The political uproar over racial and ethnic studies programs in higher education is clouding the reality that few four-year institutions offer a major in Latino studies.
Such small numbers also are the reality with majors in the study of other racial and ethnic groups.
A major in Latino studies is offered by just 89 of more than 2,600 four-year colleges and universities, according to a new report by The Latinx Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.
Further, the majority of those programs, most established after the Mexican American and Puerto Rican student movements of the 1960s and 1970s, are dramatically underfunded and understaffed, with many having one or no core tenure-track faculty in the program, the researchers found.
Just 252 four-year higher education institutions, or 9%, offer an African American or a Black studies major; 52, or 2%, offer an Asian American studies major; 74 or 3% offer a Native American studies major; and 146 or 5% offer a broader Ethnic Studies major, the Berkley research released this month found.
Given those numbers, the turmoil over ethnic studies seems “overblown,” said G. Cristina Mora, the study’s lead author.
“We are far from having an equitable higher education system that offers the classes and research opportunities on all communities, and at the same time, it’s quite ironic that these nascent and vulnerable programs are targeted because they are somehow taking over,” she added.
“Lack of investment in Latino studies is really a willful blindness as we move into the future,” she said.
Conservative fears over the study of white supremacy’s role in the making of the U.S. and its persistence in American institutions have led to campaigns to narrow ethnic studies instruction.
But Latino and other racial and ethnic studies not only tell the stories of respective communities, but also are critical to collecting demographic data, Mora said.
Students in programs with classes on Latino…
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