Word: ethnic
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...students who were willing to miss class in the name of a race-based department might not have foreseen that, thirty years later, minority students would still find themselves questioning their right to study their own ethnicity. It’s no secret that ethnic fields of study are generally the domain of heritage...
...Historically, movements for ethnic departments have been led by students like Coles in minority communities who want a place for themselves within a university that they feel is taking a limited approach to the humanities. “So-called mainstream departments, which seem theoretically not to be ethnically-based, were thought to exclude faculty and students who were not white,” explains Professor of African and African-American Studies Biodun Jeyifo. The African and Afro-American Association of Harvard-Radcliffe Students fought for an Afro-American Studies Department in the 60s expressly so that African-American students...
...Strike may have had the support of a multi-ethnic constituency at Harvard, but many of the affirmative voters were motivated by the other issues in question, particularly the elimination of the ROTC program in order to demonstrate the University’s opposition to the Vietnam War. Ten years later, when the Coalition for Awareness and Action included strengthening the Afro-American Studies Department in a list of objectives for a second student strike, the response was underwhelming. “Afro-Am?” one sophomore said in a 1979 article published in the Crimson...
...Unsurprisingly, ethnic departments attracted—and continue to attract—a large proportion of heritage students. The popularity of heritage studies within ethnic disciplines is not only the result of historical precedent, however, but also owes much to personal inclinations. “Sometimes it’s a case where somebody else comes to you and says, ‘Who are you?’—and you don’t know how to answer,” explains Hancock Professor of Hebrew and other Oriental Languages Peter B. Machinist...
...idea that heritage studies is simply navel-gazing by another name has plagued ethnic departments since the 1960s. “Some reactions were that there’s a hopeless compromise here—you cannot have a rigorous program of study if the people are only in it to find their roots,” says Machinist. Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies Jennifer L. Hochschild explains that a liberal arts education must “get you outside of yourself” so that you learn to think about a wide...