Thomas Tam: This is a rare opportunity that we can sit around and talk about this. We know how busy you are. If you can, based on your own experience, your own knowledge, tell us, as we continue to do our study, what we should really be focusing on, what are the important things we should really look at. This is probably the first time that any university system is doing this. So we would like to do a good job and we hope you can help us do it.
Mark Chae: One thing that really concerns me is that there are few Asian role models who are in the school system, particularly professors outside of the sciences. I don’t think I’ve had a psychology or social science professor who was Asian. That kind of sends me an unconscious message…you can’t do psychology, you can’t be a sociology major. That also shows me cultural issues, cultural barriers and institutional barriers. I feel that increasing the hiring of people who are Asian American can really help young people to see them as people they can be, someone to identify with.
Female Speaker: Just to follow up, I think that integration is what we should focus on, someone mentioned how they run the financial aid office, not to say that the numbers are all important, but they do support what we say in a way, if students aren’t taking advantage of the services on campus there may be a problem there, they may not feel that they connect. But there’s another issue there…should students only be able to relate or get advice from someone of their own ethnic identity? There’s probably much more to it than the ethnic perspective. What is it that will help Asian American students connect to some adult or mentor at the university? If you’re looking at ethnic identity and education you’re noticing that Asian, Asian American students are not all of one type. Does that mean we have a counselor that matches up exactly with their ethnic identity? That’s never going to happen.
Male Speaker: I would like to… my work is [inaudible] training, so I do a lot of training, and I’ve done a complete circle on it, and people sometimes think you’re colorblind. Oh, no, I’m not colorblind. Perhaps thinking of a way that we can help the whole person, that is, instead of being in separation about you’re this or I’m that, although we need to recognize that, have a way of looking at it where we have three different spheres that we may want to use as a framework for helping the whole person. One of them is that we’re all human beings no matter what you are, and that’s universal; we all have hunger, we all have love, we all have fear, all of the things that make us human beings. Then there’s the piece that culture plays, what you’re speaking to, that being a human being can be shaped somewhat by the culture you’re raised in. But then there’s that other piece, and that’s like, you’re like no other Asian, you’re unique. So having that kind of mindset about how we work with people about recognizing their humanity, but doesn’t lose the culture or the uniqueness of the person, and maybe if we can begin to have, or suggest that the work that we do, we look at the whole person, not just the culture, otherwise we would be stereotyping, not just the individual but we will not recognize the influence of culture. Not only human beings because of the difference, maybe like helping to frame society’s attitudes or the researchers’ attitudes or teachers’ attitudes about how do I work with a person, because if we do students, that automatically sets up a dichotomy and expectations and behaviors. So I’m thinking that maybe keeping the whole person like one of those bullets you had there, I was just going to include the spiritual aspect as well.
Female Speaker: I think that the experiences in recruitment that would speak to needs that we, as professionals, that the institute might be able to address with the resources, one thing we know from recruitment, and also from servicing students is that the way in which you reach and communicate with recent immigrants is very different from that of students in high school who may have only been here a couple years, but they’re not as embedded in their culture, they’re not reached the same way from social agencies, the newspapers, etc. We have to speak to recent immigrants differently and have the resources to know what newspapers they read, what they do, etc…and have the resources to address the issues that affect them. It may be January and you’re recruiting a student for the Fall who is in a language institute, but his English will be very strong six months down the line, but now you’re filing a [bachelor] which needs to be done many months in advance, it’s just clueless, and in addition it’s reporting an income from overseas in another currency, I mean they don’t know where to begin.
We found that we really need to have basic language services, Chinese, Korean counselors who can help them file forms, to be able to interest them in coming to this school. Or else, the experience is meaningless. So that was the difference we felt was important. Also, you’re saying that you reach different immigrants differently, but I think the extent is even greater than we realized. I mean, we find that Chinese students read so many different newspapers, there’s even [Japanese] in Chinatown, you really have to know the difference, or you’re appealing to one group and not the other. I think since that changes a lot, it would be really helpful if the institute could help build resources so that people who don’t have expertise in all 17 campuses and all social agencies would know the difference. What I found is that the trick is you have to latch onto some expert in the area who knows the stuff well, but it’s different for every ethnic group, so you have to go on forever. What are the newspapers? We don’t have that kind of expertise, and we need those resources too.
The other thing is the range of diversity in the Asian community is even greater than what you were saying, not just subcontinent, not just South Asia, but getting further and further west, and it’s getting into a whole South American thing, and we have students from Trinidad and Guyana who are fifth generation, they haven’t had a relative back in India for ages, yet they self-identify on our surveys as Asian. Which I think is interesting in terms of what it tells you about their identity, but also what does that say about how to reach them and what are their issues. Nothing about connections with South America, nothing about the fact that they were educated in Spanish and now English, but the Asian thing.
Another thing I think is very difficult from an academic point is the student who’s been in the country for 10-12 years and almost all of schooling has been here, and has achieved successfully enough to get into some of our most academic schools and yet has language issues. That’s sort of a tough mismatch. Obviously, language acquisition is not this kid’s forte, perhaps reading or analytic skills or some other computative skills are, but not this, and yet, what do you do? I see that when faculty are talking about the [CPE] and all, but where do we go? Do we really hold them back because of these basic ESL problems, because no, they’ll never get there, they haven’t gotten there in 10 years, why bother? On the other hand, they’re about to be graduated, and do you send them out in the world to work with these clear deficiencies that are going to keep them back from ultimate employment. I think that’s very tricky, and they’re not exactly ESL students to go back to some basic course, and some senior colleges don’t have remediation and have very little ESL, it’s sort of a very strange place. And yet there are a lot of students here, very significant limitations on their English. These are the kinds of things we need to deal with, but we always need resources.
Otis Hill: I think I come to this probably from a little different angle. I understand the comfort, what I call culture comfort, and the slow process it takes to sort of branch out and separate from that individually, and I understand that in a number of ways, because often times when you branch out you’ve got to feel secure as an individual, and that’s why I understand what Mark is talking about, because just as you didn’t have the experience of seeing a lot of people in the social sciences, I find very few of the sciences representing the so called black population, if you will. So I understand the comfort level. I think what I’m questioning in my mind is, whether or not as a university we’ve done enough to try and meet students at that comfort level.
I think we expect students to come out of that comfort to us, as opposed to trying to meet them. I recall, for example, which has nothing to do with this statement, first time in Kingsborough we had a number of Russian immigrants, and by people not reaching out to their culture to try and understand the Russian culture, we thought that all of the students cheat, didn’t realize that in that culture it’s about the success of the class, not the individual. So we labeled them, which we always do, and I don’t think we do enough to try and understand, because I find, with the Asian community for example, there are a number of subcultures, just as there is in the black community. Many of the black communities I have very little contact with. I know them, but we’re lumped together, and the expectation is that we all do the same things, and probably the only thing that we have in common is that we eat rice. I mean that is probably the only thing we have in common.
I think that there’s a real need for us as a university to make an effort to go out and understand that comfort in the culture and make ourselves a part of that. I was always amazed when on campus, how little contact I had with Asian females, because they tend to just sort of stay as a group. You have contact with the males, because they would venture out; I will never forget my first counselee who was an Asian female, she said very little, I sent her a letter to come see me, she came. But we had very little contact, very little. It took four or five visits before I could get to first base, in terms of really just communicating with her. I found out there were some family issues which she didn’t want to share because she was labeled as a failure, because she wanted to major in the social sciences, this was a number of years ago. She was compared to her brother, who was an accountant and had his master’s degree already. She was a C-B student, and that expectation that everybody who’s Asian is super-smart and therefore she should be an A student. So I think we have to try and really reach out and make students feel comfortable with themselves and with the institutions that they are working with. I think we have to do more.
Female Speaker: What you were saying before about knowledge of the Russian culture and cheating, that’s so extensive, and our faculty, I think just don’t have the resources to see the distinctions. We used to joke about some students who were Indian who were really taught very different values as far as writing, things is this country we would call terrible verbosity, things they would just flunk you in freshman English. This is what they were taught, you go in circles, you go on, and they just wouldn’t understand that in this country if you read that material you’re like beating your head against the wall. And you’re really changing the student’s writing, and yet this is the way they were taught, it’s a kind of [a different colonial] style of reading and writing. And I think some of our faculty know this and some of them don’t, but nobody knows them from every different culture, it’s not just Asian obviously, but any immigrant or someone bringing a different culture in. We don’t always know what lies under them or why they’re doing what they’re doing.
Male Speaker: It’s one of those cultural things, when we talk about leadership. Again, with the caveat that not all subcultures are alike, it’s a culture that tends to value scholars more than political leaders, and when you look at leadership and kind of lose your path, the western culture tends to focus more on political movement and involvement in that arena than scholarly achievement for scholarly knowledge. And to a certain degree when you look at the leadership in politics and even institutions, there’s reluctance to participate in the political process; in fact, you could even surmise that some people think that’s not what they’re supposed to do. That’s frowned upon, looked down upon, whereas the “high road” of scholarly achievement and acquisition of knowledge is valued more highly. It ends up being kind of a suppressant on what we in America see as a path to leadership. I think that’s something, it’s even subconscious, because kids grow up and you’re a product of your environment, and when you grow up in families where those values are still held, it affects. I mean brashness it not something that’s a value.
Female Speaker: But, a larger question in thinking about some of the comments, what should the role of the university be? Do we want to open up peoples’ ideas of what is highly valued? A family that values scholarly pursuits over political pursuits, on one hand the university could be criticized for trying to change the way somebody thinks about that; first of all, we all know, you can’t say one is more important than the other, it’s pretty personal, family, cultural, whatever. So a university could be in a really tough position. What do you want to do? Do you want to open up the possibility, but you certainly don’t want to step on toes because of the implications of doing that, but what do you do?
Female Speaker: I don’t think it’s just trying to change the students’ morals so they become leaders, but as to what you indicated before, if there isn’t a surge in the area of leadership, then how do you provide the role models for them? So it’s not so much that the kids’ scholarly values have to be changed, but how do you find some of these mentors; other people pursuing scholarly things that are not becoming administrators and other visible characters on campus.
Male Speaker: It’s always an issue, where, what’s halfway? You meet people halfway in the process. I think Harvard’s recognizing the fact is, my kids don’t have a problem being brash, right, but Harvard may be in the student leadership development process where people begin to understand that it’s okay to be assertive, it’s okay, there’s also this process saying you wait your turn. In America, people don’t wait their turn anymore. So, I think that’s kind of part of the process of saying this is different. Part of it is getting people to understand, you separate your family life, your work life, your social life, and they compartmentalize those so you can work in those different circles differently.
Thomas Tam: Maybe if I can ask each one of you to talk more of specific episodes or experiences that you have encountered, that you think that, for example, the study should be aware of. I know that some of you have commented already that if I try to make it a little more concrete, then see if what are some of the areas that we should really focus on. I don’t know if that is a very good direction.
Otis Hill: I have a question, that is something I noticed last year, I see an increase in the number of female students from the Asian community. And my question is, if there’s a role change going on in some manner. I’m not sure, I don’t know what it means or what the implications are, but is there a role change in the community?
Thomas Tam: I just want to mention that, I think that what Otis has just said, could be very helpful to us, because he’s identifying something that, look, there’s an increase of female students, is there a role change in terms of, say, from the traditional Asian values? Now, that offers us research possibilities to look into, so if we can talk like that, it would help us in terms of, say, hmm, we’re going to try to focus on that in our search for issues to zero in on.
Male Speaker: One thing that kind of came to my mind about that is kind of the generation effects of, because I think it’s fairly obvious that depending on when you landed or who in your family landed when, there are different attitudes of that principle and different acceptance levels of certain things, and that may be related to this increase in Asian women going to college, having clearly this kind cultural thing hopefully in the past. So in my family, and I see in other families, I see men being treated better in terms of where they went to school or whether they went to school, and maybe as we have gotten deeper into the immigration cycle the guard changes, maybe we are seeing more second and third generation students.
Thomas Tam: Can I ask you a little bit more to elaborate that? Let’s say that, for example, there are women students versus men students, how does that reflect itself in terms of financial aid situation?
Male Speaker: I’m kind of talking off the top of my head from numbers that we ran a few years ago, I know Cheryl mentioned that the family income is slightly above… below average, and that’s probably true because I think it’s kind of the rank order, with Blacks the lowest, Latinos, well they’re fairly close, and then Latinos and then Asians and then whites. I think when you try to mix the populations…
Female Speakers: Well, we weren’t comparing it to other breakdowns, so it’s a little hard. We didn’t break it out across all racial ethnic groups.
Male Speaker: But I think, when you kind of break all those down, it’s probably pretty close. But that’s kind of the order I remembered. But I think the problem with the Asian community is that it’s the most bi-modal distribution, we get a lot of poor, and that’s probably related to generational issues. It’s hard for me to tease out, and at least I’m only going to speculate, but to a certain degree CUNY will probably enroll among some generations, because it’s the less expensive option, the “I’ll send my son to Harvard, my daughter will go…” that kind of thing. That happens to other groups as well, but that’s why I’m kind of interested in keeping track of whether there is any significant difference. But I think it’s also related to that general shift in population, the tendency for more women to go to college, the woman population in college is growing and the male population is kind of shrinking. It maybe regulates economics. More women are working and recognized, degrees are useful, from kind of an economic sense [inaudible].
Female Speaker: It’d be interesting to see these trends nationally, and to see where we as a commuter school may or may not be difficult, I mean in terms of Harvard, I mean is it true in the Latino and Italian community way back when, that it’s better to keep the girls at home and it’s safer to live at home and the guys can go off to some dorm, or it increased all over the country.
Male Speaker: Some of this can be mixed up into this interracial marriage issue as well, as people marry into other groups, some things change a little bit.
Male Speaker: One of the things in the graduate programs, the students are seeking professional careers. And it seems to be a missing link between community and their professions, first of all field placements are not available enough for them to be able to learn these skills preparing to work, maybe with their own population, maybe not, but the system outside of the college is not that existent to providing opportunities for professional students to be able to link to. So, also in attributing that, this is especially true in social work, I’m not sure about…
Thomas Tam: I try to understand what you’re saying, you’re saying that it’s difficult to find placement with community agencies for graduate students.
Male Speaker: A little bit more than that. There are some students that would like to become involved first with the Asian Federation, things like that, but there’s not enough, there’s not enough of that depending on the students’ profession for them to be able to maintain a professional link, like a professional one with the community, but some kind of identifying or helping to establish professional communities and the length of the university to develop placement, to develop career [inaudible] to serving one’s community.
Male Speaker: I think that there’s kind of another problem in that the language fluency problem, [when you talk about the special factors in a community]. Often times, people move on to have programs that become less fluent in the language they need to deal with, they are not quite where they need to be. I think it’s kind of a conjunction that needs some effort to work on the language, so you can kind of get the services back to the community.
Thomas Tam: Uh, maybe you can talk a little about from your perspective as a graduate student in this area, what are some of the areas that you encounter, tell us a little bit about your experience, that would be enlightening for us.
Female Speaker: One thing [inaudible] and then I’ll kind of address it, what I’m conscious of as a student and also a researcher, I’ve been thinking about the study you’re going to do. So often, when we have a big study or a theory, there’s a lot of intellectualism and a lot of people in positions of privilege theorizing about what would be helpful and what things people need, and I’m very conscious about it as I am sitting here. I feel that if you have enough time and enough resources, it would be very valuable to the study to have focus groups of Asian students, whether [inaudible] and discuss what they think are the crucial issues, what they feel like is stopping them. And I feel like there is always, and this is true for psychology anyways, I’ve been developing theories, but there’s a never a connection with the data to the theory that we’re actually talking about.
Female Speaker: That’s interesting with the Queens initiative that Baruch studied, there’s going to be focus groups, but more individual telemarketing type programs. They’re going to base it on various ethnic areas and draw it from that rather than from focus groups that would go into different high schools and mix and math. They were going to mix and match… and design a marketing study to determine demographics and the need for the four colleges, and they were going to base it on various ethnic groups to determine what they wanted.
Male Speaker: I’d like to share one example of a client I’m working with, a student. He’s a Chinese student. And I think it speaks to the pressure that people have of Asian Americans as the model minority, there’s pressure to do very well in school, that they should excel and do well in math and science. So this young man is barely getting a 3.0, and he’s been doing that only because he’s been taking gym classes to raise his GPA, so he can have some face and not shame in his family. It’s also been causing depression and verbal abuse by his mother, who calls him stupid everyday. “Why can’t you get good grades? Your sister graduated from Wellesley in three years. And you are taking five years to graduate.”
So this, there’s a lot of anxiety and depression, and one of the things I’m thinking about and wondering is if there’s any sort of multicultural education and training for staff for multicultural competency, getting an understanding of students and where they may be coming from, the issues they may face, like the model minority myth, the fact that, [inaudible], if you can get them to talk, Asian students often don’t speak in class, I was one of them and somehow I’m breaking out of that gear. But, I must speak for them. So, my father used to say, even a fool is considered wise if he shuts his mouth, which is also a biblical proverb but it’s something that’s espoused in Asian culture. My father told me, he said that he received a grade not only for his academics but also for his behavior. So if he shut his mouth and took notes, he did great. But if you come to the United States and shut your mouth, you’re going to get a bad grade. So having this understanding in the world view and kind of saying, well maybe it’s because this is the cultural value that they’re raised with, I think would be very informative for faculty members and for people who work with Asian Americans in general.
Female Speaker: I didn’t understand the question, were you asking for us to provide experiences with clients or our own personal experience?
Thomas Tam: Something that you’ve heard of or you personally, or something that your friends, or some anecdotes that perhaps can accentuate what you’re talking about.
Female Speaker: I’m thinking of a client as well. I’m working with an Asian American client, she’s second generation. I feel that second generation students are often struggling with the two cultures.
Female Speaker: Excuse me for a second, I just want to know how you’re defining second generation, cause sometimes there’s…
Female Speaker: Parents were born abroad, she was born here.
Female Speaker: Thank you.
Female Speaker: She has been under a lot of pressure to perform well as well, her parents have often told her, you know, it’s the whole “you’re ugly, you need to lose weight, you have to get good grades, your sister is also doing better than you”, she didn’t get into the same school her sister did, so there’s a lot of shame in the family. And she has her own, she has both values, the American values, and also she’s a Korean-American and her Asian values, and she feels like she’s dishonoring the family. She has her own interests. For example, she’s at Baruch, she doesn’t really like business, she doesn’t know why she’s not motivated there. She likes art, but her parents are telling her “no, that’s not for you, everybody is a lawyer or doctor.” I think she’s got a 1.0 average and very often, she’s depressed, eating disorder, and I think, I see a lot of that, very similar kinds of stories.
Female Speaker: I think it would be helpful to faculty members and support services in CUNY to have some of these pictures [inaudible], pressure to live up to high-end stereotypes. I remember being with a group of, I guess they did this for high school people, this was about sixteen years ago, I don’t know if they still do it now. And the speaker was from some incredible psychiatric program on the lower east side, and the data she gave was that the suicide rate amongst Chinese-American women was about 23% higher than the suicide rate of all American women. And people were like, you know, there were explanations, immigrants coming in, role changes from home, whatever the explanations were, just immediately threw people because, wait, we thought everybody were bright together, on the path, scholarly, and all of the above, we don’t have any empathy, there’s no issues, no one’s poor and having psychiatric problems, and that was just a new piece. It really was what the outside world understood as the possibility within that culture. I think there’s just nobody who could possibly know all these things about all different populations within CUNY.
Thomas Tam: Would you like to add something?
Female Speaker: I thought I walked into a big conference, [inaudible]. I’m very sorry. My name’s [Qi-ching, Lu], I’m actually a speech and language pathologist. I was listening to all of you.
What I’m going to say may not aim at all of you, I don’t know, but since I don’t know what study you have discussed so far, but I was thinking about the role change. I have been working all, not all, but some, I would say most of my clients are Chinese, and I’m Chinese. I work with kids, babies, infants and toddlers and elementary kids. For the elementary kids I have an office in PS 124, which is in Confucius Plaza and that’s in a public school system, and I’m not their staff but they gave me an office inside.
So, I constantly have somebody like a guidance counselor, they come into my room although it’s not my job, they ask me what to do, and I’m very involved with school affairs, like for special education services. I also do volunteer work for CPC, Chinese-American Planning Council. Every three months they will put in the newspapers saying Dr. [Qi-ching Lu] is going to have a screening test. If you spot your child having any problems, physical problems, learning problems, any problems, bring your child. Every three months, I do a screening for the community, and the kids including from Queens, from Manhattan, from Chinatown. So I would say I have a lot of chances to talk to the families and I would say my biggest feelings about those families, has anybody really done something about, I would call it something with role changes in the family.
For example, some kids I know in the public school system, their parents are very depressed, and those families, a lot of them are new immigrants, and they are, especially we have Fujianese coming in recently about ten years. And the role change drastically because the father used to be the authority at home back in hometown, and when they came here, the mother has to work too, and they don’t understand English, and a lot of times they have to depend on the child to explain what telephone bills say, because they always receive enough junk mail in the mailbox, they don’t know what’s going on, they cannot distinguish, is this important, is that important, should I throw it away? They don’t know how to distinguish junk mail from regular mail, so they constantly have to depend on the child to read what’s going on to them, and they don’t have anyone. The child may also be a new immigrant, they don’t know English too much, they just a little more than their parents, so that creates a lot of pressure for the whole family.
I know a woman, a student’s mother who committed suicide, and the child described to me that the mother was for a long time, always crying, and she even didn’t go to a garment factory to work. Every morning she was doing this on the table, crying crying crying, one day she just decided to leave. Before she left, she cooked dinner for the children, and the evening was a raining day, the child described to me that her mom took an umbrella and she never came back. A few days later, they found the body in the East River. And I think there are so many potential cases in all the population, I don’t know whether this is helpful or not, it raised the question of the role changes. The kids act up because they don’t respect their parents. It used to be, you’re making money for me to survive, now you have to depend on me to tell you what’s going in this society, and they act up, the kids.
Thomas Tam: The role change is really a very important issue. I think that we have covered quite a few different areas. It’s probably very difficult and almost impossible if we could totally, comprehensively touch everything, but it seems that from our discussion, we talked a little bit about recruitment issues, we talked about difficulty that because of the diversity, we talked about cultural conflicts, the comfort zone, and how, I’m trying to figure out things that the university can do to help out in terms of these kinds of uncertainty and how the university can help to understand the different cultures better, and so the suggestion of multicultural training for the staff runs along that line. It seems that, and also there’s that comment about the need to have more students to participate in this kind of discussion, because they probably have more personal views to talk about that may be useful. It seems that we also talked about cultural value, etc., but what I’m trying to get at is that we seem to focus on, say, the psychological aspects, the psycho-social aspects seems to be what draws a lot of discussion. Am I right about that, or maybe we can get some other opinions about this? We’ll be staying here until everybody shows up.
Male Speaker: I think some of the psycho-social issues, I think people have made reference to the infrastructure of the university in order to be able to sustain or maintain that and promote that, as well as outside the university with the community. For your example, it’s like maybe we need to be more aware of the professional field, maybe another speech pathology department or psychology department, here it is folks, this is what you can do. More linkage to what’s happening in the community, some kind of infrastructure that these psycho-social issues come out of.
Thomas Tam: I’m glad that you mentioned that, because I skipped it, I’m sorry, you did talk about a need for linkages between the university and the community and how, recently, it has been severed. Maybe, in terms of infrastructure, we can look into mending that gap. I’m sorry.
Female Speaker: You can just amass resources with people, because you can’t train all faculty services, everybody in culture, but you can go to people.
Thomas Tam: Can you elaborate that, for example, amassed resources?
Female Speaker: Well, for example, whether it’s in the academic adjustment area or in recruitment, if we’re trying to build certain groups, the Asian students, Korean students, there’s like eighty-five groups, there’s nobody who can do all of that, who knows every area in every cultural group so well that we know whether they read papers, is that the way to reach them, we go through these social agencies, which papers, which agencies? You have to have a real knowledge of the community, and nobody can have that knowledge of all communities, so if we had more resources available…
Male Speaker: And maybe advisory groups as a linkage to communities.
Female Speaker: Along those lines, I was going to suggest something about student groups on campus. I know this from my own experience, not having direct experience with it, but knowing people who were involved in dance groups that focused on traditional Asian dance, but also often I knew a number of students in Bible study groups on campus, now I don’t even know if that’s allowed at a public university so I don’t know if I’m going off in a direction, but the role of the church in the Asian community should not be left out because it does play a pretty significant role. In fact, it has to do a lot with bringing people over; I know particularly in the Korean culture there’s a strong link between the Presbyterian Church and Korean communities.
You know, but I’m going off in a little tangent. What I really wanted to focus on was student groups being sort of an intermediary between higher education and the community, higher education in particular in the community. Because if students are coming from these home environments where they may feel a lot of pressure, by meeting other students in their own and other cultures, they’ll get a sense of how other students can deal with that pressure.
The thing I’m most interested in, not to take the discussion in a totally different direction, but what do you tell them? How do you counsel a student who says, this is the pressure I’m getting at home, what do you say? Don’t listen to your mother? I know that’s simplifying it, but you want them to not internalize what they’re hearing at home, but on the other hand, who can do that? It seems like a discussion we can get into later, so for students to see what other students are dealing with, some of the same issues and to get a sense of that, I think students can be a good resource for each other as well, but they need the opportunity to socialize and maybe to facilitate such a conversation.
Thomas Tam: How can that happen? That socialization process?
Female Speaker: I hope it’s not a vicious circle, but obviously what you need is a little bit of leadership on campuses I would think, someone who has an interest in dance or music or something that wants to get involved in student activity. But there needs to be administrative support for those activities as well.
Female Speaker: It also may be, to some degree, quantitative more than qualitative, because I think some of these things are true for all of us. When you get into Baruch, the thing with most Baruch freshmen, they are lost because it’s a commuter school. They don’t know anyone, there is no way to develop community early on, and they go out in the courtyard, but when it’s raining then they have no place, and it’s this marvelous architectural thing with the hangouts, doesn’t handle more than a handful of kids, and they’re just devastated. “ Well, my friend went off to, I wish I wish I wish…”. This dream of, especially Baruch kids, because they’re usually competent and qualified and certainly do get into other colleges, and residential schools.
It feels like there’s nothing there, it’s worse than high school, because you’re spending more time on the subway and bus and you’re not with the same people and you don’t know anyone. I think it was mentioned that we need to try and get them to develop community, to feel integrated with the school, which is important across the board, so if you bring in other cultural factors that make a kid even shyer or less able to hang out with other people, then it’s really a tough place.
Male Speaker: In some surveys and studies, some of these findings could be grounds for suggesting institutes or seminars that CUNY needs to really face what’s happening on campus. They can’t say it’s a mental health issue and that goes outside the school, and all that, it’s a real live experience on the campus and they have to do something about it.
Female Speaker: I think it may be interesting, I don’t know if you’ll have the resources in your study, but it may be interesting to see how other colleges, universities, campuses, urban and outside, what kind of services they provide or really just some feedback from the Asian community at other colleges. We have the same issues with almost everything we look at. Graduation rates at CUNY, why are they different from SUNY, that’s a comparison we hear all the time. [Ronnie] was just talking about, it’s not a campus in the traditional sense of a campus where the students live together, how do they interact, is there time for them to interact, is there space for them to interact.
Otis Hill: I think the other question I have has something to do with the survey, but I’m just wondering what’s the connection between current students and alumni, and whether or not there is. I’m not sure, but I think that’s certainly an important connection for students to have.
Female Speaker: Another thing, a lot of the literature we’re putting out, the recruitment [inaudible], the CUNY Monthly, is now being translated into six different languages, and you have, I would say, about five or six things out there now. But I’m not sure if we’re utilizing them sufficiently. I think that once we have these expensive, new, difficult each thing that we’ve done and created that we know the communities well enough to know how to disseminate the material and reach people, whether parents read the language or adults or perspective students themselves.
Thomas Tam: You mentioned about several reports. Are those reports available to everybody?
Female Speaker: The brochures? Yeah, in other words we have for example a brochure on how to get a GED, and it’s written in six different languages. The Chancellor [inaudible] and the study was the best, there was a version in six languages and we got, from the Chancellor’s office, a gazillion of them. You know, are we really utilizing, and we have 200,000 Chinese, so how do we amass resources to send them? Do we all send them to one agency and hope they give them out? No. We send them to every place in the yellow pages, which is kind of what we do, in Flushing, it’s tricky, you know that there’s a huge population in all different groups, but it doesn’t mean we always know how to find them and link to them and reach them as perspective students. So we have a lot of materials, which shows, I think, some interest in communities, and awareness of their needs, but then are we experts on the Russian communities, and do we actually know from you guys [inaudible], how do we reach them, and what do we do with all this stuff? That’s just another set of resources.
Thomas Tam: I think that somebody mentioned about, are there studies being done, I think some studies are being done, but it’s not in New York, it’s for example in the west coast, and I think the California State University system, and they did something. There was a booklet published recently that talks about the needs of Asian American students, etc. I think some of those things are quite useful for us to have a better understanding of Asian American students. I think that their students are not quite like urban students, the commuter school, and mostly they are more like SUNY probably, and so if we do anything here it probably would be one of the first or one of the few studies that has ever been done for such a major university.
Otis Hill: Do you have a directory of the [professors] in the university?
Thomas Tam: We’re developing it, but it’s not very complete at all. If there are ways for us to develop that, it would be very…
Otis Hill: I don’t know that I have the way, I was thinking of it as a valuable tool. For example, I didn’t know David was in the university until about three years ago. I don’t know how long we’ve been there, but I didn’t know he was here. I was thinking that, even in general, we had no real contact or knowledge of who’s in the university that we can use as resources.
Thomas Tam: That’s a very good point. Let me follow up on that and say that, in terms of the directory, we’ve attempted it several times, but it wasn’t very successful in that the information we gathered was either too much or too little. It makes the directory look very lopsided. So, how to do a good directory, whereas sometimes you don’t want to know too much, you just want to know if the person’s there. Sometimes you want to know where exactly at the university is he, and what kind of expertise, what is the most recent article that he has published, that sort of things. We’re working on that, and if you have any suggestions, you know, we welcome that.
Female Speaker: Make a webpage; just like what you were saying, you have a directory of all these names and maybe their area of expertise or something, need more information, you click on them.
Female Speaker: Well that’s what we have, they put a call out that this radio station needs by 3 o’clock today an expert on, you know, religion, 12th century or whatever it is, and there’s supposed to be a [inaudible] way of getting faculty lined up.
Female Speaker: If you don’t already have, and I don’t know if that’s something successful, that might be something that your organization can get access to, because that could be helpful, because maybe 90% of it won’t be but there’s 10% of it will be people who are experts in the issue of demographics and Chinese-American relations or whatever the case may be.
Thomas Tam: I wonder if some librarians can help us to categorize them, in the sense that, say, if you’re looking for demographics and you’re looking for the word demographics, maybe all the demographers will come out. But sometimes you may be listed under sociology, then even though the person is a demographer, you can’t get to that person. Some kind of people who know how to categorize different disciplines may be very helpful.
Female speaker: Also the public relations director on each campus has that in a portfolio being able to hopefully call on different faculty and know their expertise whether it’s for speaking or other issues, so perhaps if their vision were expanded they can start thinking about who has expertise or [ways to use them].
Male Speaker: Even more difficult is that faculty, like our students, is shy.
Thomas Tam: I think it’s something, definitely, that we can work on. We are actually, able to get the assistance from the Vice-Chancellor of Faculty and Staff and it was helping us to, but I’m sorry I did not get this information earlier so we are able to send out information to all the faculty and staff, part-time and full-time of CUNY to inform them about some of the things we are doing. I would imagine that one of the things we can do is perhaps let them know we’re doing this directory and we’ll list them, and then ask them to perhaps come back and check on the webpage, if it is web-based, to give us more information. I think that there’s really probably the best way to do by the web, easier to handle all the information. We also want to reach out a lot to student groups, but sometimes we don’t know how. Any suggestions about that?
[Mark Chae]: Well I know at Baruch they have on Thursday afternoons what they call club hours, and the different clubs, they meet together. For example, it might be the Korean Christian Organization, and they’ll get together. So there are several clubs that get together, that might be an opportunity to reach out to them, because that’s when all the student meetings get together, so list where they meet as well, that’s one possible way.
Thomas Tam: Maybe it’s possible to work with the student development personnel.
Female Speaker: I think we also want to go back before that and look at the student development orientation courses or whatever, because they don’t just join those clubs for all the reasons we talked about. If they already joined then they’re already a step ahead of us.
Otis Hill: We find, though, what I would call the stronger students involved in club activities. So I think that’s the first contact.
Female Speaker: Then the kids with a lot of needs, what’s what I’m saying, they’re not visible, they’re not there yet, because they haven’t integrated and those are the ones who feel less part of the group, so we have to find them, figure out where they are as well.
Thomas Tam: I think people are beginning to come in, and if you still want to take some time to enjoy the refreshments provided by the Vice Chancellor, this would be a good time.
