Ron Scapp, president of the National Association for Ethnic Studies, exited the airplane headed to his annual board meeting last Thursday in Fort Collins, Colo., ready to galvanize ethnic studies program chairs from colleges across the country.
He said he felt a sense of urgency because there were too many headlines in the news recently that might have detrimental consequences for ethnic studies programs across the board.
To outsiders, a federal judge’s recent decision upholding aspects of a controversial Arizona law that took aim at the Mexican-American curriculum taught at the Tucson Unified School District has nothing to do with the association or college-based ethnic studies programs.
Judge A. Wallace Tashima’s decision confirmed that it was OK for Arizona to ban a curriculum that promotes the overthrow of the U.S. government, promotes racial or class resentment and advocates for ethnic solidarity rather than the treatment of students as individuals in a public school setting.
For Scapp, the judge’s ruling can be viewed as an attack on ethnic studies because, he said, it is based upon a flawed definition that “undermines American values. Ethnic studies embrace the full gamut of American history,” Scapp said.
If left uncorrected, he said, that interpretation might springboard into problems for ethnic studies programs. “They’ve always been vulnerable because of the way they started.”
The programs are particularly at risk now because of budget restraints. Adversarial attitudes in some parts of the country toward academic programs that don’t automatically equal jobs for graduating college students does not help either, Scapp said.
