Last June, the administration announced plans to hire a tenure-track Asian American Studies professor by Fall 2005. The news raised eyebrows; after years of being cold on the idea, the college had suddenly found the extra money in its budget to fund an AAS professorship. In the same announcement, the college also revealed it would explore the feasibility of an AAS minor at Dartmouth. A committee chaired by government professor David Kang would explore the matter further and release its findings in January 2005.

The news gratified no group more than the Pan Asian Council, whose members had spent seven years advocating for an AAS program. They had written editorials, petitioned, and even enlisted the help of history professor Vernon Takeshita to further their cause. Yet they seemed to make little headway until last May, when they wrote an open letter, signed by 1,110 students, to then-Dean of Faculty Michael Gazzaniga.

Among the more important recommendations of the letter was that the college hire a tenure-track AAS professor as a precursor to the adoption of a full-fledged AAS minor. Given the College’s positive response to the PAC recommendations and the fact that four separate programs devoted to studying American minority groups already exist at Dartmouth, the adoption of an AAS minor seems imminent.

But such speculation is mistaken. If the administration’s dilatory track record in hiring professors in similar situations is any real precedent, years will crawl by before the first AAS professor arrives in Hanover. Examine the Korean Studies ordeal – in August 2001, the college vowed to hire a tenure-track professor specializing in the field who would start teaching in Fall 2002. If you can’t remember seeing this professor in the ORC, you haven’t missed anything. The professor, Suk-Young Kim, starts this term.

Regardless of when or if an AAS professor is hired, the question of whether there should be an AAS minor is still up in the air. Indeed, there are substantial reasons why an AAS program should remain in the clouds and avoid descending on McNutt anytime soon.

The program’s detractors argue that the adoption of an AAS minor would make Dartmouth’s approach to ethnic studies too parochial; despite its good intentions, the college would be mistaking the trees for the forest. Assuming the purpose of ethnic studies in a liberal arts setting is to explore issues of identity, it would be more effective to adopt the more comprehensive programs of American Studies and East-Asian Studies before adopting the more obscure AAS program. In its open letter, PAC makes the shrewd point that AAS is a “completely viable option…only a few more courses would be necessary to form a cohesive minor.” PAC’s argument for an AAS minor could be used to greater effect in justifying the adoption of American and East-Asian Studies programs, neither of which would require the creation of additional courses.

Furthermore, if you compare Dartmouth with other Ivies, which Kang says his committee will do, you find these schools are more likely to have broad ethnic studies programs than have more focused ones. Seven - all the Ivies except for Dartmouth - have East-Asian Studies programs; five have American Studies programs; and only four have AAS programs.

However, a comparison of Dartmouth College with a university can be spurious. Cornell offers its undergraduates an AAS program, but it also offers them a program in dendrochronology. But a comparison of Dartmouth with the other colleges illuminates a different objection to Dartmouth’s adoption of an Asian American Studies program: in a college concerned purely with liberal arts, an Asian-American program may be excessively specialized. Of the three best small colleges (Amherst, Williams, and Swarthmore), not one has an AAS program. This suggests that such a program is better suited to the priorities of a large research university than a liberal arts college like Dartmouth.

A clever rebuttal to this point of specialization would be to note that because Dartmouth already houses programs in African American Studies, Latin American Studies, Native American Studies, and Jewish Studies, an AAS program is more than appropriate. However, this rebuttal implies the necessity of adding one more over-specialized discipline to four other, which is nonsensical.

Of course, the theoretical objections to an AAS minor must be reconciled with the program’s student support. PAC has persistently championed the program for over seven years; over 1,110 students have signed a letter advocating an AAS program; and Student Assembly passed a resolution in support of PAC’s broad proposals. Regardless of the value of student opinions in determining academic policy – I’m sure there would be support across the boards for a physics of Pong course – student support is so overwhelming that it will probably trump all theoretical problems, no matter how weighty.

Few can argue that adopting an AAS program at Dartmouth wouldn’t be a positive thing – even if the objections to having an AAS program without having broader ethnic studies programs are valid, AAS at Dartmouth hardly amounts to academic heresy. And after all, how many people are advocating for programs in American or East Asian Studies?

Petitions, anyone?