Thomas Tam: This is the final summary session. Before I ask Professor Irene Chung to come up and let us know about what their group had talked about, I just want to remind you that we do have an evaluation form here, so we will appreciate it if you can fill it out and really give us your honest opinion, because this is the first time we did this and we need your help to input, to help us improve our organization and arrangement of the colloquium, etc. Please take some time to fill that out. Another thing, I really want to thank Transcendent International, Inc., for helping us to do the recording, so that we will have the transcript for you in maybe two weeks, something like that. We’ll put it on the web. And also, the summaries that people have put together today. This is an ongoing issue, this is not a one-time deal, so if you have suggestions that you want to make, and there are some points that really should have been there, so please utilize the discussion forum that we are going to set up for the web. Of course, the address is www.AAARI.info, then you’ll find a transcript for our colloquium, you’ll find a summary of our colloquium, and you’ll be able to make comments as we go along.
I was talking to Vice Chancellor Hill, who suggested that maybe we can do a follow-up on this, maybe in a couple of months, so a tentative date is set up to be December 5th, I believe it’s a Friday. As to exactly where it is, we’ll let you know, but please save that date, we’ll do another morning session if that’s okay with you. Then, I want to begin our summaries. I would like to invite Professor Irene Chung from the Hunter College School of Social Work to give us a summary of the discussions.
Irene Chung: Hi, we started off discussing issues or concerns that we noticed among Asian American college students. Among the issues, one of them was language. We felt that Asian students seem to do much better in science subjects than liberal arts because of language problems, and we also noticed that Asian students tend to have very little time to participate in campus extracurricular activities. One of the speculations was that they seem to have to take on a lot of part time jobs. Another observation was that they have a lot of family commitments, we feel that this is the immigrant background for a lot of CUNY students who have to help out with household chores, being the generation that speaks more English, they have to support their parents in terms of negotiating with the outside systems. We also notice that Asian students tend to need help with problems with family disputes or conflicts. Dr. Sung was the one who said that she used to have students coming to her to come get her advice on their families, generational conflict issues, and also interracial dating problems.
On the other hand, we seemed to have noticed that, despite these emotional issues that they have, they don’t really seek counseling. So from that, we kind of conceptualized or formulated a research question, and the research question was, how can we integrate or encourage Asian students to partake more fully in campus life? In other words, we see Asian students as coming to classes and then leaving, they don’t really participate. We have all these speculations, but we don’t know whether it’s language that was really the reason preventing them from participating more fully, or whether because of time commitments, or because they don’t feel accepted, they don’t feel that they can accept differences. So we came up with some suggestions, like we can raise consciousness of the Asian students, educate them about the importance of participating in extracurricular activities, we can raise consciousness of the faculty members, we can have support groups, we can have dialogues with the students, but we feel that we should probably have some discussions with the Asian students as to what we can do to encourage them, as administration or as faculty people, to encourage them to take full advantage of being students on campus. So one of the suggestions was that we should have focus groups with the students, so we can hear from them directly. I think that’s pretty much it, maybe people from my group could help me out if there’s something that I missed. No? That was it, we had a very good discussion, I want to thank my group.
Thomas Tam: Now, I’d like to invite Professor David Cheng, Professor and Director of the Counseling Center at Baruch College, to give us a report.
David Cheng: We had a very lively and sort of fun discussion in our group. Like I said to the group, it’s so unlike me to run a group without writing stuff on the board, so I’m not very good at this. I also have some notes from the people in my group, so we’ll try to present it in a sort of understandable way, we will try to organize it. Okay, we started talking about how in terms of counseling services, it doesn’t get the attention of anybody unless there’s something very drastic happening, like people jumping out of windows, and then people will start paying attention because they know it’s something that’s important. I guess the thing that we start to say is that we need to identify the needs of Asian American students. We try to get it from before, it’s more of a prevention model as opposed to waiting for something catastrophic to happen, tragedy happens.
I opened that to the group, in terms of the participants in the group, for each one from a different area to present a burning issue that they feel about the studying of Asian and Asian-American students, and this is some of the issues that my group has come up with. The first issue that one of our participants brought up was how to market counseling services to Asians so that they can use it more. Assertiveness, shyness, are some of the issues they feel that Asian students don’t come out to seek counseling> Also, when we have something that we can get a group to come out, invariably they have to be something that have to do with practical issues, like they have to do with academic issues.
Somebody also brought up the idea of how to recruit minority counselors, like Asian and Asian American counselors to work with the students, and it’s a good marketing tool so people can see who they are. One of our participants brought up the idea of doing workshops, and one of the successful workshops that was presented was an arranged marriage workshop, with Indian, Hindu, Muslim students. There were 20 students in the group, but there was no faculty. I think that’s a very common scenario whenever we do workshops in the different colleges; it seems we don’t really get strong support from the faculty or staff. We’re wondering if it’s possible to do some sort of outreach, and do some kind of in-service training for the faculty and staff so they can help us with the outreach and marketing process.
One of our participants is Mr. Downing, chief librarian of Baruch College, and he mentioned that in terms of the services, how do we encourage, promote the use of reference services to our Asian patrons. I think that’s another area that, a lot of Asians use the library, but don’t really, they don’t use our reference services. Is it because of anxiety? He also noted that sometimes they have special people that they feel comfortable about going to get services from, and they would go to get services from them. Another issue is to identify and address issues specifically relevant to the various Asian groups, like for instance, Asians who could be Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or the Indian students. So there are different groups. We need to maybe, do some research and separate and identify the particular groups and their particular needs. Another point is to acknowledge the unique difference of Asian, Asian American groups. So that’s the point that we stressed here.
Finally, we went around and tried to get, really summarize what’s one burning issue that each participant is looking for in terms of study and research in Asian, Asian American students. The first one that was mentioned is the gender issue, in terms of women, the exercising of personal freedom, acculturation, they may acculturate functionally but not emotionally. I think the topic of acculturation was brought up and it’s an important one. Another suggestion is sexuality, and maybe gay and lesbian alumni of a particular culture group can come back and talk to the students and try to bring out the students that have conflicts and issues surrounding gender and sexuality. Also, exploring ethnic identities, separation from the country, the age of arrival is an important factor. So it really has a lot to do with studies in level of acculturation and ethnic identity.
Finally, the link between faculty and staff. We feel that really, it’s important to get the faculty and staff involved in this whole process, and my experience is that when you have a kind of voluntary type of symposium or meeting or workshop, you get the same group of faculty and staff showing up to all of them. So it’s like preaching to the converted already, we’re not reaching the whole population. Perhaps one of the most successful multicultural counseling workshops that I did at Baruch, was the one that was required by the Provost. The Provost sent a memo to all the department chairs and said, you have to send a representative to this training. Then we got the numbers that we needed. Perhaps we need to do something in terms of your group, Tom’s group, the administration needs to do something in terms of bringing out faculty and staff, in terms of their involvement. We can only do so much in terms of the marketing, recruiting, and telling people how they can refer students and get to their needs, but we ultimately need the cooperation of the administration and the faculty and staff as well. I probably missed a lot of points that my group has mentioned. Can anybody else, would you like to add anything? Do you think I covered it? Kyoko, do you need anything to add?
Kyoko Toyama: I think an important point that kept coming up was to understand the differences within those Asian, Asian American groups. If we know that, and it might have to do with the other, sometimes students feel they are treated differently than other students, I think it comes from the stereotypes, so basically I think that it should be very clear how we can understand each group, and based on that we can give different services for international students versus immigrant students, or American born students. And acculturation is not just based on how long they’ve been here. Some students have only been here for one year, they are already so acculturated. So I think stereotypes and racism, those are the things we should research, and making sure that we’re not just putting all these groups together and only identify them Asians or Asian Americans.
David: Good. Anything to add? Elizabeth, something to add?
Liz McCaffrey: I just want to say something about the faculty and staff issues. We’re thinking also that in terms of the research possibilities, that maybe what we’re also talking about is doing some research on faculty and their attitudes, at the same time that we’re dealing with what students need. This will be where maybe we can get some big differences.
David: Edward, you want to add something?
Edward Ma: Yes, I would say, when you talk about support system, at Queens College law school, 15 students as a group team, they work together in harmony, as a small unit in harmony, support each other emotionally, culturally, academically, socially, and that makes their study more successful.
David: Anything else? Okay.
Thomas: Thank you very much, David. For our group, we covered basically all the areas that have been talked about with the two other groups. Specifically, I think there are some suggestions about, for example, that there’s a lack of role models for Asian Americans. For example, that there’s very few psychology professors or sociology professors that students can look up to, and so the suggestion is that perhaps we can begin hiring more Asian Americans so that students can identify with them and talk to them. There were suggestions that students were not taking advantage of the available services at the college, and there was a discussion about why that was the case. Maybe it was fear of technology, weakness to seek services, maybe there are some other issues involved. And the suggestion came up about the need to have a balance between the uniqueness of a person versus the standard for the whole culture. As we talk about Asian Americans as individuals, there are things we need to look at.
In terms of some of the difficulties, recruitment was mentioned as one of the areas we should focus on, because the recent immigrants need different approaches, and the counselors need to help them in many different ways, like helping them to file forms, that sort of thing. Us, the organization, the institute, needs to build resources, latching on to experts, to deal with diversity of the students that we have. For example, there are students from Latin America, they’re Asian, but they speak Spanish. I think that a comment was made about the importance of, the notion of culture comfort zone, that we need to understand that Asian American students, they are comfortable within a certain kind of zone they can identify with. The university needs to understand that better and be able to reach out to them. Also, as suggested before by other groups, there is a need to share that information with other university staff and other faculty members.
There are things like cultural values, emphasis on scholars versus political involvement, and all this, you know the behavior, in terms of being brash is not looked upon as a value for Asians, all of this needs to be changed. The problem is, however, that the university can be criticized if we just start changing peoples’ beliefs and values. Again, there’s a need to balance that.
The issue was raised, which is an important one, and we discussed it quite a bit, is about the increase of female students within the university. Discussions went on about why that is the case, maybe it’s because of the role change, changing of roles, maybe it’s generation effects, maybe it’s different attitudes that men are treated better back home and here it may be different, and maybe it is because CUNY is cheaper than other colleges, and that’s why, and maybe some of the families will send their male students to private colleges while female students will get to go to CUNY. I don’t know why we should worry about that. Maybe more women are now working, and when they’re working they recognize the need of education, and so that’s also the reason why they want to apply to come in. We wanted to compare to the national trend, and using our commuter school versus schools elsewhere.
There’s a big issue about the linkage between the university and the community within some graduate programs, for example in social work, there’s a missing link between a university and a community. There’s not enough professional placements between the students to become interns, so that we can learn more about the community and provide services to the community. Part of the reason, maybe, is because of the language fluency, that some of the students might have lost their touch with the language so they’re unable to reach out. It’s something the university should look into, and to work more to establishing a link with the community. A serious suggestion is that there should be more involvement from Asian American students to participate in this sort of colloquium. Since the topic is talking about students, they should be more represented.
The idea of Asian Americans as a model minority implies a lot of pressure on the family to do well. People have to go to the extent of taking gym classes to raise their GPAs, and things like that. The pressure, while it is true for females, it is especially so for males. Maybe, some sort of multicultural training for the staff and for faculty would be useful, so that we can understand Asian American students better. In terms of role changes within the Asian American family, because of immigration, the father was usually the authority figure now is no longer enjoying that role, because the mother works, and the children are the only interpreters around. They are the ones who interpret what is going on around the family in terms of letters they receive, and that sort of thing from the government, etc.
There’s a suggestion that maybe it would be good if we can somehow collect more of this kind of vignette about Asian American students, so there can be more concrete illustrations of the issues we talked about. Again, there is a talk about the need for resources, perhaps if we can get more faculty members to get involved, perhaps we can get more people who are knowledgeable about the community, maybe community leaders, agency heads, etc. get involved with us, maybe form an advisory group for us so we can get more input, that would be useful. The student groups, being intermediaries between higher education and the community, it would be good if they can work with other students, if the university can provide opportunities so they can interact with other groups, so they can develop a community where they can interact and rely on, and because of our commuting nature, some students are complaining that the situation is worse than in high school, that they spend more time on the subways rather than with each other.
So, one of the questions would be why is it that CUNY has often been cited that their graduation rate is different from SUNY, and some of the reasons we have talked about may be the issue, maybe this is something that we can begin to study and begin to answer that question. Maybe there are different cohorts that go from one group to the other, I don’t know, maybe there are different needs, there are different burdens. And a need to compare existing students with alumni, so we can learn from their experience and how they went through the whole thing, that is something that maybe we can do in the future.
To end the discussion, I think that there was a suggestion about the formation of a directory of faculty and staff as well as a directory of students so that in the future, when we reach out to university members, we will be able to reach out to them easier. And also, if we want to find any experts in those areas to join us, it would be easier, and it would be something that we will look into, and we will try to work more about that. The good thing about all of this is that the findings from the study that we’ll be doing will be able to lead to concrete programs, and we will follow all the suggestions and come up with a better plan.
I think that all the suggestions that have been made, we will put them on the web, we will try to list them out, and find out what are the more important areas we should focus on. This is a fantastic gathering of people, and you have contributed your ideas, your opinions, your advice as well as your warnings about certain areas, and we will look into it earnestly and we will follow up with this. As we go forward, this is only the first colloquium that we have, I’m sure that we will be able to implement the suggestions that you have put forth. This has been a fantastic colloquium, a very successful one, and we wouldn’t be able to do this without your selfless input, and I appreciate that, and I thank you very very much. Thank you. Vice Chancellor, would you like to say something?
David Cheng: So for my group, please leave your email address and phone number, we will be in touch.
