When Jinah Kim started at Northwestern’s Asian American studies department as a postdoctoral scholar in 2006, a meager eight students declared their minors in the field. Now, she’s one of the department’s five professors teaching 25 students who are minoring in Asian American studies.
That number is astonishing considering the department’s small faculty size, which restricts the number of classes the department can offer, especially when faculty go on leave. Still, the department wants to expand. The Asian American studies department works most closely with the Department of African American Studies and the Latina/Latino Studies Program due to their shared origins in activism.
“We see ourselves being constricted, but we see the vitality on campus in activism research,” Kim said, and added that classes’ enrollment numbers – a statistic which differs from the number of students minoring in the field – are consistently high.
Kim doesn’t believe that expanding the Asian American studies department is a priority for the university, although classes like “Performing Asia America,” which is a theater class, are available in other Northwestern schools. Students go on to medical schools, film schools and more, and they take the class because it’s a theoretical field that enables them to them to think about Asian American issues innovatively.
Looking at the adjacent chart, it is unknown if the Racist Olympics or the egging of two Asian Americans in 2012 or some other incident led to the jump in minors from 11 in 2011 to 23 in 2012.
