5-C Asian American Resource Center Needed
By Anna Kim
Contributing Writer

Fourteen years ago students at the Claremont Colleges, including the undergraduate institutions and Claremont Graduate University, presented a proposal for an Asian American Resource Center (AARC). The request came out of the simple need for a "safe place" where Asian Americans could go to deal with personal and academic problems, and understand the issues that challenge and shape their identities as racial and ethnic minorities. The 1989 proposal discussed the reasons a resource center was needed and included a mission statement outlining the goals of the proposed AARC. The first proposal for a centrally located Asian American Resource center was rejected by the Council of Presidents of the Claremont Colleges. As a result, students were forced to seek administrative support at each of the individual colleges.

Citing what amounted to the notion that Asian Americans had successfully integrated themselves in student life, and stereotypes of the submissive, quiet and well-behaved Asian, the Council of Presidents ignored the proposal and no action was taken by any of the Claremont Colleges. In May of 1989 students at Pomona College initiated a student-run Asian American mentor program as a supplement to the existing sponsor system. The program was started by student activists and received temporary space. The push for a six-college AARC, although ignored, continued to be the greatest demand of the students. The proposal, however, was rejected, and the students from each college instead approached each individual president or dean separately to garner support for a resource center. Pomona College approved and founded the Asian American Resource Center in 1992.

Although Pitzer College briefly considered a resource center of its own at that time, and Scripps started the Asian/Asian American Student Union in 1993, Harvey Mudd and Claremont McKenna made no attempt to establish any institutionalized support center. The rejection of the six-college proposal divided the Asian American student community at the Claremont Colleges and therefore the issues that were brought up in the proposal were ignored and forgotten by the Claremont community as a whole. The original purpose of a six-college Asian American Resource Center was to "unify the Asian American community, provide academic and emotional support, promote positive ethnic identification, and facilitate cultural awareness and mutual understanding among the students, staff, and faculty of the Claremont Colleges."

This year, the Asian American Student Alliance formally submitted a proposal to the Claremont University Consortium for a central facility that would address the needs of Asian American students across the Claremont Colleges. The proposal outlined the structure for a 5 College Asian American Resource Center that would provide a space for students, staff, and faculty to create dialogue and programs that would recognize the individual socio-political climates at each campus and would find ways to understand how "collective experience" actually plays out at the Claremont Colleges.

This central facility would not be a resource to make "better Asian Americans" but rather, to provide programming and resources that interrogate how "Asian American" as a race identification functions in our society and how it works to construct particular social experiences and events. The working relationship formed by students, staff, and faculty would help the overall climate of the campus by giving students tools that they can use to actually work towards changing racial discourses at the campuses.

On December 10, Claremont McKenna President Pamela Gann, writing on behalf of the Presidents' Council of the Claremont Colleges, responded to the Asian American Student Alliance regarding the proposal for a central resource center for Asian American students. The response of the Council problematizes what the colleges currently define as student services-it appears that "student services" translates into "grades only" when, in reality, academic life is directly part of and contingent upon the campus climate generally. Gann's letter states: "We view the needs of Asian American students as being different from those of Chicano/Latino and Black students and thus question some of the statements made in your presentation. While retention rates may vary at individual colleges, proportionately Asian Americans retain and graduate in high numbers and are successful in their academic programs of study."

Once again, the "model minority" myth surrounding Asian Americans is held up as the primary reason Asian American students at the Claremont Colleges do not need a central facility. It is simply not true that Asian American students across the board are "high achievers." If they are, by what standard and compared to whom? At Pitzer College, for example, Asian American students show lower retention rates than other students and are one of the largest "groups" of students consistently on academic probation.

And perhaps more significant, this is the same response and rationale that the Presidents of the College put forward in their response to the first proposal 14 years ago. This is disturbing because it points to our institutions' failure to change over time, despite expressed commitments to "diversity of students and faculty and in student services. Considering that all five undergraduate colleges received Irvine diversity grants this year, the administrative rhetoric surrounding the Asian American Student Center is ironic, to put it mildly.

In its letter, the Presidents' Council attempts to emphasize so-called academic "successes" and, by implication, their absence among the "Black, Chicano/Latino population." To reiterate the quotation above: "We view the needs of Asian American students as being different from those of Chicano/Latino and Black students. That view fails to recognize the efforts of the existing centers, OBSA and CLSA, to meet the socio-cultural needs of Chicano/Latino and Black students and to provide safe spaces for students of color who are intensely marginalized at these colleges.

In arguing that the "academic" needs of Black and Latino students are most important for the existence of these resource centers for those groups, and that Asian American students do not have "academic" needs, the entire discussion becomes relatively limited by a narrow definition of academic life. As students at a residential college, our academic life includes not only the grades we receive in our classes, but the interaction we have with professors, mentors, and other students-in our dorms, and elsewhere.

The Council's position overlooks and ignores the serious academic and curricular difficulties facing Asian American students. In addition, a narrow reading of "student services" as grade-centric ignores the prevalence of white privilege that pervades the institutional structures of our colleges through other areas such as programming, financial aid, curriculum, and admissions.

Asian American students are once again held up as some twisted "model minority," implying that other student populations need only pull themselves up by their bootstraps and adjust their "cultural practices" if they want to make it to this "model" position. The students of color are being pitted against each other and set (from the perspective of CUC) in competition for "limited resources" at the Colleges. Underlying much of this discussion is the fact that discourses on race in higher education are still largely limited by a black-white binary that operates under amorphous and highly apolitical notions of "culture."

The letter from Gann is essentially a rejection of the student center, even though it suggests that the CUC is taking the students' concerns seriously. The consortium says it will research the claims regarding the needs of Asian American students-as expressed by Asian American students-even though the presidents seem to believe them a illegitimate.

We are being told that our collective experiences as students at the Claremont Colleges are somehow unqualified. Who then, is "qualified" to speak for us? This letter from CUC seems to be an attempt to portray an administration committed to addressing the needs of the Asian American students, without approving the request for a central facility or making concrete institutional adjustments to address our needs.