PROFILE
SPORTS
Kristen Welker ’98 Watches the White House
No. 16 Harvard Makes History, Upsets No. 1 Stanford
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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY, EST. 1873
| VOLUME CL, NO. 15
| CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
|
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FRIDAY, JUNE 2, 2023
CLASS OF 1998
A Year of Firsts: Strides in LGBTQ+ Advocacy and Representation PRIDE AT HARVARD. From the first gay wedding at Memorial Church to the first same-sex couple named as faculty deans, Harvard saw new strides in LGBTQ+ representation during the 1997-98 academic year. At the same time, students said they wish they had received greater support from the University during this crucial period in LGBTQ+ advocacy. SEE PAGE 4
SAMI E. TURNER—CRIMSON DESIGNER
Student Activists Reflect on Push for Ethnic Studies
Chinese President Jiang Zemin Visits Harvard BY RYAN H. DOAN-NGUYEN AND MILES J. HERSZENHORN CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
Hundreds of Harvard affiliates crowded Sanders Theatre on the morning of Nov. 1, 1997, for the historic visit of Chinese President Jiang Zemin. It was the first time Harvard welcomed a president from China, and seats in Sanders Theatre for Jiang’s speech were in such high demand that a lottery was run in order to distribute the tickets. Since China had previously been “resistant to such high-level interactions,” Kathrine A. Meyers ’98, then editor-in-chief of the Harvard Asia Pacific Review, said in 1997 that the visit needed “to be seized as an opportunity to advance relations, rather than to stifle them.” The lottery to hear Jiang speak closed with more than 1,000 ticket requests. As a Ph.D. student at Harvard at the time, Victor C. Shih, now a professor of political economy and an expert on China at the University of California, San Diego, recalled in an interview how he excitedly watched Jiang’s motorcade arrive in Cambridge for the
1997 visit. While many Harvard affiliates, like Shih, looked forward to Jiang’s presence on campus, others objected — including student members of the Taiwanese Cultural Society. Countering outcry from human rights advocates, Jiang asserted in interviews before the event with TIME Magazine and the Washington Post that his country now touted more human rights than ever before. Philip J. Cunningham, a 1998 Nieman Fellow at Harvard whose previous decade of reporting in Asia included covering the protests and crackdown of Tiananmen Square, said in an interview that while reporting in China he “saw things that were extremely terrible and unfair and cruel” — things that “the government did.” “I was angry about it,” Cunningham added. “As an ordinary human being, I was outraged at some of the things that China was doing to its own people.” Addressing his American audience through a translator, Jiang highlighted China’s scientific, cultural, and economic progress and argued for a more robust alliance with the United States. But his remarks were not immune from protest. Immediately following his
speech, a man shouted “human rights” from the upper balcony. Four others joined him, and the five turned their backs to Jiang, showing “Free Tibet” in black letters. Cunningham stood up and repeatedly shouted, “What about Wei Jingsheng?” referring to China’s longest-serving political prisoner at the time — whom Cunningham interviewed. Shih, however, said he did not remember a lot of protests surrounding Jiang’s visit. “Today, if the same thing were to come, you can imagine a lot of people lining the streets, welcoming him, et cetera — as well as a lot of protesters,” he said. “At that time, I don’t remember seeing either.” Cunningham said he was “probably an outlier” at Harvard when it came to his passion for human rights issues in China. According to Shih, Jiang’s visit in 1997 did not hold the same significance that a trip by current Chinese President Xi Jinping would hold today. China was a rising middle-income country at the time, Shih said, not the global superpower that it has become today. “For those of us who studied
SEE PAGE 5
BY CAM E. KETTLES AND JO B. LEMANN CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
Throughout the 1997-98 academic year, student organizers and activists renewed demands for Harvard to establish an ethnic studies concentration — a call that, even then, was decades-old. Twenty-five years later, Harvard still does not offer a ethnic studies concentration or house a department for the subject, although there is now an ethnic studies field within the History and Literature concentration and a secondary field in Ethnicity, Migration, Rights. “We were calling for a curriculum, like a actual concentration where you can really gain expertise in the history and culture literature of a representative minorities in the United States,” Michael Hsu ’98 said. “We’re trying to make up for for gaps in the curriculum. We’re not just trying to do some anthropology,” Hsu added. When the Ethnic Studies Action Committee was formed in 1993, it was “a relatively small group,” Mina K. Park ’98 said. Park said the group was primarily “about filling a huge gap”
within the curriculum at the College. “At the time, even though it was so long ago, it didn’t seem like such a radical thing to ask for,” Park said. Organizers then shared many of the frustrations current student activists have expressed — namely, a lack of both course options addressing modern ethnic studies and full-time faculty members focused on the topic. “At the time, we had this incredible African American studies program, and I was very interested in studying Asian American Studies, but there just wasn’t anything really available,” Park said. Like Park, Nisha S. Agarwal ’00 had wanted to study Modern India during her time at Harvard. While Harvard did offer classes on Sanskrit and ancient Indian history, Agarwal said there weren’t “modern classes.” “I looked for classes on India, on Gandhi, on really so-called modern questions and classes, and there was nothing,” Agarwal said. “So it was like, this is very odd because it’s a pretty big country and we should expect that there would be some classes on that.” Agarwal later created the South Asian Studies Initiative
in the spring of 1998 to advocate for classes about modern South Asia. ESAC, SASI, and other ethnicity-based groups including the Academic Affairs Committee and Asian American Association jointly adopted the cause of an ethnic studies department. Hsu, a former member ESAC and chair of AAC, said ESAC would organize public protests while AAC — an organization within the Harvard Foundation — would meet with deans and faculty members. “We played good cop and bad cop,” Hsu said of AAC and ESAC. While organizers said there were many supportive faculty members, “in terms of actually being able to do something or actually pulling whatever levers they could, it was different,” Park said. Jennifer Ching ’96 recalled “being completely shut down and being dismissed and insulted” by passers-by while protesting outside Harvard’s Science Center. Ching said she believes the push for ethnic studies is related to fighting white supremacy. “It’s the idea that any call for resources that center the rights,
SEE PAGE 6
GETTING ONLINE
EDITORIAL
DINING SERVICES
A New Generation of Harvard Students Plugs In
Harvard’s Early Action Program is Flawed
The Great Grape Debate: A Brunch Referendum
PAGE 5. Harvard saw a number of forays online during the 1997-98 academic year, from online job recruitment to its new Distance Education Program — which would become the Harvard Extension School.
PAGE 9. While Harvard made 1,048 families that much happier with early-action acceptances, we fear that early-action may be creating a two-tiered accepted group with different standards and different demographics.
PAGE 10. Harvard’s campus was bitterly divided over whether to end a boycott of United Fruit Workers grapes and bring table grapes back to Sunday brunch. Participants reflect on the fruit-focused fracas.