The petition
April 10, 2007
Dear President Zimmer:
We write to you as frustrated members of the Asian Pacific American (APA) student community in the College and graduate schools. We are disturbed by a glaring problem in our university: the lack of full-time APA faculty in the Humanities and Social Sciences Divisions committed to curricula relevant to Asian Pacific Americans and advocacy on our behalf. We initially raised this matter in May 2003 with a report entitled “Concerning the Status of Asian and Pacific Islander Students at the University of Chicago”; however, we have not seen concrete measures taken to address this matter. This inaction is unacceptable.
Although APA students make up 13.2% of the College, Asian Pacific Americans compose less than 1% of the faculty in the Humanities and Social Sciences Divisions. With the departure of Professor Mae Ngai this year, the situation has become dire. Now there is even less mentorship and support available from APA faculty members. The University needs to demonstrate a sustained and comprehensive commitment to serving our needs by providing faculty who can serve as our teachers, role models, mentors, and advocates.
The lack of fulltime APA faculty in the Humanities and Social Sciences Divisions has broad implications for the educational mission of the University:
1. Current students are underserved by extremely few course offerings in Asian American studies and by the lack of APA faculty mentors.
2. Prospective students at both undergraduate and graduate levels are matriculating to other institutions that recognize APA faculty as valuable contributors to diverse fields of inquiry.
3. Faculty and students across departments and divisions are limited by the lack of scholarship centered on and informed by the experiences of Asian Pacific Americans.
According to the University’s official Diversity Statement, increasing the diversity of our faculty is more than a moral good: “A more diverse faculty and graduate student body will certainly expand the range of research undertaken at this University, and we all will be correspondingly intellectually enriched” (http://www.uchicago.edu/docs/education/diversitystatement.html). APA faculty will enrich the experiences of not only APA students but also the entire university community by bringing a unique perspective that is currently missing from our campus.
After meeting with Provost Thomas Rosenbaum and Deputy Provost for Research and Minority Issues Kenneth Warren in January 2007 to discuss our concerns, we believe that your administration still does not recognize the need for the active inclusion of Asian Pacific Americans as equal members of this university. The Provost and Deputy Provost informed us that targeted hiring could not be extended to Asian Pacific Americans, and while Deputy Provost Warren indicated that he would work with academic departments to explore the possibility of an APA cluster hire, his overture alone is inadequate because it does not offer enough accountability or transparency.
We are disappointed that Provost Rosenbaum and Deputy Provost Warren do not support the inclusion of Asian Pacific Americans as Targets of Opportunity, and we are frustrated by their suggestion that students must wait patiently for the administration and individual departments to address the matter without our visible participation. These are clear concerns because we have not seen adequate changes in APA faculty hiring since submitting our report to the administration four years ago.
Thus, we urge the University to develop a new provostial initiative to hire and retain APA professors in the Humanities and Social Sciences Divisions. Retaining APA faculty would not only eliminate appearances of “tokenism” but would also indicate true efforts to promote and sustain diversity at this university. We realize that the hiring of new faculty members is a departmental decision rather than an administrative one, and the initiative would accordingly give additional resources to departments in the Humanities and Social Sciences to hire APA faculty members. Whereas both Targeted Opportunity Incentives and cluster hiring have not been official university policies and have been left to the singular efforts of the Provost and Deputy Provost, a provostial initiative would institutionalize the recruitment and retention of APA faculty members in the Humanities and Social Sciences and create concrete standards for accountability.
Our request is part of a larger movement in this university to make the administration more responsive to student needs. We hope that as our president, you do not allow this institutional disregard to continue and will implement concrete measures to improve this embarrassing state of affairs. As underserved students of the University of Chicago and active members of our campus community, we have waited long enough.
We request your immediate action and ask for a response by April 30, 2007.
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