2008 Woodie Awards
Home > Opinion
UO must live up to promise to ethnic studies department
Letter to the editor
As an ASUO Senator for two years, the leader of a student organization for three and a fifth-year senior, I have been uniquely exposed to the inner workings of the University of Oregon. In all of the time I have spent, energy I have expelled, and classes I have skipped to attend meetings, forums and protests, one thing has remained consistent on this campus: a complete and utter lack of institutional commitment to diversity. Nowhere is this University-wide shortcoming more pronounced than in the narrow halls and crowded classrooms of the ethnic studies program.
I declared as an ES major my sophomore year, then watched the next year as my first professor/adviser Adria Imada and the program Director Martin Summers left for warmer and more supportive climates (University of California, San Diego and the University of Texas, respectively). Climates that, not coincidentally, both have departmental status for ethnic studies. That was the same year that the Diversity Plan was passed. Why is it that now, two years later, the University has still refused to fulfill its promise to fight institutional inequality by departmentalizing ethnic studies? How many more marginalized students need to leave the dorms in their first weeks (or for that matter, never enroll at all) before this commitment is taken seriously? How many more faculty (first law school, then women's and gender studies, now international studies) need to be forced out of back doors before the administration takes concrete steps toward stemming the tide of injustice consuming our campus?
We need an ethnic studies department now. Not for ES majors like me who will be gone in six months, but truly for the future of the flagship University in the state of Oregon. Imagine what our University could be like if it delivered on that unlikely promise. That promise of diversity. Of equality. Departmentalize ethnic studies.
Nate Gulley
University student, Ethnic Studies major
I declared as an ES major my sophomore year, then watched the next year as my first professor/adviser Adria Imada and the program Director Martin Summers left for warmer and more supportive climates (University of California, San Diego and the University of Texas, respectively). Climates that, not coincidentally, both have departmental status for ethnic studies. That was the same year that the Diversity Plan was passed. Why is it that now, two years later, the University has still refused to fulfill its promise to fight institutional inequality by departmentalizing ethnic studies? How many more marginalized students need to leave the dorms in their first weeks (or for that matter, never enroll at all) before this commitment is taken seriously? How many more faculty (first law school, then women's and gender studies, now international studies) need to be forced out of back doors before the administration takes concrete steps toward stemming the tide of injustice consuming our campus?
We need an ethnic studies department now. Not for ES majors like me who will be gone in six months, but truly for the future of the flagship University in the state of Oregon. Imagine what our University could be like if it delivered on that unlikely promise. That promise of diversity. Of equality. Departmentalize ethnic studies.
Nate Gulley
University student, Ethnic Studies major
Be the first to comment on this story