Ethnic Studies Is Not A Discipline

There are many lenses through which one may look at the American experience, some clearer than others. Historians endlessly debate the role of ideas, economics and institutions in shaping our past, and while each of these perspectives reveals part of the whole, the dialogue between them increases our understanding of our present.

As we are a nation of immigrants, the relations between people of different backgrounds have had a profound influence on our society. The study of ethnic relations and the changing definitions of ethnicity can therefore be quite fruitful in deepening our knowledge of ourselves.

However, like any other perspective, ethnic studies is in some ways limited, and is not a methodology in its own right. There are many ways to study ethnicity, and Harvard offers students the resources to explore race and ethnicity through its existing departments, and the flexibility to construct an interdisciplinary program where so appropriate.

Therefore, we renew our opposition to establishing a standing committee on ethnic studies and support Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles's recent letter arguing against such a program.

Dean Knowles's letter came in response to the recommendations of a student advisory committee on ethnic studies at Harvard. The group asked the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to upgrade Harvard's existing ad hoc committee to a standing committee, to establish ethnic studies as a concentration and to provide it with four endowed professorships.

While we support all attempts to diversity Harvard's faculty--and by this we mean to expand the diversity of academic perspectives within the faculty--we fail to see where Harvard's existing departments fail in this regard. We have professors who examine intellectual history, and some few, perhaps, who still look at dialectical materialism as the prime mover, but we do not feel compelled to establish separate disciplines for their work.

There is no need because the Faculty is divided primarily by the approaches they take to their studies, not to their subject matter as such. As Dean Knowles explains in his letter, "There is surely no one way, and no single methodology, to study race and ethnicity." And there is therefore no justification for a separate ethnic studies faculty, either.

While the committee report would seem to be an academic argument, there is something inherently political in the call for ethnic studies that reveals itself in the means its supporters across the country have used to press their demands. Hunger strikes, sit-ins and organized protests invoke memories of the '60s, as calls for justice when ordinary channels of protest have broken down.

This political bias reveals itself in the specific concerns of the student committee report. While they advocate a professor of "comparative ethnic studies," they also seek faculty who would examine the specific ethnic histories of American Latinos, Asian Americans and Native Americans.

It is certainly reasonable to wonder why the committee chose these three broad ethnic groups among the myriad peoples in America. Any true understanding of America's ethnic history would seem incomplete without examining the diverse American peoples of European ancestry.

It would seem that the student committee report argues not for an academic discipline, but for a vehicle in which Harvard can better diversify its faculty's areas of study. They seem to argue that Harvard lacks professors who examine the history not of ethnicity as such, but of particular ethnic groups.

If this is the case, these students would be correct to point to deficiencies in the curriculum and call upon the administration to answer these concerns. However, they should not call for a new discipline when there is no need for one.