Grad Students Seek Asia Studies Changes

Forty-five East Asian Studies graduate students elected a committee on Monday to study the strength of student support for their grievances.

The new committee is the latest in a series which department activists have set up to revamp the East Asian Studies departments. The activists, led by John W. Dower, a sixth-year graduate student, are calling for:

* Courses that would permit graduate students to study topics that interest then, rather than topics that interest the Faculty.

* De-emphasis of languages,

* Revision of oral generals, and

* Freedom to write dissertations on "interpretative and broadly-conceived topics" which would not be "long on obscure facts and short on new ideas."

The new provisional committee will study the popularity of this program among the 200 graduate students in East Asian Studies who did not attend Monday's meeting. In February it will call a general meeting of East Asian Studies graduate students to vote on a final draft of the activists' proposals. Two general this draft to the Faculty.

Christmas Vacation

The activists did not think the poor turnout at their Monday meeting meant that most East Asian Studies students were satisfied with the status quo. "It might be Christmas vacation or poor publicity."

Dower was chairman of a previous seven-man graduate student committee on East Asian Studies. This group published a four-page pamphlet last month listing their grievances, and calling for reform in the curriculum, language requirements, generals, and dissertations in their departments.

Representative?

A fear that they might not represent the feelings of all the graduate students in East Asian Studies prevented the 45 from discussing the pamphlet at Monday's meeting. However, most of those who came seemed to agree with the proposals.

"The language requirements are the biggest problem," one students said before the meeting. "We're required to know four languages for generals in Far Eastern Languages. And that just wastes our time. People don't speak Harvard Chinese in China. We have to learn it all over again anyway when we leave the country."