The most active, the most public, and possibly the most sustained discourse on race and ethnicity in the university has come from those in ethnic studies.
We offer this not as a self-congratulatory homage but simply as a reminder of a time in the university, not too long ago, when the only muted discussions around these concepts were to be found primarily in anthropology and sociology departments and, in very restricted ways, a few other social science departments.
The fact that there was such an intellectual and curricular vacuum made it necessary and possible for us to demand and secure a place in the academy for this long overdue discussion on ethnicity and race in American society. There was a great treasure that needed to be unearthed and shared, and ethnic studies provided the intellectual framework for that excavation.
Parched Landscape
The activist critics and reformers (students and faculty) of this parched landscape in the academy saw precious little as they looked around for anything that might have resembled a comprehensive, systematic, and interdisciplinary approach to understanding ethnicity and race in American society. And indeed, there was nothing interdisciplinary that addressed the historical and contemporary concerns of ethnic-specific communities in the United States.
Repeated studies left very, little in their wake after research teams abandoned communities in crisis, leading to a widespread distrust of social scientific models that failed to engage the community in some fundamental and practical way. Where were the connections that should exist between the models searching for theoretical explanations and the right of communities to expect another level of engagement and responsibility on the part of the researchers?
In its more radical form, ethnic studies sought to effect social and structural change well beyond the boundaries of the institution. Perhaps at this point the line between the objective and the subjective in scholarship and teaching was being tested by this way of doing ethnic studies.
