Ethnic Studies: Benefit or Boondoggle?

Abstract

ETHNIC STUDIES: BENEFIT OR BOONDOGGLE? Leslie Field "Why Ethnic Studies?" Why indeed! I came away from last year's meeting with not a little unease and confusion, and many questions racing around in my mind. As you may recall, the focus of our previous Ethnic Studies section was on the problems of teaching. "What specific problems do we encounter?" we were asked—and four papers were delivered in which some valiant attempts were made to pinpoint the problems and come up with valid answers. We were dealing with Black-American hterature, American Indian or Native-American hterature, Jewish-American hterature, and Mexican-American literature (or, depending on one's predilections in the latter category, Chicano hterature). Some of the papers enumerated tangible problems in teaching: 1) What materials are available and where does one obtain them? 2) What kinds of students are being taught? 3) What kinds of staff and programs must we have to enable us to teach effectively? Along the way, however, a problem of definition emerged. From a historian's viewpoint, Professor Machado felt the need to define the ethnic groups. Are we talking of a recent phenomenon which has given us the term "Chicano" and its fashionable and ardent supporters, or are we talking of an ethnic group in America that has a long and involved historical/social history and that goes by the name of "Mexican-American?" Or are we talking of still another group that is related to Americans of Spanish-Indian ancestry in yet a different way? Obviously, the term or label used involves the problem of student attitudes and general definitions. Student attitudes also figured prominently in Professor Schafts' essay, "The Torah and the Time Bomb." Schatts proposed to explore the "historical, sociological and political forces . . . shaping Jewish-American hterature," and the problems facing teachers addressing themselves to a new generation of activist Jewish youth alienated from a tradition and an Old World Jewish milieu. The papers on Black and Indian hterature revealed still other thorny issues. However, one common denominator of all the papers presented last year involved problems of defining subject and audience, and I began to feel that the "Why?" of Ethnic Studies was not the basic question. Why, I believe, cannot be answered before What. So, I would now preface "Why 148 Ethnic Studies: Beneftt or Boondoggle?149 Ethnic Studies?" by first asking "What Ethnic Studies?" or "What Is Ethnic Studies?" The What before the Why. As I pursue one of my own special interests—Jewish-American Studies— I could say a good deal about the justification for offering writers like Bellow , Malamud, Roth, etc., as part of special programs in colleges and universities . But I'm convinced that at this time one's defense of particular programs in Jewish-American Studies is just not too pressing a pursuit The What of Ethnic Studies in general increasingly haunts me and I fed tiiat I must resolve it before I can legitimately pursue anything else in this area. Once again let me go back to the papers delivered last year—which in many ways reflected Ethnic Studies activities in many colleges and universities around the country. I have the disconcerting feeling that that which should be a system in fine equihbrium is constantly being jarred. I have the uneasy sense that "Ethnic Studies" have been pulled together like an unplanned zoo, where cages and ponds and green areas are not yet even on the architectural drawing boards, where amateur zookeepers and caretakers and concessionaires and a few overworked zoologists are all bedded down together in one homogenized zoo-domiitory; where astronomical sums seem to be required to manage the zoo, but only a few paltry dollars have actually been allotted; where those few dollars have been used quixotically to purchase 7,642 African lions and 389 kangaroos from "Down Under," but where no thought has yet been given to the purchase of a boa constrictor or a polar bear. Moreover, in this unplanned zoo I see that the thousands of lions and hundreds of kangaroos and two lonely, colorless anteaters have all been put into one ghastly, diminutive enclosure to mill and hop about and snarl and tangle. Soon...