After a three-year effort to promote ethnic studies at Barnard, students in the fall will have the opportunity to participate in a specific ethnic studies program.
This March, the Barnard College Committee of Instruction approved a small-scale ethnic studies program after a group of students and faculty collaborated together to create a proposal. With the recommendation from a consortium of American studies, women’s studies, and Africana studies, the Committee of Instruction approved the proposal, which, according to Angela Haddad, Barnard’s assistant provost and chair of the COI, will be going into effect in the fall.
The approved program is not a stand-alone major, which some students have pushed for, but rather a specific ethnic studies concentration that combines studies from those three existing majors in the consortium, Haddad said.
Students in the fall can have an interdisciplinary concentration, or a minor for students not majoring in one of the three majors in the consortium, Janet Jakobsen, director for the Barnard Center for Research on Women and Barnard’s interim associate dean of faculty diversity, said.
Jakobsen said that one of the reasons that Barnard has not yet developed the major is its status as a liberal arts college.
“Ethnic studies tends to be institutionalized at major research universities like Columbia,” she said. “It is much less likely to be institutionalized at liberal arts colleges.”
The process towards approving an ethnic studies program at Barnard has been ongoing since the fall of 2008, when Barnard formed a year-long independent study group of students on ethnic studies, according to Zeest Haider, BC ’10 and representative on academic affairs for Barnard’s Student Government Association.
This Barnard-specific group, she said, branched off from an earlier independent study based at Columbia and made up of both Barnard and Columbia students. This group formed after students in 2007 staged a hunger strike on campus, in part to demand the expansion and reform of Columbia’s ethnic studies program, Haider said.
After the Columbia group compiled a report at the end of the year about the need for ethnic studies at both Barnard and Columbia, the Barnard members decided to take matters into their own hands.
“They decided that they should have an independent study Barnard group that focuses on what is happening on this side of the street,” Haider said.
Through communication with the faculty and administrators at Barnard, the group of students turned this effort into a one-credit independent study in 2009.
Although approval of the concentration is a step, Haider said it has been a long, drawn-out process.
“This whole debate started when I was a freshman ... and now I’m a senior. Four years is a long time to make that happen,” Haider said. “I felt it was important that this year we approve it and pass it. ... How many more students are going to see this process happen but not the end result?”
Sara Probber, BC ’12, who intends to major in political science, expressed interest in seeing the ethnic studies department remain not just under the three consortium departments, but also expanding to the political science department.
“It’d be really important, especially in international relations or national relations, to have an ethnic component,” Probber said.
Veronica Horvath, BC ’13, who has been involved with the independent study group since last semester, said that there still needs to be further improvements in the ethnic studies philosophy. “It seems that the class construction so far is just ‘non-white’ studies. This isn’t what ethnic studies really stands for,” she said.
Haddad cited the lack of resources at Barnard as a challenge to actually creating a major, which can make it difficult to institute new courses within the program and acquire appropriate faculty.
Despite the obstacles, though, Jakobsen said she has been proactively engaged in developing the program through close collaboration with the Columbia’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. At Columbia, CSER is in the process of potentially joining together three separate majors into one revamped academic track.
Frances Negrón-Muntaner, director of CSER, said, “It was really evident to me ... that because Barnard was developing a race and ethnicity concentration and we were undergoing a period of transformation as well, that it would be a great idea to collaborate closely so the curricular offerings would be significantly expanded for both programs.” In line with the element of collaboration, Barnard’s newly approved program will share an introductory level course with CSER called Critical Studies of Ethnicity and Race.
After her work with Jakobsen, Negrón-Muntaner foresees the joint input improving their offerings. “I think that quality of the work that’s going to be done, the integrity of the courses to be offered ... are going to speak for themselves.”
“What we’re doing is providing them intellectual support for the project they’re engaged in, which is educating themselves about ethnic studies,” Jakobsen said, adding, “We don’t see this as an end.”
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