College of Ethnic Studies celebrates 50
Ethnic studies means talking about things in a college classroom that previous generations didn’t.
That’s what was happening the other morning at San Francisco State University, 50 years after the campus strike that gave birth to the landmark College of Ethnic Studies.
A professor projected a picture of a sign on the screen in front of the classroom.
“Pull your pants up or don’t come in !!!! ” the sign said. “No one wants to see your underwear.”
Professor Charity DaMarto asked her three dozen students what the sign really meant. Was it about pants or was it about something else?
“This sign was put up by white people to criminalize people of color,” said a student in
“Transformative education empowers students.” Amy Sueyoshi, dean of SFSU’s College of Ethnic Studies
the third row. Other students nodded.
Sagging pants are a fashion, not a crime, DaMarto said, before leading discussions on discrimination against gays, against coming out and whether, as DaMarto asked, the “lack of structural supports contributes to violence against queers.”
It was all part of DaMarto’s class on Critical Thinking, a required course in the College of Ethnic Studies, the groundbreaking college born in the fire of the tumultuous 1968 strike and which this fall celebrates its 50th anniversary.
Critical thinking is what students 50 years ago said S.F. State administrators weren’t doing enough of. The great lawn in the middle of campus, not far from DaMarto’s classroom, was filled in late 1968 and early 1969 with thousands of striking students complaining that the university curriculum was Eurocentric and slighted minorities.
They were led by such groups as the Black Student Union and the New World Liberation Front and by many faculty members who agreed the curriculum needed to change.
During the strike, a littleknown linguistics professor named S.I. Hayakawa was named university president. Sporting his trademark tam o’shanter, he ordered the strike to end and angrily pulled wires from a loudspeaker being used by demonstrators. The strike went on, but the notoriety made Hayakawa popular with conservatives and propelled him to win a term as a U.S. senator.
Striking students demanded the university launch departments of black, Native American, Asian American and Hispanic studies. After 4½ months of tension and violence, the longest college strike in U.S. history ended when the university relented and agreed to do just that, placing the new departments under the auspices of what would become the new college.
Fifty years and thousands of degrees later, the College of Ethnic Studies is nothing if not mainstream. It’s still the only such college in the country, although countless other universities offer ethnic studies classes. The College of Ethnic Studies is also two years older than its new dean, Amy Sueyoshi, the first woman to lead it.
Students, she said, are the best judge of what they need to learn and what classes they ought to be taking — a view perhaps not shared by every educator. Having an entire college devoted to ethnic studies, as opposed to a department or classes within other departments, makes a critical difference.
“When you have an entire college dedicated to a single core value, there’s much more cohesion,” she said.
Students can major in African, American Indian, Asian American, Latino, or Race and Resistance. They can minor in Queer Ethnic Studies or Pacific Island and Oceania Studies. If they keep studying after graduation, they can earn master’s degrees.
Sueyoshi has heard all the arguments challenging the curriculum of her college. Engineering students become engineers and biology students become biologists. What do ethnic studies students become? They become everything, Sueyoshi said. Often they become teachers, but also government workers, politicians and employees of nonprofit foundations.
“What businesses want to hire are critical thinkers and good writers,” the dean said. “Third, and least important, is a skill, like engineering.”
Half a century after the riot cops cleared out, critical thinking remains popular. Nine thousand SF State ethnic studies classroom seats get filled by students each year, Sueyoshi said. And they get filled because the students are excited and engaged by that take up topics that their parents’ and grandparents’ professors may not have considered part of a college education
“Transformative education empowers students,” she said.
Not a single seat in DaMarto’s classroom was empty. It’s hard to find an open seat in any of the college’s nearly 200 classes, which include courses with titles such as Islamophobia, Pacific Islanders in Film and Decolonize Your Diet.
Those classes could only have been imagined by the thousands of students who sat on the lawn in 1968 and 1969 surrounded by riot police.
One of those striking students was Penny Nakatsu, who became a civil rights lawyer in San Francisco. She recalls seeing protesting friends around her “abused, beaten and arrested” by police.
“It was a very intense time,” she said. “Things got very violent, and I’ve blocked out a lot of it.”
After the strike ended with the university’s agreement to add ethnic studies, Nakatsu said she helped develop classes in Japanese American studies and was surprised that the new college got off the ground so quickly, with many of the new classes taught by nonacademics.
“I don’t think the administration thought we could put it all together,” she said.
In the decades that passed, Nakatsu has remained passionate about a student’s need to pick his or her own curriculum — but perhaps not entirely without help.
“Students should learn not only what they think they want to learn but they should have a frank dialogue with those who came before, with older people who can offer a wider perspective,” she said. “That’s always a good idea.”
Another striking student, former San Francisco State student body President Connell Persico, said the strike was violent but that the college would never have been forged without it. As a freshman, he realized his school needed to change.
“When I came to the university, I was taught that world history began with Greece and ran through Europe and that was all we ever learned,” he said. “Ethnic studies allows people to learn their own history.”