Columbia University
SPEaK

Hallie Montoya Tansey ][ Students have been active for ethnic studies at Columbia since 1968, but it was not until 1993 that the administration first established the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS), which is currently directed by Manning Marable. In 1996, after a 15-day hunger strike and several building takeovers, the administration agreed to the establishment of a Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER), which houses two programs, Asian American Studies and Latina/o Studies. Unfortunately, this agreement, reached under coercive conditions, fell far short of the student's goal: an Ethnic Studies Department with hiring power and with Native Studies included. The sole major victory in the agreement was that it allowed for undergraduate student representatives to sit on all faculty search committees in CSER (a first for the university).
    Gary Okihiro currently serves as chair of the Asian American Studies program and as director of CSER. In addition, Asian American Studies boasts one junior tenure-track faculty member, and Latina/o Studies has two. Two more junior tenure-track lines remain open in the Center. Three consecutive searches have failed to find a director for the Latina/o Studies Program, due primarily to the reluctance of the departments to tenure anyone who has the necessary qualifications to direct the program. A fourth search will convene (and fail, according to my predictions) next year or the year after.
     Under Okihiro's leadership, CSER has developed a comparitive emphasis which stresses not only comparitive work across various racialized groups, but which also attemps to locate the intersections of race and ethnicity with other social formations such as gender, sexuality, class and nation. Hopefully, beginning next year, students will be able to major in Comparitive Ethnic Studies, in addition to current options in African American Studies, Asian American Studies, and Latina/o Studies.
     In 1998, students involved in the 1996 protests founded Students Promoting Empowerment and Knowledge (SPEaK). SPEaK's mission is to make students active in shaping their own education. In the last four years, we have fought for student input in decision making processes and greater autonomy for Ethnic Studies and Women's and Gender Studies programs, created extracurricular spaces for dialogue about race, class, gender, and sexuality, including an underground student-run Native American Studies program, and curated public art to express our visions of the world and our interpretations of the historical and existing injustices around us, among other things.