I.
Introduction
“The
Center will hopefully enrich the experience of the entire university
by contributing to an understanding of the long neglected history,
rich cultural heritage, and present position of Asian Americans
in our society.”
--
Mission statement of the Steering Committee
to establish the Asian American Studies Center, 1969
“The
(UCLA Asian American Studies) Center has strengthened its presence
as the premier research locus within the field. Its progress
is considered especially important since the role of Asian Pacific
Americans within the United States has grown
exponentially over the last several decades . . . the Center’s
leadership in a wide variety of scholarly and policy arenas
has become widely noted both nationally and internationally.”
-- External Committee, Five-Year Review, 1997-98
Founded
in 1969, the UCLA Asian American Studies Center is celebrating
its 31st anniversary during the period covered by this 15-year
review. It is now the largest and most comprehensive program of
its kind in the nation, with active core programs in research,
undergraduate and graduate teaching, publications, library and
archival collections, student leadership development, joint university-community
research projects, endowment and development efforts, and public
educational activities. The past fifteen years have been an extraordinary
period of growth, achievement, and recognition for the Center.
This report
provides information, analysis, and recommendations with respect
to the principal criteria for evaluating the 15-year accomplishments
and continuance of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center as an
Organized Research Units (ORU) of the University of California:
research, undergraduate and graduate education, and public service.
The report has two major parts: (1) a narrative analytical discussion
in sections I – V, and (2) appendices (A – H), which
provide a wide spectrum of relevant supporting materials. Please
see “Appendix A: Location of Required Information, Checklist
for the Continuance Proposal for the UCLA Asian American Studies
Center,” which specifically pinpoints the location
in the narrative section or the appendices where the evaluation
criteria are addressed. The report begins with an overview
of the Center -- its history and mission, faculty participation,
staff, budget, space and physical resources. It then provides
evidence of accomplishment in research, teaching, and public service,
and concludes with recommendations and plans for the future.
A.
History and Mission.
The UCLA Asian American Studies Center was established during
the 1969-70 academic year as a result of faculty, student, alumni,
and community interest. "The Center," the founding steering
committee wrote in its proposal to the UCLA administration in
1969, "will hopefully enrich the experience of the entire
university by contributing to an understanding of the long neglected
history, rich cultural heritage, and present position of Asian
Americans in our society." Through its programs in research,
teaching, publications and other endeavors, the Center has pursued
its original mission, and has sought to enrich and inform not
only the UCLA community, but also an array of broader audiences
and sectors in the state, the nation, and internationally. The
Center's existence and development coincides with one of the most
dramatic periods of growth and transformation in the history of
Asian Pacific Americans. At its founding, less than 10% of the
UCLA student body were Asian Pacific Americans, and the 1970 U.S.
census indicated that there were 1.5 million Asian Pacifics nationally,
with the majority being American-born. In 2000, over 40% of the
35,000 UCLA undergraduate and graduate students are Asian Pacific
Americans, and there are over 11 million Asian Pacific Americans
across the country, with the majority being immigrants. Southern
California has the nation’s largest and most diverse Asian
Pacific American population with 2.5 million residents. The state
of California now claims 40% of all Asian Pacifics in the United
States.
The Asian
American Studies Center is one of four ethnic studies centers
at UCLA, and one of the oldest programs in Asian American Studies
in the nation. Its longitudinal development parallels and yet
is quite different from other Asian American Studies programs
founded in the late 1960s (e.g., UC Berkeley, UC Davis, San Francisco
State, and CSU Long Beach), particularly because the UCLA Center
was the only one that was established administratively as an ORU
rather than as a teaching program. Among other differences, for
example, the Center is the only one that has had a continuous
publications program, on-going organized research projects and
affiliated institutes, a research grants and postdoctoral fellowship
competition, and historical archive acquisitions campaigns throughout
its history. It is also only one of two programs (the other being
Berkeley) that has been able to develop a comprehensive library
and reading room devoted to Asian American Studies, and the first
to organize a graduate training program, an M.A. degree in Asian
American Studies, which will be holding its 25th anniversary in
2002.
The Center,
although an ORU, has shared a strong commitment to teaching like
other Asian American Studies programs since it offered its first
undergraduate class on "Orientals in America" in 1969.
The course reader for that class subsequently was transformed
into the Center Press's first publication entitled, Roots:
An Asian American Reader (1971), which became the standard
textbook for Asian American Studies courses throughout American
higher education for many years. It went through twelve printings,
and sold over 50,000 copies. The Center now administers one of
the largest teaching programs in Asian American Studies. Aside
from the M.A. degree in Asian American Studies, it offers a B.A.
major, an undergraduate minor, and two joint M.A. degree programs
with the School of Public Health and the Department of Social
Welfare of the School of Public Policy and Social Research. In
1999-2000, it offered 70 undergraduate and graduate classes during
the regular academic year and summer session, which attracted
nearly 3,000 students from departments throughout the UCLA campus
from the physical sciences to the humanities, including those
who were pursuing degrees in Asian American Studies (See Appendix
F, “UCLA Asian American Studies Interdepartmental Program,
Self-Review, 1999”).
UCLA also
has been one of the two major sites for the graduate training
of scholars for the field of Asian American Studies during the
past three decades, and its Ph.D. and M.A. alumni represent a
“Who’s Who” of leading scholars, writers, and
program directors for Asian American Studies from Professor Yen
Espiritu at UC San Diego to Professor Gary Okihiro at Columbia
(both of whom worked with the Center’s Amerasia Journal
during their UCLA doctoral careers). UCLA annually produces more
M.A.theses and doctoral dissertations on Asian American Studies
topics than any university because of the large number of Asian
American Studies specialists on the UCLA faculty, who are affiliated
with the Asian American Studies Center. Indeed, during the past
two years, 1998-2000, alumni of the M.A. Program in Asian American
Studies alone who have subsequently pursued their Ph.D. degrees
at UCLA or other institutions have been hired as tenure track
assistant professors at top universities across the nation, usually
to teach and do research in new Asian American Studies programs:
Eiichiro Azuma, History, University of Pennsylvania; Augusto Espiritu,
History, University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne; Grace Hong,
English, Princeton University; Scott Kurashige, History, University
of Michigan; James Lai, Political Science, Santa Clara University;
James Lee, English, University of Texas, Austin; and Kariann Yokoto,
American Studies, Yale University. All of these students actively
participated in research, archival and publications programs of
the Asian American Studies Center during their M.A. careers, and
all received research grants and/or graduate fellowships which
the Center administers from its own endowment accounts, or from
the Institute of American Cultures (IAC), an umbrella unit of
the four ethnic studies centers that annually provides each center
with a postdoctoral fellowship, a graduate fellowship (which the
Asian American Studies Center usually splits into three parts
and has three recipients), and a research grants competition open
to all UCLA graduate students, staff, and faculty (with each center
typically awarding between $20-25,000 annually in IAC research
grants).
Like other
Asian American Studies and ethnic studies programs, the Center's
development and acceptance on the UCLA campus has not been linear,
or non-controversial. At times, it has faced extraordinary institutional
forces of resistance and opposition, which made, for example,
the recruitment, appointment, and promotion of permanent faculty
nearly impossible for long stretches of the Center's history.
Indeed, during the first five-year period of this fifteen-year
review’s focus from 1985-1990, the Center's faculty, staff,
students, alumni, and public supporters were engaged in one of
the most highly publicized and prolonged tenure reviews in the
history of Asian American Studies. On the other hand, the Center
has also undergone diametrically opposite phases of strong and
inclusive institutional support, which has characterized much
of the past ten years from 1990-2000. For example, the success
that the Center experienced in hiring and promoting permanent
faculty during the past ten years was unprecedented with respect
to not only the Center's history, but also that of all Asian American
Studies programs across the nation. By extension, UCLA departments,
professional schools, libraries, museums, and other units throughout
the campus have shown great interest in collaborating with the
faculty, staff, and students of the Asian American Studies Center
on research projects, joint degree programs, conferences, visiting
professorships, development campaigns, public outreach, and other
joint activities. The Center now enjoys wide visibility and admiration
on the UCLA campus, and its accomplishments and activities are
showcased frequently in university publications and outreach efforts.
It plays a unique and indispensable role in serving as UCLA’s
multidisciplinary research, teaching, and professional service
locus for Asian American Studies, and in enhancing the university’s
national and international stature. On November 5, 1999, when
700 individuals attended a 30th anniversary fund-raising dinner
for the Center in downtown Los Angeles, they could celebrate the
collective achievement of literally thousands of faculty, students,
administrators, alumni and others who had helped to build an institution
over the past three decades that had indeed “enrich(ed)
the experience of the entire university by contributing to an
understanding of the long-neglected history, rich cultural heritage,
and present position of Asian Americans in our society.”
(See Appendix D, “Chronology of Selective Accomplishments
and Highlights of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1990-2000,”
for further information on the range of major campus activities
and achievements of the Center’s faculty, staff, and students
during the past decade).
What is also
evident in reviewing the Center’s development is that it
has been profoundly influenced by and has sought to maintain mutually
beneficial relations with an extremely diverse range of constituencies
and audiences from scholars to policy decision-makers, and from
local social service agencies to national museums across the country,
but particularly in Southern California. There is no question
that being located in a geographic region that became the largest
and most diverse Asian Pacific American community in the nation
during the Center's history has posed a number of challenges and
provided special opportunities that probably no other Asian American
Studies program encountered in quite the same way or magnitude.
For example, during the period under review, the Center’s
faculty, staff, and students felt compelled to respond through
its scholarship, teaching, publications, campus forums and public
educational programs to the 1992 Los Angeles civil unrest, in
which 2,000 Korean and other Asian American businesses were destroyed
in what has been called the first multiethnic urban rebellion
in the nation's history. Likewise, the Center's interests in the
use of recent electronic technological advancements (e.g., internet,
CD-ROMs, digital video cameras, etc.) to enhance the impact of
its scholarly, public policy and creative works were supported
significantly through a number of mutually beneficial partnerships
with major local social services and visual arts organizations.
The Center, for example, was one of five founding members of the
APANet consortium that received major funding from the National
Telecommunications and Information Administration, Pacific Bell
and other private and public entities to establish the first Asian
American electronic information sharing and communications network.
Indeed, the faculty, staff, students, and alumni of the Center
have played a critically important role over the past three decades
in helping to develop the nation’s largest and perhaps most
influential infrastructure of social service agencies, museums,
art and cultural organizations, and civil rights groups that serve
and represent the Asian Pacific American population in Southern
California, and oftentimes at the state and national levels as
well. Prominent Asian American organizations like the Asian Pacific
American Legal Center of Southern California, Visual Communications,
Chinatown Service Center, Thai Community Development Corporation
and others were founded by former students of the Center, and
they along with numerous other groups have maintained enduring
relationships in pursuing collaborative research, publications,
internship and artistic projects with Center faculty and staff.
Likewise, national organizations like the Smithsonian Institution,
Rockefeller Foundation, National Asian Pacific American Legal
Consortium, American Academy of Poetry and others have sought
to build partnerships and to pursue joint projects with the Center.
(See Appendix D, “Chronology of Selective Accomplishments
and Highlights of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1990-2000,”
for further information on the range of major professional and
public activities and achievements of the Center’s faculty,
staff, and students during the past decade).
These extensive,
long-standing relationships with Southern California’s Asian
Pacific American population have been extremely beneficial to
faculty and other researchers in departments throughout UCLA,
who are not members of the Center’s faculty but who are
interested in undertaking research on the Asian Pacific American
population. The Center, for example, has frequently been asked
by faculty and graduate students in the professional schools and
the social sciences departments of the College of Letters and
Science to assist in providing access to neighborhoods, organizations,
institutions, or leaders of the different Asian Pacific American
communities in the region in order to undertake medical clinical
trials, ethnographic studies of immigrant communities, or policy
research projects. In turn, the Center’s faculty and staff
oftentimes become co-principal investigators of grant proposals,
or co-sponsors of community-oriented events. At the same time,
one of the most invaluable on-going public service publications
of the Center’s Press and its Student and Community Projects
unit – the Asian Pacific American Community Directory, which
provides an annotated and indexed listing of over 900 Asian Pacific
American social services agencies, newspapers and media, civil
rights groups, museums, and other organizations in Southern California
– has become an indispensable research tool for faculty
and graduate students at UCLA and other institutions who are interested
in conducting field research on Asian Pacific Americans in the
region.
B.
Structure:
Institutional Location, Faculty, and Staff: Although the Center
is technically an ORU, it is in reality a highly integrated organization
that is both an ORU and an Interdepartmental (teaching) Program
(IDP). The ORU is part of the Chancellor’s Office, and now
reports to the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs/Dean of Graduate
Division, Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, although during the past fifteen
years it has reported to the previous Vice Chancellor for Research,
Albert Barber, and to the previous Executive Vice Chancellor,
Andrea Rich. The Center receives practically its entire permanent
funding budget from the Chancellor’s Office, which it has
used to support both its ORU and IDP programs and activities.
The IDP, on the other hand, is part of the College of Letters
and Science, and reports to the Dean of the Division of Social
Sciences, a position once occupied by David Sears and now Scott
Waugh, and ultimately the Provost of the College, formerly Ray
Orbach and now Brian Copenhaver The Center (as well as the other
ethnic studies centers and teaching programs) has had a long-standing
grievance with the College involving the inadequate funding of
its IDP. For two decades, despite the substantial growth in enrollments
and courses offered (see Appendix F, “UCLA Asian American
Studies Interdepartmental Program, Self-Review, 1999”),
the Center received $7,100 annually in permanent funding from
the College to administer its undergraduate and graduate programs,
the largest IDP on the UCLA campus. The Center has annually contributed
well over $100,000 in staff time, supplies and equipment, and
other expenses to administer and develop the undergraduate and
graduate academic programs in Asian American Studies at UCLA,
and should be fully recognized for this achievement and the commitment
and sacrifices it has made. This issue was identified as perhaps
the most serious challenge facing the Center in the previous three
five-year reviews of the ORU in 1985, 1990, and 1997-98. It was
also the focus of substantial commentary and recommendations in
the just concluded external review of the IDP in 1999-2000. The
external committee, in judging the IDP to be the most outstanding
Asian American Studies program in the nation, stated that the
College and the central administration should no longer neglect
the appalling funding and physical space issues facing the IDP.
It also recommended that the IDP should become a department, and
that more faculty FTEs and resources be provided to the academic
program. (A copy of this Academic Senate report should be available
in the binder of materials provided with this report.) The Executive
Vice Chancellor has made a commitment to remedy this situation
with the allocation to the College of $250,000 annually for the
IDPs in Asian American Studies, American Indian Studies, and African
American Studies, in which the Asian American Studies Center will
receive $165-175,000 of this amount, depending on the allocation
formula that is finally selected. [The Ceasar Chavez Center, which
administers the academic program in Chicano Studies and is not
formally tied to the Chicano Studies Research Center (the ORU),
receives separate funding.] At the same time, the Chancellor’s
Office and the College of Letters and Science have expressed strong
support for the departmentalization of the IDP in Asian American
Studies.
The issues
of institutional location and whether the ORU and IDP in Asian
American Studies (and the other three ethnic studies programs)
should continue to have dual reporting lines to the Chancellor’s
Office and to the College of Letters and Science have been extensively
discussed for several years. Proposals have been made, for example,
to bring all of the ethnic studies ORUs and IDPs together in one
administrative structure in the Chancellor’s Office; or
to do the same under the jurisdiction of the Division of Social
Sciences of the College; or to keep reporting lines as they have
been for three decades. For the Asian American Studies Center,
a number of benefits and disadvantages have resulted from this
dual reporting arrangement. During the 15-year review of the Asian
American Studies Center as well as the other three ethnic studies
centers during the 2000-2001 academic year, this issue will be
of utmost interest. In the concluding section of this report,
we will offer additional commentary on these issues.
The Center
has a Director, who is a tenured member of the UCLA faculty and
is given .33 release time to administer, represent, and lead the
program. Professor Don Nakanishi, a political scientist who holds
an institutional FTE appointment with the Graduate School of Education
and Information Studies and the Asian American Studies Center,
began his first year as the Director during the 1990-91 academic
year. Under his directorship, a position of Associate Director
of Research was created, and tenured faculty members were selected
to serve for a period of at least one academic year. Professors
Paul Ong (Urban Planning and Asian American Studies), King-Kok
Cheung (English and Asian American Studies), Valerie Matsumoto
(History and Asian American Studies), and Robert Nakamura (Film
and Television and Asian American Studies) have served as Associate
Directors from 1990-2000. Each was asked to pursue his or her
research and creative interests in Asian American Studies, and
to assist the Director and the Center staff in institutionalizing
and enhancing those areas of expertise into the Center’s
programs. Professor Ong, for example, was instrumental in the
development of the Center's public policy research endeavors,
while Professor Nakamura organized the Center's innovative video
documentation program with the establishment of the Center for
EthnoCommuniucations. Associate Directors were given .20 release
time, as well as a research stipend.
The Center
has a Faculty Advisory Committee, which meets as a committee of
the whole at least twice during each academic quarter, and undertakes
other work in subcommittees that meet at other times. The Chair
of the committee since 1989 has been Professor James Lubben, a
renowned geriatrics scholar who is also a former Chair of the
Department of Social Welfare. The Faculty Advisory Committee is
an extraordinarily involved, committed, and supportive body of
faculty. They have come to value serving on the committee because
a number of viable professional networks, collaborative research
opportunities, and mentoring relationships have developed from
their involvement in the committee. At the same time, the faculty
has played a highly visible role in all of the Center's major
accomplishments during the period under review, be it the magnificent
yearlong series of academic and public educational programs and
exhibitions commemorating the 50th anniversary of the World War
II internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans in 1992, the founding
of the joint public policy research institute with the Leadership
Education for Asian Pacifics (LEAP) organization, the campaigns
to create endowments for academic chairs, research grants, fellowships,
and scholarships, or the establishment of the B.A. major or joint
M.A. degrees in Asian American Studies, among others. Practically
all members of the Faculty Advisory Committee also have presented
their research or creative works in the Center's highly successful
Faculty Colloquium Series or its numerous scholarly conferences
and symposia, and many have written for one of the Center's publications
such as Amerasia Journal, the leading multidisciplinary
journal for Asian American Studies; the major joint public policy
research studies it has undertaken with the LEAP organization;
or the “Intersections” joint book series with the
University of Hawaii Press. .
From seventeen
members in 1990-91, the Faculty Advisory committee now has forty-one
members who represent the largest and most multidisciplinary group
of faculty in Asian American Studies in the nation. This is due,
in part, to the unprecedented success in faculty recruitment during
the past ten years, which will be discussed more fully later in
the research section, and continuous outreach efforts to all UCLA
faculty who have scholarly interests in Asian American Studies.
The current members of the Faculty Advisory Committee hail from
a wide cross-section of the UCLA academic community representing
21 different departments and professional schools from the medical
center in the southern part of campus to the film school at its
northern most tip. They are leading scholars in their areas of
expertise, who have received scholarly acclaim from long-established
disciplines like history and sociology as well as more recently
founded ones like women’s studies and policy research, and
have pioneered a number of new areas within Asian American Studies.
Last year, for instance, Professor Min Zhou of Sociology and Asian
American Studies received the Thomas Znaniecki Award from the
American Sociological Association’s International Migration
Section for the best book published on immigration for her book,
Growing Up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life
in the United States (Russell Sage, 1999), while during the
previous year Professor Kyeyoung Park received the book prize
for the outstanding work in history and the social sciences for
her book, The Korean American Immigrants and Small Business
in New York (Cornell University Press, 1998). About eighty
percent of the members of the Faculty Advisory Committee are tenured,
and several have reached the esteemed Professor Step VI level.
One member, Professor Emeritus Harry Kitano of the Departments
of Social Welfare and Sociology, held the endowed chair in Japanese
American Studies, which is administered by the Center, until his
retirement. It remains as the only academic chair in Asian American
Studies in the country (although the Center is currently involved
in development drives to establish four more academic chairs).
It is now occupied by Professor Robert Nakamura of the Department
of Film and Television, as well as Asian American Studies, who
is a pioneering, award-winning film-maker with Asian American
themes, particularly those of the World War II incarceration of
120,000 Japanese Americans. At the same time, four have served
or are serving as chairs of their departments (Professors Ong,
Lubben, Kar, Berkanovic), and others have held leadership positions
in ORUs and IDPs throughout the university. Each member devotes
all or a portion of his or her research and teaching agenda to
the study of Asian Americans. Sixteen of them hold formal joint
institutional FTE appointments between Asian American Studies
and a host department, in which half of their annual teaching
load is contractually dedicated to the Asian American Studies
program. The members of the Faculty Advisory Committee for 2000-2001
are as follows (with an * for those who hold joint institutional
FTE appointments):
Anthropology:
Kyeyoung Park*
East Asian Languages and Cultures/Comparative Literature:
Shu-mei Shih*
Economics: Wei-Yin Hu*
Education: Don Nakanishi* (Director, ex-officio),
Mitchell Chang
English: King-kok Cheung*, Rachel Lee, Russell
Leong (adjunct*), Jinqi
Ling*, David Wong Louie*
Ethnomusicology: Hiromi Lorraine Sakata
Film and Television: Robert Nakamura*
Geography: Cindy Fan
History: Yuji Ichioka (adjunct*), Vinay Lal,
Valerie Matsumoto*, Michael Salman, Henry Yu*
Law: Mitu Gulati, Jerry Kang
Library and Information Studies: Clara Chu
Management: William Ouchi
Medicine: Nancy Harada,Takashi Makinodan
Political Science: James Tong
Psychiatry: Kazuo Nihira
Psychology: Cindy Yee-Bradbury*
Public Health: Roshan Bastani, Emil Berkanovic,
Ninez Ponce, Marjorie Kagawa-Singer*,Snehendu Kar
Social Welfare: Pauline Agbayani-Siewert*,
Harry Kitano (Emeritus), James Lubben (Chair of Faculty Advisory
Committee), Mitchell Maki, Ailee Moon.
Sociology: Lucie Cheng, Min Zhou*
The Center
formally participates in the promotional and tenure reviews of
the sixteen faculty who hold institutional FTE appointments, and
usually is requested to submit promotional evaluation letters
for the other members of the Faculty Advisory Committee. The Center
also provides funding for individual faculty research projects,
especially those who are assistant professors and those in the
College, as well as travel grants to professional conferences,
from a variety of endowment and special funds that are administered
by the Center. All can request keys to the Center, use the specially
designated faculty conference room, and obtain complimentary xeroxing
and faxing privileges. All receive complimentary copies of all
publications produced by the Center’s Press, including Amerasia
Journal, and invitations to all special events of the Center
like its major fund-raising dinners. Of all the faculty members,
only the Director, Associate Director, Chair of the IDP, Russell
Leong (who is an adjunct professor in English and Senior Editor
of Amerasia Journal) and Yuji Ichioka (who is an adjunct
professor in the Hstory Department and a Senior Researcher at
the Center), have offices at the Center. The other members of
the Faculty Advisory Committee have their offices in their home
departments (See Appendix B, “Affiliated Faculty of
the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 2000-2001,” for
the home departments, external funding, prizes and awards, and
most significant publications of all faculty members who are affiliated
with the Center).
Approximately half of the members of the Faculty Advisory Committee
of the Center also are members of the faculty committee that oversees
the IDP in Asian American Studies. From 1985-96, Professors Don
Nakanishi (Education and Asian American Studies), Paul Ong (Urban
Planning and Asian American Studies), and Snehendu Kar (Public
Health) served terms as Chair of this committee. From Winter 1997,
Professor Cindy Fan of Geography became the Chair, with Professors
David Takeuchi (Psychiatry), Min Zhou (Sociology and Asian American
Studies), and Valerie Matsumoto (History and Asian American Studies)
having served as Vice Chair. The chairs of this committee have
worked closely with the Director, Associate Director, Assistant
Director, and Chair of the Faculty Advisory Committee of the Center
in actively coordinating the activities of the IDP with the ORU.
Professor Fan has done an exceptional job of chairing the IDP
during the past three years. In Fall 2001, Professor Zhou, who
holds a joint appointment in Sociology and Asian American Studies,
will become the Chair of the IDP (or department) of Asian American
Studies.
The Director,
Associate Directors, and Faculty Advisory Committee were assisted
greatly by a professional staff of eight full-time and four part-time
employees at the Center. This staff remained remarkably stable
during much of the past fifteen years. Six of the staff members
have worked at the Center for over 10 years, and two of the principal
unit coordinators (Russell Leong of the Center Press and Marjorie
Lee of the Center’s Reading Room and Library) have been
with the Center for over twenty years. It is an experienced, committed,
and highly professional staff, which works effectively and collaboratively
with the affiliated faculty of the Center. Most are recognized
leaders, researchers, and writers in their own right in the field
of Asian American Studies, as well as in Asian American communities.
Indeed, the long-time former Assistant Director of the Center,
Dr. Enrique de la Cruz, who provided leadership to the Center
for over ten years, became the Chair and Professor of the Asian
American Studies Department at CSU Northridge, beginning in January
2000, upon his departure from UCLA. The staff members are highly
supportive of one another, and fulfill not only their primary
job duties within units, but also have a remarkable ability of
working collectively on projects that require coordination and
integration of talents like the development of the Amerasia Journal
Cumulative Bibliography (AJCB) database, organizing scholarly
and public-oriented conferences, or contributing to the development
of the IDP in Asian American Studies. The Center staff for 2000-2001
is as follows:
Assistant
Director & Curriculum Coordinator: Dennis Arguelles
Fiscal Manager and MSO: Cathy Castor
Office Manager: Charles Ku
Administrative/Curriculum Assistant: Irene Soriano
Center Press /Resource Development and Publications Coordinator
and Senior Editor of Amerasia Journal: Russell Leong
Amerasia Journal Editor: Glenn Omatsu
Center Press Design and Production: Mary Kao
Center Press Distribution Assistant: vacant
Student Community Projects Coordinator: Meg Thornton
Student Affairs Officer: Sefa Aina
Library and Reading Room Coordinator: Marjorie Lee
Library Assistant: Judy Soo Hoo
Associate Researcher and Adjunct Associate Professor in History:
Yuji Ichioka
The individuals
who have been staff members of the Center during its 31-year history
have played an immeasurable role in the development of the Center,
and its impact on the UCLA campus, the field of Asian American
Studies, and the general public. (See Appendix C, “Staff
of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 2000-2001,” for
more information on each staff member).
At the same
time, the Center annually hires a number of undergraduate and
graduate students, who work at the Center as well as under the
direct supervision of faculty members. Some are employed to support
the general operations of the Center such as performing clerical
duties in the main office or working in the distribution section
of the Center Press. Others work in the Reading Room and Library
cataloging newly acquired archival collections, or with the Student
and Community Projects unit in updating the Asian Pacific American
Community Directory. Still others work as research assistants
on Center or faculty projects, as interns with Amerasia Journal,
or as teaching assistants in introductory classes of the IDP in
Asian American Studies. The Center annually also has 5-10 Visiting
Scholars from institutions across the nation and around the world,
one Institute of American Cultures (IAC) Postdoctoral Fellow,
and approximately 10 part-time lecturers. In total, the Center
makes approximately 175 payroll appointments annually.
C.
Resources: Budget, Space, and Equipment.
Budget.
The Center has an annual operating budget of approximately
$1.5 to $2.0 million, of which approximately $525,000 is permanent
funding (with $7,100 coming from the College to support the administration
of the IDP, and the rest from the Chancellor’s Office).
The bulk of these permanent funds are used for staff salaries.
The remaining $1.0 - $1.5 million is derived annually from temporary
funding from grants, sales by the Center’s Press, endowment
accounts, gifts and donations, and miscellaneous augmentations.
For example, in 1998-99, the Center’s budget was $1,581,000,
of which 33% was permanent funding from the university, and 67%
came from temporary sources. In 2000-2001, the operating budget
will exceed $2 million with several major grants and added funding
of the IDP by the central administration. Aside from the funding
of release time for the Director and Associate Director (and summer
ninths and an administrative stipend for the Director), the salaries
for all affiliated faculty of the Center are paid through their
home department.
The Center’s
budget is administered through its Center Management unit, which
consists of an MSO (currently held by Cathy Castor, and previously
for over ten years by Christine Wang) and an Office Manager (currently
held by Charles Ku, and previously for nearly ten years by Cathy
Castor). The unit annually administers over 1500 account payable/receivable
accounting transactions, 175 payroll appointments (of visiting
lecturers, research assistants, work study students, etc.), and
700 payroll transactions. The Center Management unit also administers
over 150 grants ranging from $100 - $500,000; over 20 endowment
accounts totaling nearly $3,000,000 for an academic chair, graduate
fellowships, undergraduate scholarships, research funds, and academic
prizes; and over 40 university expense accounts.
The Center
has administered numerous research contracts and grants throughout
its existence. This is largely due to the commitment of faculty
to the ORU, as well as the wealth of grant writing, administration,
and coordination experience on the part of the Director and Center
staff. Center Press Coordinator and Adjunct Professor of English
Russell Leong has written a number of successful grant applications,
totaling well over $1 million during the past ten years. At the
same time, both MSO Cathy Castor and Assistant Director Dennis
Arguelles have had extensive contracts and grants experience at
UCLA and elsewhere. Arguelles, for example, coordinates the Asian
Pacific American Geriatric Network Collaborative, a program which
the Center operates in partnership with UCLA School of Medicine
professors Takashi Makinodan and Nancy Harada, both active members
of the Center’s Faculty Advisory Committee, and six major
community-based Asian Pacific geriatric organizations. The Collaborative
received a grant for $315,000 from the California Endowment, and
is developing several multi-million dollar proposals to develop
other programs relating to research, teaching, and public educational
programs benefiting Asian Pacific American elderly. However, like
most ORUs, the Center must oftentimes compete with the home departments
of its affiliated faculty members in the channeling of grant applications
and the subsequent administration of grants. Most faculty members
are strongly encouraged by their Deans and department chairs to
keep the administration of research grants and contracts within
their Schools or departments. Despite this, Center affiliated
faculty continue to house a number of projects at the Center because
of its sound administration, to take advantage of its interdisciplinary
synergy, and to benefit from the Center’s long-standing
reputation among foundation, social services, and other relevant
groups. Indeed, the Center is oftentimes in a more advantageous
position to leverage grants and to showcase faculty expertise
and interests to develop larger and more enduring research programs
than can be achieved by any single faculty member.
Physical
Space and Equipment. The Center occupies only 4300 square
feet on the north end of the second and third floors of Campbell
Hall. This includes offices for the Center Director, Associate
Director, IDP Chair, and staff, a reading room/library, a graduate
lounge for M.A. students in Asian American Studies, offices for
the IAC Postdoctoral Fellow and the lecturers for the IDP, faculty
conference room, and a larger conference room, which is shared
with the adjacent American Indian Studies Center. At the same
time, the College has provided one 90 square foot office in Bunche
Hall to assist in administering the IDP in Asian American Studies.
The limitation of physical space at the Center has long been a
major obstacle preventing the Center from further expanding its
research activities, particularly in the housing of research projects
and affiliated research institutes of its faculty. The College
clearly has not provided adequate space to fully support the activities
of the IDP.
In addition to standard office equipment (e.g., copier, fax, etc.),
the Center houses approximately 20 computers of varying capacity
and sophistication. Most are assigned to Center staff offices,
but several are provided for patrons of the Center’s Reading
Room and Library and others are located in the graduate lounge.
The Center also has a television, VCR, digital video cameras,
portable microphone, and other audio-visual equipment.
II.
Research
Since its founding in 1969, the UCLA Asian American Studies Center
has attempted to document, analyze, and forecast the contemporary,
historical, and future experiences and concerns of people of Asian
and Pacific Islander heritage in the United States through an
array of scholarly, policy-oriented, applied, and creative forms
of inquiry. It has attempted to fulfill this mission through sponsored
research projects; the development of affiliated research institutes;
support for individual faculty members; collaborative research
and creative projects with campus and community organizations,
museums, and leaders; publications and other media; archival and
data-collection activities; and the training of new scholars,
policy analysts, and creative artists. It is a unique institution
in having the expertise, resources, and opportunities to attempt
such a multifaceted and multidisciplinary research agenda. It
has become an indispensable resource for the UCLA campus and for
the field of Asian American Studies.
The Center's
research and publications activities and accomplishments from
1990-2000 are documented and presented in “Appendix
D: Chronology of Selective Accomplishments and Highlights of the
UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1990-2000,” and
“Appendix E: Publications of the UCLA Asian American
Studies Center Press, 1990-2000.” At the same time,
please see “Appendix H: Annual Report, 1999-2000, of the
UCLA Asian American Studies Center,” to gain an understanding
of what the Center’s faculty, staff, and students typically
undertakes and achieves in an academic year in terms of research,
publications, teaching, library and archival acquisitions, development,
and community-campus collaborations.
In attempting
to capture and analyze the Center's research and publications
activities during the review period, we will organize our comments
along two major themes: (1) building institutional anchors and
bridges, (2) contributing and sharing knowledge through publications,
conferences, exhibits, media projects, the internet and other
media. By doing so, we will attempt to provide some insights on
the broader trends and interconnections of the Center's activities
in research and publications with that of the required evaluation
criterion of public service.
A. Building
institutional anchors and bridges. We have found it useful to
use Director Nakanishi's often-stated goals of building institutional
anchors and bridges to describe a number of significant innovations,
accomplishments, and activities that were undertaken, especially
during the past ten years, and will influence future directions
of the Center. The metaphor of the anchor is used to describe
the development of core resources and programs that provide stability
and foundation from which Asian American Studies can survive and
further thrive at UCLA. In 1990, when Nakanishi became Center
Director, many of those anchors like a strong and vibrant Press
were in place. However, other essential elements needed to be
bolstered or developed. In this vein, faculty recruitment and
individual faculty development, the establishment of affiliated
research centers, the routinization of programs like the faculty
colloquium series and conferences, increased grants and endowment
activities, and contributing to the development of scholarship
on new communities were given special attention. The building
of institutional bridges goes hand in hand with the notion of
institutional anchors, and focuses attention on the need to build
and maintain relations with a potentially large and diverse array
of constituencies, partners, and audiences both on campus and
outside to facilitate and maximize the Center's abilities and
resources to pursue its multiple missions. Over the years, the
Center has built and strengthened its institutional anchors and
bridges. Hopefully, the presentation of evidence of accomplishment
in research and other areas in the following narrative section,
as well as in the appendices, will fully justify the continuance
of our unique multidisciplinary ORU.
1.
Faculty recruitment and development.
The most significant resource for the success of an ORU or IDP
is its faculty. The recruitment of faculty can be viewed from
two vantage points: the appointment of new faculty to the UCLA
campus, and the outreach to existing UCLA faculty to encourage
their participation in the affairs of the Center. From both perspectives,
the Center achieved unparalleled success in building the largest
multidisciplinary faculty in Asian American Studies in the nation
during the past ten years. Since this achievement had far-reaching
ramifications for every aspect of the Center's research and programmatic
goals, along with its multiple forms of impact on the UCLA community,
it would be well to provide a brief discussion of the history
of the Center's faculty recruitment efforts.
Throughout its existence, the Center has played an indispensable
role in the recruitment and retention of Asian American Studies
faculty at UCLA. Beginning in the mid-1970s, the Center along
with the other three ethnic studies centers each received five
institutional FTEs from the Chancellor's Office to develop its
research and teaching programs, and to begin to infuse the UCLA
curriculum and its scholarly mission with an appreciation for
the experiences and contributions of Asian Americans, African
Americans, American Indians, and Chicanos. These tenure-track
appointments required the individual to teach half of his/her
courses in the IDP in Asian American Studies, to participate in
the research and other activities of the ORU in Asian American
Studies, and yet to be housed in and actively participate in an
academic department. The latter requirement was necessary because
tenure-track faculty could not be (and indeed, still cannot be)
appointed to ORUs or IDPs at UCLA. As stated previously, the Center,
like the other ethnic studies centers, had difficulty in filling
these positions for many years for a various reasons, not the
least of which was the opposition to ethnic studies and race relations
scholarship by faculty in potential host departments. However,
with the appointment of Professor Valerie Matsumoto in History
in 1987, all five institutional FTE positions for Asian American
Studies were filled after nearly fifteen years of searching. The
other FTEs were occupied by Professors Robert Nakamura (film and
television), Don Nakanishi (education), Paul Ong (urban planning),
and Stanley Sue (psychology). An additional FTE was also given
to the Çenter in the early 1980s to recruit Professor King-kok
Cheung (English). All of these professors gained tenure (and Nakamura,
Nakanishi, Ong, and Cheung subsequently were promoted to full
professorships), and all continue to be actively involved in the
leadership of the Center, with Nakanishi being the director; Ong,
Cheung, Matsumoto, and Nakamura serving as associate directors;
and Sue, prior to his recent departure for UC Davis, chairing
the Center's task force which led to the establishment of the
B.A. major in Asian American Studies, along with developing the
Center’s first affiliated research institute.
In 1990, the Center had one of the largest groups of faculty in
Asian American Studies of any university in the nation. Aside
from the six permanent, although shared, institutional FTE appointees,
the Center benefited from the participation of other members of
the UCLA faculty who had expertise and strong interest in Asian
American Studies, but were fully appointed in their home departments.
These included, among others, Professors Lucie Cheng (of Sociology,
who was the long-term Director of the Center from 1972-1988),
Harry Kitano (of Social Welfare and Sociology, who was Acting
Director of the Center from 1988-1990), and Alexander Saxton (of
History, who chaired the Center's Faculty Advisory Committee for
nearly two decades until his retirement in 1990). However, despite
its relatively successful standing in relation to the size of
other Asian American Studies programs, it was felt that more faculty
representing a broader cross-section of disciplines was necessary
for the Center to meet and build upon its expectations and goals
in research, teaching, publishing, professional and public service,
and other activities.
When Professor
Nakanishi became Director in 1990, he was able to negotiate a
number of additional institutional FTEs in the social sciences
and humanities from then College Provost Ray Orbach, and later
an additional one for a professional school appointment from the
Chancellor's Office. As mentioned previously, the Center experienced
unprecedented success in faculty recruitment during the past ten
years. It was able to appoint eleven new faculty to institutional
FTE positions -- Kyeyoung Park (Anthropology), Min Zhou (Sociology),
Wei-Yin Hu (Economics), Henry Yu (History), Jinqi Ling (English),
Shu-mei Shih (East Asian Languages and Cultures/Comparative Literature),
David Wong Louie (English), Pauline Agbayani-Siewert (Social Welfare),
Cindy Yee-Bradbury (Psychology), Marjorie Kagawa-Singer (Public
Health), and Mari Matsuda (Law). Only Professor Matsuda -- the
first Asian American ever hired by and tenured in the School of
Law, but who is now at Georgetown Law School – and Professor
Hu – the first Asian American Studies specialist hired in
the Economics Department – have left UCLA. At the same time,
the Center still had one unfilled institutional FTE from the College,
which had been targeted for a joint appointment in Art History
and Asian American Studies. Two national searches for a junior
scholar to fill that position were not successful. In 1999-2000,
the Center gained permission to split this FTE, and to join with
a newly established program in Southeast Asian Studies to search
for a senior scholar in Philippines Studies/Filipino American
Studies. The search led to a recommendation to appoint Professor
Vicente Rafael of UC San Diego, who just received a Guggenheim
Fellowship, to a faculty position in Asian American Studies, Southeast
Asian Studies, and Comparative Literature (which would be his
home department). The appointment is pending final approval by
the Academic Senate’s Committee on Academic Personnel. In
2000-2001, the Center has again joined with the Southeast Asian
Studies Program to search for an assistant professor in Vietnam/Vietnamese
American Studies, who would teach in and participate in the research
activities of both programs and be housed in the East Asian Languages
and Cultures Department. Both of these appointments will serve
to strengthen the Center’s expertise, particularly in relation
to research, teaching, and graduate training on two extremely
important and vibrant ethnic communities of the Asian Pacific
American population.
Along with
these institutional FTE appointments, the Center was actively
involved in the search processes of nine additional new UCLA faculty
members who expressed strong interest in Asian American Studies,
but whose full appointment would be in a UCLA department or professional
school. During the period under review, the Center participated
in the recruitment of Professors Ailee Moon (Social Welfare),
Jerry Kang (Law), Rachel Lee (English and Women's Studies), Michael
Salman (History), Mitchell Chang (Education), Shirley Hune (Urban
Planning, and Associate Dean of Graduate Programs), Justine Su
(Education), Mitchell Maki (Social Welfare), and Julie Roque (Urban
Planning). All became members of the Center's Faculty Advisory
Committee, and all participated in other programs of the Center.
For example, Professors Moon, Kang, Salman, Hune, Chang, Su, and
Maki taught courses, usually cross-listed with their home departments,
for the IDP in Asian American Studies.
The addition
of these twenty new faculty, as well as active outreach efforts
to existing UCLA professors who had interests in Asian American
Studies, led to the creation of the forty-one member Faculty Advisory
Committee, which is the Center's most significant institutional
achievement during the period of this review. Its consequences
have been far-reaching. For example, for many years, Professor
King-kok Cheung was the Center's sole faculty member not only
in the English Department, but also in the entire Division of
the Humanities in the College. Now, four other tenure track professors
(Lee, Ling, Louie, and Shih) and one adjunct full professor (Russell
Leong) specialize in Asian American literature, and provide a
critical mass for the development of innovative teaching and research
endeavors in the literature area that benefits not only Asian
American Studies, but also the faculty and students in the Departments
of English, Comparative Literature, and East Asian Languages and
Cultures. .The anticipated additions of Professor Rafael and the
Vietnam/Vietnamese American Studies junior scholar will further
augment this unparalleled strength. Likewise, significant cohorts
have been created along other specific disciplinary lines (e.g.,
five historians), as well as multidisciplinary areas of inquiry
(e.g., public policy, research on Asian American elderly, transnational
dimensions of the Asian Pacific population, Asian American women’s
studies, new immigrant communities, etc.). Equally important,
the recruitment of these new faculty members has served to fulfill
the founding mission of the Center, "to enrich the experience
of the entire university" by infusing UCLA undergraduate
and graduate curricula and scholarly agendas with Asian American
Studies expertise. There is no question that the Center's faculty
represents one of the most important and enduring institutional
bridges between the Center and departments and professional schools
of the university.
Along with
the recruitment of faculty, the Center has been keenly interested
in the professional development of individual faculty members.
As mentioned previously, it has provided research grants and other
resources to support faculty from a variety of extramural grants,
endowments and special funds that the Center has received and
administers. An extraordinary number of publications and other
research activities have resulted. Most of these studies appear
as refereed articles in scholarly journals. However, it has been
most gratifying to see a number of critically acclaimed books
produced by those who were assistant professors during the period
under review who benefited directly from grants and other support
provided by the Center. These include, along with the names of
their publishers: Professors Kyeyoung Park (Cornell University
Press), Jinqi Ling (Oxford University Press), Henry Yu (Oxford
University Press), Jerry Kang (Aspen Publishers), Rachel Lee (Princeton
University Press), Valerie Matsumoto (Cornell University Press),
Vinay Lal (Oxford University Press), Ailee Moon (Academia Koreana),
Michael Salman (University of California), Mitchell Maki (University
of Illinois Press), Min Zhou (Russell Sage), Shu-Mei Shih (University
of California), and David Wong Louie (G.P. Putnam and Sons). (See
Appendix B, “Affiliated Faculty of the UCLA Asian American
Studies Center, 2000-2001,” for more detailed information
about publications by these and other affiliated faculty of the
Center, and Appendix E, “Publications of the UCLA Asian
American Studies Center Press, 1990-2000.” ).
2.
Developing affiliated research institutes and sponsoring large-scale
projects.
During the review period, particularly the past ten years, the
Center sought to build additional institutional anchors and bridges
in the form of affiliated research institutes, which would serve
to organize and leverage faculty expertise and interest in specific
areas of scholarship, undergraduate teaching and graduate training,
and public service. These multidisciplinary endeavors served to
bypass seemingly rigid departmental and disciplinary boundaries,
and served to link faculty members across the campus. They were
also intended to benefit the field of Asian American Studies nationally
because they would actively encourage the participation of scholars
from other institutions in research teams or multi-university
consortia. One of the models for this form of institution building
was the National Research Center for Asian American Mental Health
(NRCAAMH), which was established by Professor Stanley Sue in 1988
with a major grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.
From the inception of this important institute, the Asian American
Studies Center maintained a close affiliation, provided funds
for a joint lecture series, and benefited from the pioneering
work that the NRCAAMH undertook in relation to Asian American
psychological and mental health research. A number of graduate
students and other researchers who were part of NRCAAMH received
IAC research grants from the Center to undertake their dissertation
and other scholarly projects, and one (Dr. Diane Fujino) was the
recipient of an IAC postdoctoral fellowship administered by the
Center. She later became an assistant professor at UC Santa Barbara.
Others benefited from the Center’s Reading Room/Library,
and its extensive collection of journal articles and books on
Asian American Studies, while others were frequent participants
in the Center’s colloquium series and academic conferences.
In 1994, the NRCAAMH received $2.4 million to continue for another
five years, with strong support from the Center. With Professor
Sue's departure to UC Davis, most of its programs were relocated
to the UC Davis campus. However, several major research projects
like the $1.3 million grant that Professors David Takeuchi of
Psychiatry and Pauline Agbayani-Siewert of Social Welfare and
Asian American Studies received to undertake the largest ever
survey of Filipino Americans remained at UCLA.
The Center
has sought to develop three additional research institutes that
have focused on Asian American public policy research, Asian American
arts and the humanities, and Asian American medical research.
All involved extensive participation by members of the Center's
Faculty Advisory Committee, Associate Directors, Director, and
staff; seed funding that the Center requested and received from
the Chancellor's office; and active collaboration with departments,
programs and groups at UCLA and in the public and private sectors.
To begin with, in 1992-93, the Center launched its joint Asian
Pacific American public policy institute with the LEAP (Leadership
Education for Asian Pacifics) organization. Prior to the establishment
of this joint venture, Director Nakanishi co-chaired an Irvine
Foundation-funded task force for LEAP that examined the feasibility
of and need for establishing the nation’s first public policy
institute that would address the most compelling Asian American
policy issues through serious research. At the same time, Professor
Paul Ong’s leadership in directing the Center's research
and technical assistance activities in relation to Asian Pacific
American reapportionment and redistricting efforts in Southern
California during his two terms as Center Associate Director from
1990-1992 were also critically important in the development of
this institute. He subsequently became the Research Director for
the joint endeavor, and provided extraordinary intellectual leadership,
policy vision, and administrative skills in building this highly
regarded and influential policy research program.
Funded by
major grants from the Irvine, Ford, Mellon, Rockefeller, Carnegie,
Levi-Strauss, Mott, Allstate and ARCO foundations, among others,
this joint endeavor has produced four major public policy reports
-- The State of Asian Pacific Americans: Policy Issues to
the Year 2020 (1993); Economic Diversity: Policies and Issues
(1994); Reframing the Immigration Debate (1996) and Transforming
Race Relations (2000) -- which have attracted extensive national
and international media and public policy attention. Each book,
which ranged from 300 – 500 pages, was the focus of front-page
stories in over 100 newspapers and media, including the New
York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, Los Angeles Times,
CBS-News, and each has been used in legislative hearings, in proposals
by community-based organizations, and in undergraduate and graduate
classes throughout the nation. Each study, in bringing together
the top policy scholars from UCLA and other institutions around
the nation, attempted to go beyond customary anecdotal information
about major Asian American policy issues and concerns, and provided
state-of-the-art multidisciplinary quantitative and qualitative
analysis and projections based on large databases like the census,
labor statistics, national opinion surveys, and field research.
After each policy report was released at a press conference in
Washington, D.C., funds were raised to allow the principal investigator
and the other members of the research teams to travel to 10-15
of the largest urban concentrations of Asian Pacific Americans
from New York to San Francisco and from Seattle to Houston to
share their findings and policy recommendations with Asian Pacific
American community leaders, civic officials, researchers and students,
and the general public. All of these reports have become part
of the Center Press’s book list, and have sold extremely
well.
These four
major reports were not the only products of this collaboration
between the Center and the LEAP organization. Two other significant
policy reports were published: (1) Beyond Asian American Poverty
(1993), one of the first-ever empirical studies of poverty among
Asian Pacific Americans, which was undertaken as a group thesis
project by graduate students in the Urban Planning Program (including
current Center Assistant Director Dennis Arguelles) under the
guidance of Professor Paul Ong, and (2) Beyond Self-Interest:
Asian Pacific Americans Towards A Community of Justice by
UCLA Law Professor Jerry Kang and law professors from other institutions,
who provided an in-depth assessment of the impact of affirmative
action policies and programs on Asian Pacific Americans in college
admissions, minority contracts, and public sector employment.
The latter report was not only printed the Center Press, but also
placed on the Center’s web site and downloaded as much as
100 times a day by interested scholars, students, and readers
around the globe. In the future, policy research reports will
focus on topics like Asian Americans and the new media technology,
Asian American elderly, and Asian American and the nation’s
arts policies.
Public policy
research will remain as one of the core research priorities for
the Center in the future. There are a number of Center affiliated
faculty and students – as well as scholars, policy-makers,
and community leaders -- who have urged the Center to continue
to provide national leadership in developing this area of study
within the field of Asian American Studies. Along with the collaboration
with the LEAP organization, the Center intends to pursue a number
of other long-standing as well as new projects in public policy.
First, the Center will continue to pioneer research on the political
participation of Asian Pacific Americans in electoral and non-electoral
forms of political activity. Led by Director Nakanishi, the Center
will continue to do large-scale empirical studies on those topics
(which in the past were the first to document and analyze that
Asian Pacific Americans have the lowest rates of voter registration,
despite their high levels of education and socio-economic attainment),
as well as publish the National Asian Pacific American Political
Almanac, which has been called the “indispensable guide
to Asian American politics” and provides a listing of over
2,200 elected and major Asian Pacific American elected officials,
as well as exit polls, commentaries, and other information on
the state of Asian American political involvement. It will also
support research on non-electoral forms of political mobilization
like the first-ever multidisciplinary examination of the Japanese
American redress and reparations movement that was undertaken
by Professors Mitchell Maki, Harry Kitano, and Megan Berthold,
Achieving The Impossible Dream: How Japanese Americans Achieved
Redress (1999, University of Illinois Press), which received support
from the Center for both research and a national conference. Second,
the Center has had a series of discussions with its large number
of affiliated faculty in the professional schools and social sciences
at UCLA, and is preparing to launch a second national journal.
Tentatively titled, PUBLIC PRACTICE: A Journal of Asian American
Social Research, Policy, and Practice, it will attempt to
contribute to the further development of research and professional
training and practice on Asian Pacific American communities by
professional school disciplines like social welfare, public health,
law, medicine, education, urban planning, nursing, library and
information studies and the arts. The journal is scheduled to
be announced in May, 2001, during a major event celebrating the
30th anniversary of the Center’s flagship multidisciplinary
journal, Amerasia Journal. Initially, one member of the
Center’s affiliated faculty will be the overall editor for
the journal, and other members of the Faculty Advisory Committee
will be recruited to develop special issues focusing on their
specific areas of expertise in Asian American social research,
policy, and practice. A national editorial board will be formed
by the time the journal is inaugurated next Spring.
The Center
is also interested in further undertaking basic and applied quantitative
research, and to train its undergraduate and graduate students,
affiliated faculty, and interested staff members of community-based
organizations in the use of quantitative methodologies. Recently,
the Center, in partnership with a nationwide association of Asian
American community development organizations (National Coalition
for Asian Pacific American Community Development or National CAPACD)
was selected as a Census Information Center by the U.S. Bureau,
and as such will receive the most up-to-date census databases
and publications during the next decade. The Center intends to
use its extensive repertoire of public dissemination vehicles
– publications, community forums, scholarly conferences,
exhibits, internet, and new media technology – to share
practical information about demographic trends of the Asian Pacific
American population with an array of professional, policy-oriented,
student and community-based audiences. It will also support basic
and policy oriented social research by its faculty experts in
the professional schools and the social sciences, who are interested
in making much more substantial theoretical and empirical contributions
through quantitative databases. The Center also intends to continue
to support research on Asian American jurisprudence, and the pioneering
scholarship of its two affiliated law professors, Jerry Kang and
Mitu Gulati. Kang has used his training in physics, constitutional
law, and critical race studies to add to his marvelous publishing
record by writing a path breaking article in a recent edition
of the Harvard Law Review (2000) on the topic of “Cyber-Race,”
while Gulati has broken new ground in legal scholarship with his
examination of the persistence of discrimination against Asian
Americans and other groups of color in the nation’s top
law schools and corporate law firms in an article in the Harvard
Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law Review (1998) entitled, “Efficiency
Wages, Tournaments and Discrimination: A Theory of Employment
Discrimination Law for ‘High-Level’Jobs.” And
finally, the Center intends to institutionally anchor the field
of Asian American public policy research and teaching at UCLA
by completing its current development campaign to establish the
Benjamin Cayetano Chair in Asian American Public Policy. This
academic chair is named after the current governor of Hawaii,
who is the first UCLA alumnus as well as the first Filipino American
to be elected to a state’s highest office. Governor Cayetano
and his wife have been long-time supporters of the Center, and
have spoken at numerous gatherings, particularly the Center’s
25th anniversary scholarship dinner. The academic chair will be
administered by the Center, and will be held by the most renowned
scholar of Asian American public policy research in the nation.
The Center
also has sought to develop an Institute of Asian American arts
and humanities during the past ten years, and will continue to
give very high priority to contributing to the further national
development of these fields within Asian American Studies. Building
on its long-standing activities and interests in literature and
film, along with its administration of the Rockefeller Foundation-funded
"Asian American Generations" resident fellowship program
in the humanities from 1990-93, the Center sought to institutionalize
the arts and humanities into its programmatic efforts. During
the review period, a number of significant activities were undertaken
in the arts and humanities -- the yearlong series of activities
in 1992 commemorating the 50th anniversary of the World War II
internment of Japanese Americans, especially the highly acclaimed
exhibition on paintings and art produced by the incarcerated Japanese
Americans, a theater production by the East-West Players, and
a national conference on literary works dealing with the concentration
camp experience; the Rockefeller Foundation-funded "Strategizing
Cultures" conference that was co-sponsored with Asian American
Studies program at Queens College and the Center for the Study
of Ethnicity and Race in America at the University of Colorado,
Boulder; the acquisition of the magnificent archives from the
East-West Players, the country’s oldest Asian American theater
company, and the recent launching of the Asian American Writers
Archives, with founding collections by Hisaye Yamamoto, Wakako
Yamauchi, Al Robles, and Janice Mirikitani; the "Pangarap"
conference on Filipino American literature; the nomination of
and selection of the late literary giant of Philippines and Filipino
American literature, N.V.M. Gonzalez, as a Regents Professor at
the Center; and most recently, the “Words Matter”
national literary conference that was held in June, 2000, and
featured many of the country’s most influential academic
literary critics and creative writers.
In many respects,
though, the Center’s most significant achievements in the
area of Asian American literature are the extraordinary group
of literary scholars and creative writers it has recruited to
its affiliated faculty, and the critically acclaimed books and
other publications they have produced with support by the Center.
Distinctive and path breaking in their own right, the following
books have collectively placed UCLA and the Center at the forefront
of the field of Asian American literature: King-Kok Cheung, Articulate
Silence: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Joy Kogawa
(1993, Cornell), An Interethnic Companion to Asian American
Literature (1997, Cambridge), and Words Matter: Conversations
with Asian American Writers (2000, Hawaii); Rachel Lee, The
Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of
Nation and Transnation (1999, Princeton); Russell Leong,
The Country of Dreams and Dust (1993, West End), Phoenix
Eyes and Other Stories (2000, University of Washington),
Jinqi Ling, Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in Asian
American Literature (1998, Oxford); David Wong Louie, Pangs
of Love (1991, Alfred A. Knopf), The Barbarians Are Coming
(2000, G.P. Putnam and Sons); and Shu-Mei Shih, Writing
Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937 (forthcoming,
University of California), Visuality and Identity: Cultural Transactions
Across the Chinese Pacific (forthcoming, University of California).
The Center will continue to support the scholarly and creative
work of its affiliated faculty and students in Asian American
literature, organize events like the “Strategizing Cultures”
and “Words Matter” conferences to showcase their talents,
and work with them in using the Center’s Press, Amerasia
Journal, and the internet to reach broader audiences. Indeed,
professors and graduate students from countries throughout Asia,
as well as Europe, Australia, and the Americas have become intensely
interested in Asian American literature, and they will surely
continue to seek appointment as Visiting Scholars in order to
learn and build intellectual ties with the Center affiliated faculty
in literature. The Center will also attempt to find ways to institutionalize
its expertise in Asian American literature. Recently, for example,
Professor Shih, in collaboration with Professor Francoise Lionnet,
the Chair of UCLA’s French Department, received a $175,000
grant from the Office of the President to develop a Multicampus
Research Group on Transnational and Transcolonial Studies. The
Center is providing funding to support a joint visiting lectureship
series with this new MRG, and will work closely with Professor
Shih to develop joint proposals for undertaking research and teaching
in this exciting area of study.
In the area
of Asian American media arts, Associate Director Robert Nakamura
has been a legendary pioneer. A founder of the oldest Asian American
independent media arts organization, Visual Communications, Professor
Nakamura has made a number of award-winning films on the Asian
American experience during his nearly 25 years on the faculties
of the School of Theater, Film, and Television and the Asian American
Studies Center. During his tenure as Center Associate Director
from 1996 to the present, he has used his artistic brilliance,
considerable leadership skills, and commitment to teaching and
community service to launch the Center for EthnoCommunications,
which is situated within and linked to both the ORU and IDP in
Asian American Studies at UCLA. The Center for EthnoCommunications
seeks to visually document Asian Pacific American and other ethnic
communities during their dynamic growth and development with the
use of new media technology like digital video cameras. By doing
so, Professor Nakamura and his staff seek to bridge ethnic studies
and ethnographic research with emerging technologies to create
interdisciplinary opportunities for scholars, students and community-based
organizations. In developing the Center for EthnoCommunications,
he has received major grants from the National Endowment for the
Arts for his “Eye-to-Eye” documentation series on
Asian American writers, artists, and cultural workers, and from
the California Civil Liberties and Public Education Program to
produce the award-winning “Once Upon A Camp” educational
video series on the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans.
The “Once Upon A Camp” series was undertaken in collaboration
with the Alhambra School District and the Japanese American National
Museum, and led to the development of three videos (“The
Bracelet” for elementary grades; “Dear Miss Breed”
for middle school; and “Interactions” for high school
and college), which were offered in English, Spanish, Korean,
Vietnamese, Mandarin Chinese, and Cantonese. The EthnoCommunications
faculty have developed a three-quarter sequence of theory and
production classes for upper division and graduate students at
UCLA, and are in the process of developing an undergraduate minor.
They also have held several academic conferences, community workshops,
and are collaborating with other Asian American Studies programs
to develop EthnoCommunication classes at other campuses. The Center
plans to continue to place very high priority on the further development
and institutionalization of the Center for EthnoCommunication,
and to work with Professor Nakamura and other affiliated faculty
to augment its national and international impact through publications,
new video projects, the internet, and conferences.
The Center
also believes it is in a unique position to play a significant
role in leveraging its faculty strengths in medicine, public health,
social welfare, and related fields to do basic and applied research
on Asian Pacific American medical and health issues. It supported
the development of the UCLA MEDTEP Center for Asian Pacific American
Medical Outcomes Research, which was established in 1993 by Professor
Takashi Makinodan of the School of Medicine and the Center's Faculty
Advisory Committee with a multi-million dollar grant from the
National Institutes of Health. This research center was the only
one in the nation that focused specifically on medical outcomes
research on Asian Pacific Americans. It involved faculty and researchers
from the Schools of Medicine, Public Health, Nursing, and Social
Welfare, as well as the VA hospital and the Rand Corporation.
Center Director Nakanishi served as the Chair of the Advisory
Board of this research center, which included representatives
from major Asian American health clinics, researchers, and private
physicians. Drawing on Professor Makinodan’s expertise in
geriatric medical research, the MEDTEP Center focused on medical
outcomes research on Asian American elderly. A number of research
studies were undertaken, and a plethora of articles were accepted
for publication in leading medical journals. After federal funding
no longer became available for minority medical outcomes research
institutes like the UCLA MEDTEP Center, the Asian American Studies
Center worked with Professor Makinodan and Professor Nancy Harada
(also of the Center’s Faculty Advisory Committee) to seek
funding from other sources to continue the MEDTEP Center’s
research and professional service agenda. In January 2000, these
efforts succeeded with the awarding of a grant for $315,000 from
the California Endowment to begin the first phase of the Asian
Pacific American Geriatric Network Collaborative. (See section
above, “Resources: Budget, Space, and Equipment, p. 12,
for more information on this project.) Administered by the Asian
American Studies Center, this project will seek to build a viable
community-campus collaboration involving UCLA medical and health-oriented
professors and graduate students, on the one hand, and an initial
group of six of the largest Asian Pacific geriatric social services
agencies in Southern California, on the other hand. Additional
proposals are pending. At the same time, other affiliated faculty
of the Asian American Studies Center are involved in other important
areas of health enhancement for Asian Pacific Americans. For example,
Professors Roshan Bastani, Marjorie Kagawa-Singer, and Ninez Ponce
are experts on Asian Pacific American women and cancer. They are
involved in basic and applied research on this compelling health
topic, and are pioneering leaders in a $7.1 million national program
to educate Asian Pacific American women about their extremely
high rates of breast and cervical cancer, and the necessity to
get regular medical check-ups. Professor Snehendu Kar, one of
the world’s leading experts on quality of life indicators,
has applied his many scholarly and administrative talents in pursuing
large-scale empirical work on Indo-American health behaviors,
while Professor Emil Berkanovic has received major grants to link
the Center and School of Public Health with community-based health
organizations in the Asian Pacific American community. Finally,
Professor Ailee Moon has uncovered and sought remedies for the
growing problem of elder abuse in Asian Pacific American communities.
The Center intends to further support the work of individual faculty
members who are involved in medical and health research, and to
collaborate with them in institutionalizing these areas.
Finally,
during the period under review, the Center has sponsored a number
of large-scale multidisciplinary research projects that examine
significant economic, political, and social trends involving the
Asian Pacific American population in the context of changing racial
relations in Los Angeles and across the country. For example,
two large-scale research projects that the Center supported have
led to a number of major social science books. The first was a
study of new Asian Pacific immigration in relation to global economic
processes in the Pacific Rim region, that was headed by Professors
Lucie Cheng and Paul Ong of UCLA, and Professor Edna Bonacich
of UC Riverside, who has long participated in research and teaching
activities of the Center. The project was supported by Center
research assistantship funds for many years. A book entitled,
The New Asian Immigration in Los Angeles and Global Restructuring,
was published by Temple University Press in 1994. The second project
was led by Professor John Horton of the Department of Sociology,
and a member of the Center's Faculty Advisory Committee until
his retirement in 1994. His Ford Foundation-funded study examined
dramatic shifts in ethnic and racial politics in Monterey Park,
California, especially as they related to the city's large Asian
Pacific American population. This project also was housed at the
Center for three years, and several members of the research team,
including Horton and Dr. Leland Saito, received additional funding
from the Center's Rockefeller Humanities program. In 1995, Horton
published the project's findings in a book entitled, The Politics
of Diversity, also by Temple University Press, while Leland
Saito, now an Associate Professor at UC San Diego, wrote an award-winning
book, Race and Politics: Asian Americans, Latinos, and Whites
in a Los Angeles Suburb (1998, University of Illinois Press).
Currently, the Center has several other large-scale research projects
focusing on Southern California, including one of the first-ever
empirical analyses of Asian American youth violence. Funded by
a major grant from the California Wellness Foundation, the study
focuses on the alarming increases in youth gangs and violence
among Vietnamese, Filipino, and Korean American youth in Southern
California. Professor Kyeyoung Park is completing a book on the
impact of the 1992 civil unrest on Korean Americans and other
Asian Pacific Americans, while Professor Min Zhou is writing a
book based on a comparative empirical analysis of the Central
American community in the Pico-Union area, Lations and Korean
Americans in Koreatown, and Chinese and Vietnamese in the downtown
Chinatown. Consistent with UCLA Chancellor Albert Carnesale’s
goal of increasing UCLA’s research and public service activities
in Los Angeles, the Center will continue to build on its long
record of undertaking large-scale empirical studies on Southern
California that will benefit the residents of the region, and
illuminate trends and concerns facing Asian Pacific Americans
locally that might have potentially wide national ramifications.
3.
Routinization of Center research forums.
During the review period, a number of the Center's long-standing
research forums became routinized, attracted large audiences,
and increased the Center's visibility on campus and in the general
community. The Faculty Colloquium Series, for example, has been
presented at least twice and oftentimes three times each quarter
for the past ten years. As mentioned previously, practically all
members of the Center's Faculty Advisory Committee presented their
research findings at these forums during the review period. At
the same time, the series has featured a number of scholars and
artists from other institutions, as well as the Center's Institute
of American Cultures postdoctoral fellows, Rockefeller Foundation
Humanities fellows, and visiting professors. As a result, the
colloquium series has reflected an exciting and vibrant cross-section
of basic, policy-oriented, creative, and applied approaches to
the study of the Asian American experience. Faculty, graduate
and undergraduate students, alumni, and interested members of
the general public attend these provocative and lively gatherings.
Along with
the Colloquium series and the numerous conferences that have been
discussed previously, the Center also regularized and stabilized
other core research dissemination programs. The annual community
research roundtable, which the Center launched in 1988, were coordinated
by Meg Thornton, the Coordinator of the Center's Student and Community
Programs unit. These one-day forums served to focus both basic
and applied research attention on major issues facing the region's
large Asian Pacific American population. Center faculty, staff,
and graduate students worked with leaders of over twenty Asian
American social services and civil rights groups to organize these
annual conferences, which usually attracted over 500 participants
to the UCLA campus or another local institution. .
4. Increased grants and endowment activities.
From 1990-2000, the Center substantially increased its efforts
to secure grants and endowment funds to support its research and
teaching programs, to establish affiliated research institutes,
and to create permanent endowments. Some of those funds were awarded
to the Center directly, while others were shared with other programs
and organizations, both on campus and outside, in the pursuit
of joint projects. In total, the Center estimates that it was
involved in over $10 million in grants during the review period
from a wide array of foundations, government agencies, and corporations.
These included the Ford, Irvine, Rockefeller, Union Pacific, Carnegie,
California Endowment, Ahmanson, Nathan Cummins, California Community,
Wellness Foundation, and ARCO foundations; National Endowment
for the Arts, California Council for the Humanities, National
Telecommunications and Information Administration, and other government
agencies; and Kaiser-Permanente, Pacific Bell, Blue Cross, Southern
California Gas Corporation, and other private companies. The Center
also was extremely successful in tapping into funding sources
within UCLA, with the most significant one being the $100,000
Chancellor's Challenge Grant in the Arts and Humanities, which
provided the funding base for the yearlong series of activities
commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Japanese American internment.
At the same time, the Center paid special attention to the establishment
of a permanent endowment in Asian American Studies through development
activities. One of the most significant campaigns during the review
period was the $500,000 Japanese American Remembrance Fund endowment
campaign, which successfully reached its goal in 1995, with the
largest gift in the Center's history: $175,000 from George and
Sakaye Aratani. The Center now has an endowment in excess of $1
million, which includes the only academic chair in Asian American
Studies. Plans have been laid for a $10 million endowment drive
during the upcoming UCLA campaign, which will focus on raising
funds for the study of other Asian Pacific American populations,
as well as the affiliated research institutes. Several alumni
and "Friends" groups have been formed to support these
development activities. At the same time, the success of the Center's
25th anniversary gala banquet in September, 1995, which attracted
over 700 supporters and alumni and established a special fund
for student and community programs, has encouraged the Center
to consider organizing similar events on a regular basis.
(See Appendix D, “Chronology of Selective Accomplishments
and Highlights of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1990-2000,”
for further information on the range of major campus activities
and achievements of the Center’s faculty, staff, and students
during the past decade).
5.
Contributing to the development of scholarship and teaching on
new communities.
The Center has sought to advance new fields of scholarship and
teaching in Asian American Studies since its founding. The individual
work of the Center's faculty, staff, and students, as well as
the larger-scale projects of its affiliated research institutes,
during the review period continue that legacy. However, two important
and innovative activities which the Center pursued deserve special
highlighting because they are critical to the future of Asian
American Studies, and yet have not received the same level of
commitment and support from other programs in Asian American Studies.The
first is the Center's strong interest in contributing to the development
of scholarship on several major new, as well as long-standing,
ethnic communities in the Asian Pacific American population that
have not received adequate attention in the Asian American Studies
literature. These include, among others, Filipino, Korean, Indian,
Thai, Cambodian, Vietnamese, and Pacific Islander American communities;
practically all of which have their largest concentrations in
the Southern California region. In relation to these group experiences,
the Center has attempted to use its various programmatic vehicles
to train new researchers and to provide forums and publishing
outlets for the development of scholarly and creative inquiries.
During the period of this review for example, the Center offered
undergraduate classes on the historical and contemporary experiences
of all of these groups, actively recruited students for its M.A.
program, supported conferences and other gatherings, assisted
in the compilation of bibliographies, as well as published special
issues of Amerasia Journal and other works. In relation
to Filipino American Studies, for example, former Assistant Director
Dela Cruz, as well as Professors Pauline Agbayani-Siewert, Geraldine
Padilla, and Michael Salman, have provided leadership in working
with probably the largest cohort of MA and PhD students who are
pursuing research on Filipino American Studies in the country.
Likewise, Professors Park, Kang, Shih, and Moon were involved
in developing Korean American Studies. In April, 1997, the Center
co-sponsored a National Korean American Studies Conference with
the Korean Youth and Community Center and Korean Immigrant Workers
Alliance on the fifth anniversary of the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
It was intended to further develop the field of Korean American
Studies, and scholars from throughout the country attended. More
recently, Jae Min Chang, a UCLA alumnus and the publisher of Korea
Times, the largest circulating Korean language newspaper in the
United States, provided the cornerstone gift for the establishment
of the first Korean American Studies academic chair, which will
be named after his newspaper. The academic chair will be administered
by the Center, and it will be occupied by the most renowned scholar
in Korean American Studies. Hopefully, this chair, like the Japanese
American Studies chair or the Benjamin Cayetano chair will permanently
anchor Korean American Studies at UCLA. And finally, Professor
Kar has been actively involved in developing courses and developing
a research agenda for the Indo-American experience.
At the same
time, the Center continued to actively develop its archival collections
for future historiographic, social science, and creative work.
This is another less visible, and yet highly critical, activity
for the entire field of Asian American Studies. Building on the
Center's work on the Japanese American Research Project Collection,
the most extensive collection of primary materials on Japanese
immigrants in the nation, the Center began work to pursue a long-range
agenda that Professor Yuji Ichioka persuasively articulated of
building an archival collection on the immigration and immigrant
experiences of all Asian Pacific groups that would be comparable
to the extraordinary one on European immigration to the United
States, which is housed at the University of Minnesota. Aside
from being involved in the acquisition of a number of new archival
collections on Japanese Americans during the review period, Professor
Ichioka was also involved in the Korean American Research Project
Collection that acquired the magnificent Hei Sop Chin and Hyung-ju
Ahn papers on the role of Korean immigrants in the United States
in the Korean independence movement prior to World War II. The
Center also acquired the archives of the East-West Players theater
company, renowned human rights activist Yuri Kochiyama, the Steve
Louie archive on the Asian American movement, the Chinese American
Historical Society of Southern California, and the founding collections
for the Asian American writers archives. Like the Japanese American
Research Project Collection, all of these archives will be processed
by researchers and graduate students of the Center and then permanently
housed in the Department of Special Collections of the University
Research Library. And like that extraordinary collection, it is
expected that professors, graduate students, and writers from
across the country and around the world will use these documents
for scholarly and creative purposes for decades to come. (See
Appendix D, “Chronology of Selective Accomplishments
and Highlights of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1990-2000,”
for further information on the range of major campus activities
and achievements of the Center’s faculty, staff, and students
