Letters
…getting pleasure from reading
the obituaries…
Minority Views
Amy Braverman’s article
on the status of minorities on campus (“Minority
Report,” February/03) rightly draws attention
to several promising advances, but it also seems to recapitulate
many of the University’s blindnesses and presuppositions
in the recruitment of minorities, both in the content
of the piece and its visual representation in the Magazine.
Although the article attempts to address
the condition of the Latino student population in abstract
admissions statistics, Latinos are otherwise a disembodied
presence. The faculty featured and the students interviewed
are all African American, which is not necessarily bad
but unwittingly equates “minority” with “black.”
While Braverman did mention the Office of Minority Student
Affairs and the new multicultural center, there was little
offered about attempts to open up channels of communication
between different racialized groups on campus as well
as between those groups, individually and collectively,
and the University community at large (one of the aims
of the comparative race-studies program at Stanford that
you mentioned). Many alumni teach or hold administrative
posts at other colleges and universities. At other universities,
Asian Americans, certainly a vital component of any vision
of campus multiculturalism, are regarded as minorities.
The article does not address the University’s position
of not regarding Asian Americans as an underrepresented
group, despite strong arguments that can be made for Asian
American underrepresentation in the humanities and humanistic
social sciences.
The article
also seems to draw a connection between faculty research
on race and ethnicity and student recruitment. Certainly,
for some students, the presence of minority faculty
is one factor among many for selecting a school. There
is much to celebrate in the important work being done
by scholars like Kenneth Warren, Cathy Cohen, Jacqueline
Stewart, AM’93, PhD’99, Jacqueline Goldsby,
and Melissa Harris-Lacewell, but linking student recruitment
with the recruitment and retention of faculty of color
seems inconsistent with the national surveys cited earlier
in the essay—surveys that suggest minority students
tend to prefer pre-professional tracks over liberal-arts
ones. The other danger in connecting these two things
is that it implicitly locates the value of faculty research
in how it ostensibly creates an inviting environment for
students of color and not in the importance of the work
that these impressive scholars are doing. Still, one hopes
that their work and presence will help cultivate a fertile
ground for further work on race beyond and within African
American studies at the University.
William Orchard, AM’02
Chicago
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