Administrators at Cal State Los Angeles are considering whether to suspend the Asian and Asian-American Studies program at the campus, which, ironically, is located at the gateway to the San Gabriel Valley—home to one of the nation’s largest Chinese communities.
According to a spokesman for the university, “There has been some discussion regarding the current state of the program. This discussion is based on the results of [the department's] self-study for its Program Review. The self-study showed that there had been only six graduates and two minors in this degree over the past five years…The next step in the process will be providing input to [Dean James Henderson, College of Natural and Social Sciences] and gathering input from the appropriate program reviewers and [the department]. From there, Academic Affairs will decide whether or not to suspend the program.”
The program has only been operating since 2005. An online campaign has been launched to fight the possible suspension. According to the group’s website:
Cal State LA has long been an academic pioneer in supporting area and ethnic studies. Now this long history of celebrating the diversity of both the campus and the city it resides in is under attack. Threats of dismantling the undergraduate AAAS program come at a time when the need for understanding of an important ethnic community and a region of the world is growing. Cutting AAAS is an attack on the university’s diversity and threatens the already tenuous support of CSULA’s Chicano, Latin American, and Pan African Studies programs as well.