard’s graduates went on to the ministry, and the rest became business executives, scientists, writers and educated members of an increasingly industrialized secular society.
Harvard President Charles W. Eliot was well-known in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for his creation of the elective system, which allowed students to choose their own course offerings. He also championed the notion of a graduate school to teach future professors and researchers, and pioneered the Harvard Classics, a “five-foot shelf of books” that was sold to the public as a 51-volume set.
Although a private enterprise done with the blessing of the Harvard administration, the Harvard Classics represent a clue as to why Asian Pacific American studies has not yet been adopted into the Harvard curriculum, as well how that adoption can come about.
In 1910, when Dr. Eliot was retiring after four decades as Harvard’s president and writing the introduction to the Harvard Classics, he made it clear that he was not compiling the best books, but was instead creating a portable university that was available to anyone who was motivated enough to go to the local library or wherever the series was housed.
This substitute for an on-campus education at Harvard, which he had shaped and understood more than anyone at the time, could be studied as a set of six courses: “The History of Civilization,” “Religion and Philosophy,” “Education,” “Science,” “Politics,” and “Criticism of Literature and the Fine Arts.”
Looking back from our vantage point a century later, we can see that Eliot left out Freud, Marx, Nietzsche and others who already had made a major mark on the world by 1910. Yet, we also can see that his desire to champion the “intermittent and irregular progress from barbarism to civilization,” which caused him to be both a champion of educational innovation, as well as a conservator of what he viewed as worthy information for educated Americans.
Given this and many other possible examples of how Harvard has tried to be both innovator and conservator, Harvard is not going to encourage Asian Pacific American studies, unless it can be convinced that it is falling behind the curve in educational innovation. Here’s how I would make that argument.
Harvard set up its Harvard-Yenching Institute in 1928 to focus study on China and the rest of Asia, and pioneered the use of War Department grants to train scholars and linguists in Asian languages and culture.
Today, Asians in the United States are one branch of the global Asian diaspora, which has reached all continents and is having a global effect on trade, culture and every aspect of life. Their impact on this society is one manifestation of the effect that they and other immigrants, refugees and expatriates are having on every country in the world.
Early Internet search engines such as Yahoo tried to continue the library shelf method of organizing information, but Google has thrown away both the organizing system and the bookshelf. The ability to find a fact, an old classmate or an entire poem from a single stanza means that old ways of seeing the world have to change.
The Harvard Classics represent an important milestone in universal education, but if Harvard continues to view its curriculum and departments as fixed entities, it runs the risk of becoming the conservator of the old way of categorizing and sharing knowledge.
Comments
One Response to “The Fight for Asian American Studies Continues”
Got something to say?
Sir:
I am confused with the same topic name I read on SF Asian week in January 25 issue which incomplete article cut short from the page.
Would you comment?
Thanks.
Regard,
Sath