Open Letter from Faculty on Ethnic Studies at Harvard
(This letter was not written by our coalition, but by the undersigned group of faculty at Harvard. We are publishing it here with their permission to facilitate its widespread sharing.)
Dear members of the Harvard community:
We write as FAS ladder faculty who work and teach in Asian American Studies, Latinx Studies, and Native American Studies, and as the chairs, directors, and senior administrators of the programs and centers that support ethnic and indigenous studies research and teaching at the university, including the doctoral program in American Studies; Ethnicity, Migration, Rights; History and Literature; and the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. The recent denial of tenure to Professor Lorgia García Peña has severe repercussions on our efforts, especially given our small numbers, to respond to students’ growing interest in ethnic studies courses and advising, to recruit and retain top faculty working in our fields, and to participate in the university’s mission of fostering diversity, inclusion, and excellence.
Universities cannot simultaneously pledge a commitment to diversity and inclusion, and not take seriously the knowledge produced by and for communities that have long been excluded from or marginalized within the academy. Ethnic and indigenous studies emerged five decades ago as students of color confronted the limits of established curricula and the disregard of institutions of higher education for the issues faced by their communities and global third-world struggles. Rather than simply be taught or taught about, these students challenged these institutions to reflect on who they were serving and why certain stories, histories, and phenomena were considered worthy of academic inquiry while others were not. They called attention to how academic and disciplinary conventions can replicate rather than truly test and expand our knowledge. Born of these concerns, ethnic and indigenous studies sought to open up the world in new ways, to encourage us to think critically about the relationship between academia and the communities it serves (or hasn’t served), about disciplinary boundaries, and about how racialization, colonialism, and migration affect cultural, social, and political formations. This, then, is a project concerned primarily not with individual identity, but with knowledge: with how it is produced, naturalized, marginalized, challenged, and deployed, and thus with questions that should be at the center of every academic institution. Yet because such work necessarily critiques given categories of existing knowledge, fostering research and teaching in these fields has required a willingness to reimagine the intellectual architecture of the university.
The areas of study that developed first under the banner of ethnic studies are thus not new, nor have they remained stagnant. They have been growing, indeed thriving, for half a century, and have become the site of much innovative interdisciplinary work. During this time, however, these fields have continuously faced institutional resistance, especially at elite universities such as Harvard. The arguments against these fields tend to characterize them as “identity politics,” to dismiss them as unrigorous or unserious, essentialist and nationalist, and to point to their absence at the university as itself a sign that they lack value. These arguments are often made with little to no knowledge of the work actually done in Arab and Muslim American Studies, Asian American Studies, Latinx Studies, and Native American Studies, and with little interest in understanding the history of their development, the basic terms, frameworks, and conventions of the fields, and the priorities that drive research and teaching. Nevertheless, the presence of these fields as well as comparative ethnic studies has grown in institutions of higher learning across the nation, and several peer institutions have begun devoting considerable energy and resources to building in these areas in recent years. At Harvard, where ethnic studies exists as a field of study in the History and Literature concentration and as a secondary concentration in Ethnicity, Migration, Rights, we see increasing numbers of students declaring in each: currently, 20 students in the former, and 65 in the latter. While we were heartened to read Dean Gay’s recent statement affirming her support for ethnic studies at Harvard and expressing her hopes for its future, we also wish to recognize that this burgeoning academic interest reflects the labor of faculty members like Professor García Peña, as well as dedicated lecturers, fellows, and administrators, all of whom have devoted considerable time and energy to sustaining ethnic and indigenous studies despite limited resources and very little acknowledgement or reward.
Professor Lorgia García Peña is irreplaceable, and we will long feel the effects of the decision to deny her tenure. While we understand that receiving tenure at Harvard is never assured, questions about the fairness of the promotion process for faculty in fields long misunderstood and dismissed at the university will inevitably arise until they are afforded the respect and resources given to other areas of study. It is difficult to imagine what Latinx studies will look like at the university without her esteemed scholarship, teaching, and mentorship. As we turn, painfully, to that future, we find that we are still reiterating the same requests that ethnic and indigenous studies advocates have made for half a century: faculty, a secure institutional home, and resources to sustain both. But at this moment, we also ask our colleagues for something else. Trust that our fields think carefully, expansively, and critically about the work done within them. Trust that we are dedicated to furthering intellectual inquiry, even if the shape of that inquiry is not always familiar. And trust that the students who have been asking for ethnic and indigenous studies for decades do so because they know its history, its promise, and its necessity.
Signed,
Eleanor Craig, Administrative and Program Director and Lecturer, Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights
Philip Deloria, Professor of History, Chair of History and Literature
Walter Johnson, Winthrop Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies, Director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History
Lauren Kaminsky, Director of Studies for the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature
Ju Yon Kim, Professor of English
Dan McKanan, Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer at Harvard Divinity School, Chair of the American Studies Program
Tiya Miles, Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
Arthur Patton-Hock, Administrative Director of the American Studies Program and the Charles Warren Center
Mayra Rivera Rivera, Professor of Religion and Latinx Studies, Chair of the Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights
