S2E2 - Planting Seeds For a Harvest | UPAAN x ASAM25

When we were able to win this sort of fight with Amy Gutman, I viewed it as a celebration, but it was definitely we won a battle not a war. Hello and welcome to the podcast of University of Pennsylvania, Aison alumni network. On this podcast, we aim to document the oral history of the ever-changing, multifaceted Aison American experience on Penn's campus across generations, as well as the share and highlight our alumni stories. Welcome to episode two of our five part mini series honoring the Aison American Studies program on the 25th anniversary. My name is Paul Boutista, class of 2014 and I'm your host. Thanks for tuning in. If you haven't yet, pause this episode and go back into our feed to find the first episode of this series where we dive into the history of the field of Aison American Studies as a whole. As we learn then, Aison American Studies, or Asam for short, emerged from the Third World Liberation Front as soon strikes at San Francisco State and UC Berkeley in 1968 and 69, that established the broader field of ethnic studies. So now the question is, how did Aison American Studies make its way across the country to Penn and why did it take 28 years for the program to be founded in 1996? In doing research for this series, one name that came up early on was Dr. Rosanne Rosé, the first director of Penn's Asam program. To give you a better picture of what Dr. Rosé was like, he was Dr. Ferriacan. Hi, my name is Ferriacan. I'm the co-director of the Aison American Studies program at the University of Pennsylvania. So Dr. Rosanne Rosé is Professor Emma Ratta of Sanskrit in the South Asia Studies Department and an amazing individual who was approached by many students to really begin thinking about their own experiences as Indian Americans, as Aison American students at Penn. She actually led the charge for them in partnership with the students to really found Aison American Studies at Penn. She was trained in Belgium as a white woman in Sanskrit and she recognized the politics of all of this and she also recognized that she was really pushing for a discipline that she was not trained in, but that she felt very strongly was incredibly critical to the university. While Dr. Rosé declined to be interviewed for this podcast, she did send along a paper she wrote in 2000 and titled Aison American Studies at Penn, Programmatic and Personal Reflections. That paper formed the backbone of this episode and you'll hear excerpts of it read throughout the episode. According to Dr. Rosé, the first course offered in Aison American Studies at Penn came in the 1970s, though it was not taught by an Aison American professor. In response to student requests, Eth Hilary Conroy, a senior professor whose primary field was East Asian diplomatic history, but whose dissertation had been devoted to Japanese immigration and Hawaii, taught the Aison American experience until his retirement in 1990. While Professor Conroy likely didn't see a large number of Aison students on campus in his time, that would soon change. Due to the repeal of the nationality-based immigration quarters, as part of the 1965 Immigration Act, the number of Aison immigrants to America would grow. By the mid 80s, the children who were born in the States would be of college age ready to enter university. For example, from 1986 to 1991, the proportion of Aison students in Penn's freshman class doubled from 10% to 22%. So, in the late 80s, the growing Aison American population started organizing. And while there were certainly a number of cultural groups on campus serving Aison students needs, they weren't necessarily political in nature. One exception to this was the Aison American Students Alliance. Now, they weren't ever formally recognized as a group by the university, but rather, they were a group of like-minded students who were agitating for chains on campus to better serve Aison American Student needs. To learn more about them, I turned the two former members, Dr. Scott Koishige and Ellen Somakawa. My name is Scott Koishige. I graduated in 1990 from the college with a BA in history and with minors in what was then called Afro-American Studies and Economics. Currently, professor at TCU in comparative race and ethnic studies. I'm Ellen Somakawa. I was at Penn somewhere from the mid 80s to the early 90s. I'm currently the executive director of the folk arts cultural cherish charter school. Now, Scott and Ellen came from very different backgrounds prior to meeting at Penn. Ellen and her brother, originally from Minnesota, grew up as the only Aison kids in their all-white school. So, you learn about her family's history of Japanese internment at the age of 15 years old. I was at one of those fundraisers that your parents dragged you to, and somebody handed me this flyer that said, "You know, these internment camps don't let them happen again." And that was the first time I had ever heard about the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans, which includes basically all of my family and every Japanese American person. I knew of. Honestly, I was just so completely outraged. You know, I went to my civics teachers like what do you mean by trying to teach me civics without teaching me like this important stuff in American history. I remember she said, "Why didn't your parents teach you about it?" That lackluster response from her civics teacher spurred Ellen to get involved in self-education about Asian American topics with other activists in the twin cities before ultimately making her way to pen for grad school. Meanwhile, Scott, coming from the more diverse area of Southern California, didn't have a lot of political consciousness about being Asian American before transferring to pen in his sophomore year. That would soon change with one of his very first classes on campus. And so, really, the first class I took, US history was Dr. Richard Beeman. He shows up in his kind of like cape and a bow tie. Very much the kind of, you know, professor you would see in a movie. And the first thing he says is, "Whatever you learned in high school, this is going to be nothing like that." We're not going to talk about history the way you would study it for like trivial pursuit. We are going to talk about trends and dynamics and things that shaped the course of history not because one individual did something because there were these broader social forces that were trying to understand. I just got really fascinated by history. I ended up taking the second semester of US history. I think it was 20A and 20B. It was called then. And 20B was amazing because I got to take that class with Evelyn for a second possible. She was a junior professor then without tenure. Now, she's one of the most famous African-American historians. And so, to be able to take a class with a really prominent African-American woman scholar, someone who's credited with coining terms like respectability politics. She became really my mentor, my advisor. She really pushed me to do more rigorous work. You know, on the academic side, I really began to focus on African-American history and African-American studies. Now, this is about the time when Ellen came to campus, trying to be a "serious academic." In my life, I've gone through these periods of kind of political activism and then kind of trying to turn my back away from it and saying, "I'm going to go this other way." And actually, coming to Penn was one of those periods when I was like, "Okay, I'm going to be serious about being a graduate student. I'm going to get a doctorate. I'm going to become an academic. You know, I'm not going to get embroiled in politics." Then, after a few years of, you know, trying my best to be a good graduate student, there's just a part of you that can't deny the need to speak out and to, you know, live that political part of yourself. So, I started drifting into politics and I started getting involved. Mainly with undergraduate students who were also looking for Asian-American presence at Penn and interested in Asian-American community issues and interested in Asian-American studies. But we met once a week. One of the important things that I think had a big impact on me is we just did self-education. I saw who killed Vincent Chinn for the first time at one of our own meetings. And that movie just like changed my whole life. I mean, I remember I was in tears through most of it. But, you know, we were very vocal. And so, like, I kind of crossed over the multiracial student activist crowd and then we formed this group called the Asian-American Student Alliance. And initially, it was just like five or six of us. And our first campaign, it was funny because we said, okay, let's do an easy campaign of getting the Oriental Studies Department to change their name. And that was not an easy struggle at all. It kept taking a long time and being a big, long fight. Parallel to Asian-American students alliance. Another student group developed called the Asian-American Student Task Force who would later merge with and take the name of students for Asian affairs or SAA. This group was advised by longtime Penn Administrator Joseph Son. Names Joseph Son. I retired from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015. After 31 years of full-time service there. In 1990, I became a full-time assistant dean in the College of Arts and Sciences. And I would pick that as a time when I began to call us around Asian-American students. Part of my hiring was that in my job description, in a job at Penn, my duties included specifically. outreach to Asian American students. You know, students form SAA saying we're going to be focused on lobbying and advocacy and pushing the agenda along. One of these students was Kate Lamb. My name is Kate Lamb. I graduated from the College of Arts and Sciences in 1992. I currently work for an electric vehicle enabling the company. Kate became aware of her own identity as an Asian American by talking to other students in students for Asian Affairs. Some of the earliest work was around bringing awareness about potential racial violence on days such as Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day. It wasn't until, as I talk to my friends who were active and then Chris Aing being one of them and he actually sat down and started talking to me about something called Asian Americans. It wasn't until then that I became more cognizant why, you know, when we have Remembrance Day, Pearl Harbor Day, the implications of focusing specifically on the Japanese bombing also have effects. Japanese hatred, Asian hatred, how do we discuss issues like this sensitivity, how do we help prevent or at least bring out the open with students' potential SSF fallout from subject trade in the media? Very much similar to COVID nowadays. Now, one of the biggest topics that both groups, Asian American student alliance and students for Asian Affairs, both found common ground on was the issue of the lack of Asian American studies on campus. I don't remember a lot of developments or progress being made towards the inclusion of Asian Americans as a subset of American history. I think it's definitely fair to say that most of us were inspired by the radical origins of Asian American studies through the Third World Strikes at San Francisco State and Berkeley. We had read about them, we had watched films about them, you know, at that time they were only like 20 years in the past and we definitely recognized that power concedes nothing without a demand that you sometimes, you know, have to really take a bold stand. We certainly didn't shut down the campus, we weren't able to do anything that dramatic, we didn't even do any kind of civil disobedience or anything, everything we did was just, you know, basic. And so we started just doing sort of agitational things, we would do skit in front of the library about the lack of Asian American presence at Penn or we started just putting up posters, saying there's a hole in our curriculum, there's no Asian American studies at Penn. So we would be on Locust Walk, we did an event called Airing Dirty Laundry where we just put up an old clothes line with like the clothes were like posters that said things like, you know, Penn does not have a single class on Asian American studies. We sort of tried to build coalitions with other students of color, we wrote a lot of letters to the editor over the years, we had educational pamphlets that we found, this is before the internet or at least before any of us used the web. And then there were occasions where we tried to go to some of these university, you know, council meetings or meet with administrators and, you know, that really went nowhere. When I went to the dean of the college was a man named Norman Adler and I asked him, can we have one Asian American studies class? Like anywhere in the college, I would like to take one Asian American studies class before I graduate from Penn. And his response was, that's not a big enough topic that to vote one entire class. He said, you know, you should go talk to Eva Morowska, she's in sociology and she teaches about immigration and see if she may be able to do one or two weeks about Asians in her immigration class. One quick clarification, Scott was talking to the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Penn's liberal art school for undergraduates. The college is a branch of the larger umbrella of the School of Arts and Sciences or SAS, which includes graduate level studies. Scott would try his luck with the dean of SAS. The dean of SAS at that time was a senior scholar named Hugo Son and Shine. And so he used to have these just open office hours where anyone could go. And so I found out about it. And I said, well, I'm just going to go ask him, hey, like, can you fund some Asian American studies classes or at least one? And I explained to him, you know, I mean, African American studies minor, these classes have been life changing for me. And they've really made me want to learn more about Asian Americans and how our story connects to, you know, this broader US history. And he literally this was for his exact words. And I'll just never forget this. He said, well, let me tell you something. The only reason we have black studies is because blacks have had this shit kicked out of them throughout history. And you can't say that about Asians. And that's what we don't have Asian American studies. You know, I'm sure he was some kind of liberal-minded person, but he came of age during mid-20th century, when to be a progressive anti-racist was to be colorblind. To be fair to him, I think that's where he was coming from. He thought he was a very tolerant, minded colorblind believer in equality and civil rights. And he just didn't see any reason why these Asian Americans should come along and sort of, you know, demand the same things. Meanwhile, Joe Sun, as a assistant dean in the college, brought SAA in touch with the chair of the now-defunct American Civilizations or AMSIV department. So somewhere in the background, who is, essentially, the American Civilizations department was chaired by Dr. Murray Murphy. So Murray and Melvin Hammerberg, he was also on the AMSI faculty. And a fellow named Rosen, I forget his first name, who was from Comparative Literature. I have memories of sitting down with the three of them at their invitation to talk about how AMSIV can help organize Asian American studies. Whether it was the AMSIV department's ally-sep with the cause of Asian American studies or Scott Kursegas interactions with Dean Sonensign, one way or another, the faculty and administration were made aware of the growing interest in Asian American studies. And it paid off. I think I went back to meet with him. Maybe he went back to Princeton or something, so he was leaving as dean. And, you know, at the end of the year, now I know I'm a department chair, you got to reconcile your budget and spend down different things. He said, you know what I'll do for your kid basically? I'm going to throw $5,000 towards a task force to look at Asian American studies at Penn. He told me this personally after I was just kind of back in his office begging him. You know, I graduated. I wasn't part of that task force, that that's where I think Dr. Roche came in. As Dr. Roche notes, with the support of Ben Dean Hugo Sonensign, Jean Moo, Ben Dean of the Division of General Studies and Lecture of Psychology at Brinmark College, was recruited as an adjunct lecturer to teach a two semester sequence on the Asian experience in America. Now, Jean Moo wasn't a stranger to Penn. She already knew Joe Sun and Kate Lamb and other SA students went out to Brinmark to talk to her to try to recruit her. We actually went around a few of us, I remember taking the train to visit Jean about, you know, coming to Penn and Lecture. Jean also knew Ellen So McCalla. Ellen had gotten involved with local advocacy group, Asian Americans United or AAU. And after leaving Penn, Ellen would become their director. When Jean Wu was out at Brinmark, she was very active in Asian Americans United. Through her Asian American Studies courses, had a really steady stream of Brinmark students going to AAU and volunteering, our involving Jean Wu was all related to that common history of work together with her. With Dr. Wu teaching her course in Fall of '91 in Spring of '92, House in the American Civilizations Department, other lecturers were soon brought on in subsequent years. See when law, who we heard from in last episode, taught a course on Asian American perspective on government policy, and Joe Sun also brought it at least on a graduate student at Rutgers to teach a course on Asian American literature, as well as Franklin Odo, who were now the Asian Americanist, who would take over Jean Wu's course during his sabbatical and later become the director of the Asia Pacific American program at the Smithsonian. Around this time, we start to see more faculty involvement in working to develop Asian American Studies. Dr. Wu say, "With the support of then Dean Rosemary Stevens, and Associate Dean Richard Beeman," "Remember, Richard Beeman was that Cape and Bowtie were in professor that Blue Scott Wu is seeing his mind on his first day in class." A Dean's Advisory Committee on Asian American Studies was formed. Although this was the first committee formally charged with representing Asian American Studies concerns, its composition was largely informal. The Dean did not select us. We were a group of self-recruited and cooperative faculty, some Asian American, some not, Asian American staff, and Asian American graduate and undergraduate students. We shared a common intent to lobby the Dean in support of Asian American Student Demands for a program in Asian American Studies. In the fall of 1992, the Dean's Advisory Committee was able to invite an external committee of scholars to provide recommendations for establishing an ASM program at Penn. Members of this committee included Dr. Jean Wu, but also Dr. Gary Okahiro, who we heard from last episode, he recounts one particular exchange on that visit. My name is Gary Okahiro, and I'm a professor at Marinus at Columbia University, and a visiting professor at Yale University. We met with administrators, we met with the chairs of relevant departments like here. Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science. Those would be likely places for Asian American faculty. We went over how to jointly appoint or to devise a program, a model curriculum for the program. Now, what stood out in my memory were these meetings with the dean and with a faculty committee, and they were quite receptive, I must say. But over lunch, one of the chairs of a department said to us, "If you guys want Asian American studies, you guys have money. Asians have money. Why don't you just invest in Penn with your money, and we'll have a program here?" Now, that really pissed me off. It pissed me off for several reasons. One is this assumption that all Asians have money, and second, and probably more important. Since when does money determine academic or intellectual contributions? Anyway, we somehow overcame that. In the Spring of 1993, the External Committee made its recommendations, which were to hire a senior director, as well as two more faculty members in different departments, for a total of three hires to establish an Asian American studies program at Penn. However, due to various limits on hiring new faculty in place at the time, Dean Stevens was somewhat reluctant to initiate a hiring search. One thing that perhaps helped sway Dean Stevens' mind, as well as to continue to bolster student support for Asim, was the hosting of the Conference of the East Coast Asian American Student Union, or ECASU, organized by students for Asian Affairs and Joe Sun. And for that long weekend, 1,400 Asian American students from up and down the East Coast descended on Penn. What did it draw a lot of attention? You know, both among the student community, and also the faculty staff took notice. In my memory, that was a watershed moment for the university. As far as student activism goes, and student awareness and awakening goes. Around this time, Joe was tapped to serve as interim director of the Greenfield Intercultural Center, or GIC, which supported minority students on campus. Alan Somukawa also served as part-time graduate program coordinator for GIC. Having known Dr. Jose from his time in the college, Joe reached out to see if the South Asian Studies Department would be able to contribute funds for students to attend the Conference of the Association for Asian American Studies, or Triple AS, that was happening in Cornell that summer. Coincidentally, Dr. Jose was working on developing a new writing seminar that was soon to become a requirement for freshmen. On the principle that students write best about what interests them most, I cast my mind back to the most memorable papers I had received in my old course. Since my classes in Indian languages and culture had increasingly become populated with second-generation Indian-Americans, what my students had most often wanted to write about had to do with issues of identity and ethnicity. I asked leaders of our undergraduate South Asia Society what they thought of my offering such a course. The reaction was so ecstatic that there was no backing away even if I had wanted to. This course would eventually become a writing seminar that Dr. Freakhan would take over from Dr. Jose. I was the teaching assistant for Roseanne's course, which was called Writing About the Indian American Experience. After that first year where I was her TA, she turned to me and she said, "You know, you really should teach this course." And so the following year, I taught it. Now, as someone who originated from Belgium, Dr. Jose might not have originally been an Asian-American scholar herself, but she certainly threw herself in totaling as much as he could about the field in preparation for this course. As such, she accepted Joseph's invitation to attend the triple AS that summer. A time came when I approached her to ask if she might take an interest in what we're trying to get done with Asian-American studies. And she was at first skeptical, or writing so it's like, "What is this?" It's not her field. I just, I happened to know that the Association for Asian American Studies was taking place at Cornell. And I was planning to go and I reached out to Roseanne saying, "Hey, if you want to better understand whether Asian-American studies is real as an academic discipline, why don't you come?" So she agreed and we went. And I think that was transformational. I think that was a turning point as well. She saw that this was a serious scholarly community. You know, then we talked more about, "Well, how about helping us out of Penn?" Long story short, she agreed to. The whole thing would not have really gained legs without Roseanne. She was relentless. Once she became convinced that this is legitimate and appropriate and much needed on this camp, or she went for it, she didn't stop. That fall of 1993, at Dr. Roseanne began teaching her freshman writing seminar. An interdisciplinary search in Asian-American studies was approved. Dr. Roseanne on that process. Benjamin Shen of astrophysics, Peter Kahn of English, and myself, members of the advisory committee were to anchor the search committee with recently appointed ethnomusicologist Deborah Wong, two students, Ji Yunya, a graduate student in history, and undergraduate student Lily Lowe, chair of students for Asian Affairs, would complete the search committee. The appointment of an undergraduate student on a search committee for a faculty position was highly unusual. If not unique. It constituted a clear recognition of the fact that this first search in Asian-American studies was a direct result of Asian-American undergraduate student efforts. Applicants were many, 118 in the first year, a total of 247 over three years, and a sizable pool of outstanding candidates, particularly in literature, sociology, and history was available. Departments in which appointments might be made, cooperated fully, and yet it proved difficult to attract or chosen candidates. Candidates repeatedly expressed concern of being the one and only Asian-Americanists on campus. Only in the third year, when concurrent searches from multiple positions were authorized, did we succeed in attracting or chosen candidates. Two young scholars in the final stages of their doctoral work, Grace Cowan Sociology and Mark Chang in English. Yet even this third year was not free of disappointment. A school-wide hiring freeze imposed in January 1996, canceled a third appointment just days before we scheduled for a final vote in the Department of History. Although all offers already rendered were honored, no new ones could go forward. Now, if you remember, the recommendation from that visiting external committee with Gene Wu and Gary Okahiro were the higher three faculty, a senior director, and two other faculty members. Yet with Dr. Cow and Dr. Chang being the junior faculty, where was that third senior director? Well, in the absence of this hire, Dr. Jose would go on to assume the mantle of the first director of the Asim program, despite being not Asian-American herself, which, as seen noted, it brought that concerns I had entertained all along about bridging the principle of Asian-American self-impronament, which is foundational for Asian-American studies. This model of bringing in an external visiting community to make recommendations, to then having a senior faculty who was most likely not trained in Asian-American studies themselves, dedicated a few years of their lives to building out an Asim program before handing off the director's tip to a more traditionally trained Asim Americanist, would come to be known by Dr. Okahiro as the Penn model. Rosanne was fantastic because you need a senior professor on your campus who will say, "I am going to take on this program." She was not trained in Asian-American studies, and she realized that she was not an Asian-Americanist, but she went to all of our meetings, the Association for Asian-American Studies. She talked to people, she recruited faculty, and that was the key. So that, to me, is the Penn model. I can say, just myself from the Midwest, to the South, to the Northeast, I must have visited at least a hundred campuses to promote the field of Asian-American studies. And everywhere I go, I suggested that kind of model, the Penn model. In any case, would Dr. Rosanne as director alongside Peter Khan and Lin Lee's as senior faculty and Grace Cow and Mark Cheng as junior faculty, the steering committee for the Asian-American studies program was officially recognized in fall of 1996. A plan for an undergraduate minor program was approved in January 1997, and the first courses were offered later that fall. Eventually, in 2001, Dr. H. Phil Azuma of History would become the third overdue appointment, though Dr. Rosanne would retain the director's tip until about 2003. After almost a decade of hesitation and activism from students, faculty, and community members, Penn finally had its Azum program. But that was only the first step. When we come back, we'll look into the early years of the Azum program. The immediate impact it had on student life, as well as one of many challenges over face, about 10 years in. That's after the break. [MUSIC] So we just heard how it took a village to simply establish the Azum program at Penn after almost 10 years of work from the late 80s into the early 90s. But what came next? Well, in the first few years of the ASIM program, in addition to the courses offered by the full-time faculty, a number of ASIM lecturers were brought in to teach courses and a variety of disciplines. ASIM also received an office space, though no full-time administrators, staff, and only one work-study student. In January of 1998, then university president Judith Rudin convened the Asia Pacific American Student Affairs Committee, made up of administrators, faculty, staff, and graduate and undergraduate students to "consider issues uniquely the Asia Pacific American students at Penn" and to develop specific and concrete recommendations to resolve them. One of the key findings of the committee was that for about 1700 ASIM and Asian American undergraduates, there were only 15 Asian American administrators on campus, with some of those being dedicated to graduate student programs only. The committee recommended that people, the vice-provers of university life, so aggressively higher staff to serve this growing population. These parallel students who, through their ASIM courses, were inspired to demand more of the university experience. While the Greenfield Agricultural Center certainly served some of these needs, GSE of course had to split their resources among other minority groups on campus. This would lead to the 1999 student activism, rallies, and incidents that led to the formation of the Penn Asian American Community House, or Pats, which opened in 2000. If you remember last episode, we talked to Peter Vando, current director of Pats. The formation of Pats probably deserves its own podcast series, perhaps in a couple of years for Pats' 25th anniversary. But specific to this story, Peter's role as Pats director at the time had split duties, also serving as the assistant director for the ASIM program. The first person that filled this joint role was Dr. Karen Sue. My name is Karen Sue, and I currently teach in the Global Asian Studies program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I served as the assistant director of ASIM, or Asian American Studies, and the first director of Pats, the Pan Asian American Community House at Penn from 2000 to 2002. Before taking on the Pats director's sip, Karen had actually been one of those ads and collectors for ads that I had mentioned. I was actually teaching adjunct in Philadelphia. At Penn, the academic program had started, and that was very exciting, and students wanted more. Once there's an institutional space opened up, and thinking about the transformational potential that opens up once students get engaged with Asian-Rain Studies, it doesn't surprise me that students wanted to see more. So the year that I was teaching part-time, I did see students organizing for Pats. I did attend some meetings, and I attended the rally for Pats. Really to support that student effort, I didn't know that I would later apply for these jobs. Now, while Karen wasn't privy to the decision to have ASIM and Pats be so closely integrated early on, the idea made sense to her. The idea was that ASIM and Pats would have a very symbiotic partnership philosophically and practically, I think it makes a difference for students' education, because the outside of the classroom experience can be very integrated with the inside of the classroom experience, and it's a more holistic approach to education that I think is really important for students. A good relationship between the Cultural Center and the academic program is really key to creating that positive environment. One of my fondest memories is just being able to have lunch with the students who were spending time in Pats, not only that, but ASIM faculty would drop by to Pats, too. Sometimes, there would be these moments when it's like, "Hey, you were absent from class today, but here you are," when an ASIM faculty member walked in and saw a student who didn't make it to class that day. One laughed, and I thought that was a great sense of community like, "Hey, yeah, you missed class, but we're still all here, and it's all good, and it's good to see you at Pats. We did have guest speakers. That's where the shared position made sense if we were inviting a guest speaker for ASIM. A Pats would be a co-sponsor and vice versa. The graduate students becoming really active at the time was key. At the time, Yoon Mi Chang, she played an instrumental role in developing a graduate Asian-American Studies group for graduate students who wanted to get involved. Dr. Fuyuk Han, a bit more on who Yoon Mi Chang was. So, Yoon Mi Chang actually was a colleague of mine, she was a graduate student in the English department, but Yoon Mi was a force. I mean, I remember when she was really interested in starting Asian-American Studies at the graduate level, and so we had a colloquium that she organized, and graduate students would give talks. She had a reading group, she was incredibly motivated, and she was super inspiring. She went on to teach at the University of Indiana and then ended up at George Mason University. Fairy said, "We lost Yoon Mi to cancer a few years ago. Her mother reached out to me and said Yoon Mi was incredibly fortunate to have Asian-American Studies in her life." And so her mother donated additional funds not only to support the graduate student paper prize, but also to support the Asm Fellows, and so an undergraduate research fellowship was established as well through that very generous donation. Back to Karen Soo about the early years of Pats. Students wanted opportunities to develop their full potential. So leadership, training, ways to build community. We were looking for where we could insert a program we could do that would provide an Asian-American perspective, for instance, in orientation so that incoming new students who maybe hadn't had a chance to learn about Asian-Americans in K through 12. If you get exposed during orientation, that also might make you interested in taking a course or checking out Pats and becoming a Pats regular. One of those students who ended up getting recruited via that orientation program was Dana Nekano, who we actually heard from last episode. So my name is Dana Nekano, I graduated from Penn in 2004 from both the college and the school of engineering and applied sciences. I also minored in Asian-American studies. I am now an associate professor of sociology at California State University Stanislaus, came like a week early to campus. And one of the people that I met during this time was Jennifer Kwan, definitely somebody who was involved with the kind of creation of Pats had been doing this type of activism early on. She informed me of this orientation program and there was one on Asian-American identity. That was put on by Pats, so Karen, Sue and Yanling Shek were already on campus and I kind of feel like I got poached and then kind of got sucked in. So in that way, it was very much Pats. That was sort of my first interaction. But then I also will say simultaneous was looking for classes and came across an Asian-American studies freshman writing class. That was taught by the late Amy Che. It was just so different from any class. I mean, it's my first semester in college. It was small. I think there were 12 students, all of us were Asian-American. It was just sort of giving us a broad survey of Asian-American literature. It was just a great experience to get to write about these things and she encouraged us to write our own experiences in relationship to the various books that we were reading. Which again, was not necessarily something that I was told to do or was told was okay to do. Yanling Shek was the graduate program coordinator at GIC. At the time, Pats shared Yanling with GIC and she would lead the development of one of Pats' citizenship programs, Apollo or the Asian-Pacific American Leadership Initiative. Then I would go on to become one of the first participants of Apollo in fall of 2001. But it is really this sort of melding and understanding that leadership and identity are just linked together and that it's difficult to be an effective leader without understanding yourself and your community. Apollo is simultaneously identity and leadership development and so a lot of the programming that goes into that is about us exploring our own identities, our communities, but then also giving us tangible leadership skills like public speaking or things of that nature. Later in a senior year, they then would go on to become an Apollo Facilitator and try to integrate some of the learnings of his as-and-courses into Apollo. When thinking about my role as an Apollo Facilitator, I think one of the things that I brought was a more learned perspective right on the Asian-American experience because of my involvement with the coursework. Beyond his first writing seminar on Asian-American literature with Yumi Tseng, Daning would go on to take enough Asian-American studies courses to graduate with the minor, predominantly with the newly hired Dr. Azuma in history. So you know the other kind of joke and you know that I always tell people like well I'm his first student because he and I started at the same time right myself as an undergrad but he as an assistant professor and so that I think was really the turning point for me is taking his class and then really starting to think about like okay well now I'm taking more than one class what are the options and kind of getting involved in in Asian-American studies not just in the classroom but also eventually on the undergraduate advisory board. Another Azuma UAB member at this time was Saji Philip. Yes I'm Saji Philip and I attended the University of Pennsylvania graduating class of 2004 and I currently work as a physician. Saji's first course was three accounts writing seminar on the South Asian-American experience that Dr. Jose had developed and that that was a realization to me that I couldn't just know about South Asia and South Asian Americans I would have to know about the broader American experience across immigrant groups. Daning Saji alongside other alums such as Dr. Cliff Bersamira who we heard from last episode did a lot of work to try to help push enrollment in Asam through various means. You know in a lot of ways we were trying to figure ourselves out right like we were trying to figure out what what undergraduates could really do and so we would put on these sort of like conversations right you know faculty might come in and you know give a talk about the research and I think the biggest topics was increasing class enrollment part of that means getting classes that people want and supporting them and bringing awareness to them so it was a lot of awareness worked on supporting the diversity requirement part of the curriculum at Penn. There was a push to have all students have at least in the College of Arts and Sciences some part of their curriculum devoted to diversity and the understanding of diversity that advocacy of bringing education of Asian-American history as part of you know larger movement of American studies really paved a way for a lot of things that I ended up doing for getting involved in later expecting that at the highest levels of whatever that institution that place it was you know deeds and whoever proves curriculum to value this that did become something that I realized was really valuable and so that was great thing that we got to be a part of as students. Currently the College of Arts and Sciences requires all students to take at least one course in cultural diversity in the United States of which many if not all as in courses meet that requirement. Now let's fast forward a bit. Karen Sue leaves Penn for the University of Illinois at Chicago to help establish their version of Pats. Shortly after she leaves the duties are split into two separate distinct roles though Pats and Asim continue to be closely aligned with each other. Saji Dana and other early UAB members graduate from Penn doctor will say with tires and doctor glazed cow it receives tenure and assumes the directorship of the program. Dr. Mark Chang leaves Penn while Dr. Josephine Park and Dr. David Eng joined the English department which in addition to Dr. Azuma brought a total number of tenure track faculty in Penn's Asim program to four total. Asim even had actor Cal Penn coming for a year or so to teach a course on Asian-Americans in media. The 10th anniversary of Asim came and went in 2006 with Scott Curris C. Gay coming back to talk about his involvement in forming the program in the 90s. And that's the state of Asim come 2008. To tell us more about the events of that year I turned to alumni Ben Aluswag. So my name is Benjamin Aluswag class of 2009. At Penn I majored in English creative writing and then also minored in Asian-American studies and these days I'm a program manager at a late stage startup. Ben had gotten interested in Asim after participating in the Polly early on in his time at Penn. I think there's a combination of a different number of things that ended up inspiring my interest in Asian-American activism and then Asian-American studies. It was a program that I'm sure you're familiar with called a Polly. From there I was already an English major at the time and so I was like you know I don't want to just you know talk the talk so I decided to like enroll in one of the courses. That was Dr. Josephine Parks Asim like class one of my favorite courses will speak highly of it. Once I took her course and just being like the English nerd that I am and was it just was an easy decision for me to end up studying. And it is becoming an Asim minor. Ben also found his way to becoming chair of the Asia Pacific student coalition or APSC. The umbrella organization for Penn's Asian interest cultural groups on campus. And APSC had their fair share of controversies to deal with at the time such as one incident involving the Punsple magazine. A comedy magazine at Penn published an entire spread around where Asians don't belong and there was like a back and forth in the daily Pennsylvania with editorials and we had lots of sensitivity training meetings. With that incident only recently in the review mirror Ben got an email one day that would spur him and APSC into action yet again. On just some mundane day, I get an email from the Asim advisory board from Dr. Cal's saying like there's been a severe budget cut proposed for Asian American studies. Dr. Cal's telling me that she's threatening to quit or step down. The TLDR of the issue is that like this proposed cut would essentially be so severe that it would cripple the apartment and make it impossible for it to continue in the next two to three years. While I couldn't find an exact number on how much Asim's budget would be decreased by, an article from the daily Pennsylvania at the time noted that Asim would only be able to offer one course that was not housed in another department. And this was all still while Asim did not yet have any full-time administrative staff members. While we'll talk to Dr. Grace Cal later in the series, when I spoke to her, she said that she had taken on directorship of the program with assurances from administration that a certain minimum level of support would be provided. Hence her threat to design the directorship when these cuts were made without warning. It's also worth noting that these budget cuts were communicated on and decided upon without any input or discussion from the Asian American studies program. Functionally, this would have killed off any sense of the program surviving long-term into the future. When we get this news, we're obviously outraged. There was just this like discrepancy between like glorifying Asim's Asian Americans with this course with CalPen and then threatening to cut the program and eventually like removing it from a curriculum standpoint. So our first point of action was to like just convene sort of the powers that be. So that was my board, the APS-C board and the Asim Advisory Board. So Ben, APS-C and Asim UAB all lived in the Asim reaching out to their contacts including our very own alumni network, UPAN. Recently worked with like UPAN to sort of share that knowledge around. We kind of made a list of all the things that would give us cloud and like recognition like we reached out to journalists and Philadelphia. At this time like it was still a blog world and so we reached out to angry Asian man. This blog that kind of just highlights activism and so like we basically got like a hundred people to write into angry Asian man talking about this potential threat. Like he even made fun of us a little bit in the blog and we're saying that like it's it looks like someone copy and pasted the same message and email it to us from like 20 different accounts but like that was our grassroots approach. In our mind we're like if we could get enough people angry about this like we could stop this from happening. Ben by virtue of his role as chair of APS-C also had another avenue to make his and the Asian American communities voice heard. I did have the privilege to serve on um university council right and so university council gives seven undergraduate leaders a seat at the table with like Amy Guntman president and other leaders and there just happened to be a university council meeting that week. I was like what other way to display sort of our disapproval with this budget cut which is then to just like bring it up with the entire faculty at this meeting and I would say like it was pretty controversial thing to do. In that world you're supposed to like follow these rules there's certain decorum right. I was a student wearing sweatpants all the time but like when I go to that meeting all of a sudden I had to like wear a suit. There's a basically an open form at the end of every meeting and so I remember the transition I used to like Amy Guntman said something about like you know we really chairs diversity and so I like raised my hand and like speaking of diversity like if that is something that is part of our mission I would just like to alert us about like the recent budget cut that was proposed on Asian American studies which would eventually separate us from existing as a program in perpetuity and I tell you it was like a hundred percent silent like I think maybe after like a minute she looked like the dean of the college to like sort of get more information and then that person stumbled with an answer and the moment actually like started to feel bad I was like man am I being aggressive and I remember it just the subject was eventually changed and they said like we'll follow up with you essentially. After the university didn't get back to them after that night Ben and APSC took things to another level. After a day after that we didn't really hear back from them. What we did is said okay we tried to coordinate with that multiple people in administration I brought it up in front of an entire governing body. The last thing we can do is protest. Like have a literal full-blown rally in front of college hall. It's funny today when I look at protests and think about, oh, I was part of what and like kind of started one. Some of them are organic, but some of them are planned. Like this one was a very intentional rally because we wanted to have like a huge presence. And so part of planning the rally is that we essentially wanted to send an ultimatum to Amy Govin. So we sent an email to her, CC'd her secretary, and basically wrote that like, hey, we have a large amount of people supporting us. And then we sort of linked to everything. Ingar Asian man, all of the new sources. And we said, you know, if we can't come to an agreement around this budget cut, then, you know, we're going to continue on without rallying in front of college hall at like 1 p.m. on Friday. I know it was a Friday. So that was like sent on a Wednesday night. Now, while I couldn't see the actual email sent myself, I've been told that the email included some vague ultimatum about having Penn Restore Asm's budget or else. I asked Ben, what was that or else? Yeah, I don't know what the or else was. When I look back, if we didn't have this ultimatum, I don't know if Asm would still exist, right? Because after the ultimatum happened, the morning before the rally legit no like two hours before she emailed and said, it's been resolved. And I called Dr. Count as like, is this email real? Like, can you confirm that the budget proposal has been suspended and she's like, yes, it's real. We won. So yeah, the ultimatum worked. Admittedly, it is a bit anticlimactic that it got resolved behind closed doors. But enough support was guaranteed that Dr. Count stayed on as director and the program would continue on at least for a couple more years. Though there was still the matter of everyone who had gotten wild up and were ready to protest on college green in a couple of hours. And so I said, well, let's still have a protest, but let's just make it a celebration. And we still had that group come in front of college green instead of protesting. We had people sign up for Asm courses. Honestly, Amy government came. I gave her the bull horn. She talked to everyone. She celebrated our program, celebrated the faculty. And there was a understanding there that like this was important. So while Asm was saved for the time being, the work wasn't done. I still struggled with the fact that like, OK, we did all this work, but our people going to take the courses. Our people going to stay interested in Asian American studies. Like you have the protests, which my look bag, it's like fun. I know it's like the wrong word to say it, but it's like that's the stuff that makes you feel alive. But you also need leaders who are going to do the work that will be institutionalized. When we're able to win this sort of fight with Amy Gutman, I viewed it as a celebration, but it was definitely we won a battle, not a war. Because like, who has control over the budget in three years? I won't be there, right? It's because that punchbow thing I told you about. They had already done something similar to that five years ago before I came. They created some other racist language around Asians. And it was published. And then there was this whole drama with the university. And like whether or not we should be sensitivity training. But like, that was five years ago before I came. By the time I was there, like, it's a whole new group of kids, right? The school kind of almost relies on this rotating door of leaders. They only have to deal with a problem for four years. And then they can kind of like cover it up. The never ending nature of the struggle for recognition of asthma side, Ben is still proud of his work at Penn. For me, that's work was so important, right? The amount of identity work that I was able to do through asthma. I think just in many ways that I will never comprehend, continue to influence my life and my work and my relationships with people and my friendships. And so like, is asthma for everyone? I don't know. But for the people who sort of really rely on defining their identity or learning more, on their identity through coursework, through through these classes, like I know how impactful it could be. Over the course of this project, I've interviewed a lot of people. Some of whom we've heard here. But there are many more who I didn't have time to make contact with. The legacy of Penn's asthma program is built upon a foundation laid by hundreds. It's not thousands of students, faculty, staff, and allies. Some of whom never got to see the food of their labor such as Scott Kurasege. Sometimes you don't fight for things that you get in your own time on campus or even in your own lifetime, you know, when you think about the bigger struggles, but you do it for the principal. Sometimes the results we got weren't always what we wanted. Alan Somakawa. We knew that this issue of a department versus a program was going to be important. I mean, we didn't win it. You know, it was just obvious that if the hiring decisions rested in the mainstream departments and that Asian-American studies as its own self could not make offers or make tenure decisions, that the program was going to be limited. And of course, I think that's that is kind of what has happened. And so that foreshadowing for later episodes. But even when things didn't work out exactly as you wished, it's still important that 10s Asian students fought to self determine their own educational experience. Even if it wasn't always easy. Ben Ali Swag. - And I feel like this is why Asian-American studies is so important. I think a white person would not have felt as uncomfortable as I did going through this process. We learned through Asian-American studies that like there are like a confluence of historical moments and societal relationships that have happened that sort of made Asian folks scared to like speak out. Seeing that manifest with my fear of like, all I'm saying is like, you guys are being unfair, right? All I'm saying is like, you respect diversity. Why are you cutting diversity? But for some reason, you know, it feels like I'm being a troublemaker. - I'd like to say notes in the closing words of her reflections on the ASIM program within in 2000. - We have come a long way in the three and a half years of our existence. Yet in this and many other areas, our work has just begun. (upbeat music) - Many things to all the individuals I interviewed for this episode. Dr. Ferriacan, Dr. Scott Kura Sige, Alonso McCawa, Joe Sun, Kate Lamb, Dr. Gary Okahiro, Dr. Karen Sue, Dr. Dan and Akano, Saji Phillips, and Bennelly Suag. Also, thanks to Lily Lowe, class of 2005, and Dr. Vose, who, while I didn't record an interview with them, both provided valuable insights into my research. Dr. Vose's manuscript can be found on PENSE ASIM website and was voiced by-- - Recorded by Diana Woon, so PEN class of 2016. - We've talked a lot in this episode about student activists who printed seats that they themselves would not be able to harvest. Next week, we'll fast forward from the past to the present to meet some of those students who are enjoying that harvest. As we explore the impact ASIM American Studies has had on some current students at PEN in discovering who they are and who they might become. A quick reminder that the views and opinions expressed on the show are those appearing on this podcast alone and not without those of any other organizations, including University of Pennsylvania. Music in this episode is provided by Oxay San Josecar, AKA Fortissimo, and Ram Vilvika, AKA Ascal, both PEN undergraduate class of 2016, or the music provided by Blue Dot Assassins. Episodes are provided by Sophie Hurt, editing, and production provided by Ninja Boy Media. Special thanks to the PEN Asian American Community House, the ASIM undergraduate advisory board, Alumni Relations, Animal Estrada, and Dr. Freer Khan for their support. For questions or inquiries, you can email us at [email protected], that's UPAN, [email protected], or reach out on Facebook or Instagram. Links to all of those, as well as where you can find or so on iTunes, Spotify, and Google Play, or in the show notes. Thanks again for listening. Till next time, keep it funky. (upbeat music) ♪ Baby I've been hard, be over tried ♪ And Jen will tell you this horrific story about how I was wearing these like white jeans, which is a lie. I'm just gonna tell you now if you ever talked to her. But.