Is this a cause worth dying for? “We are risking our lives to save lives,” says hunger striker Jorge Mancillas, assistant professor of biology at UCLA’s medical school. More academic attention, he thinks, will eventually pay off in a more prosperous, stronger Chicano community. But UCLA does not have separate departments for any special-interest group. Asians, blacks and women have all had to content themselves with interdisciplinary majors taught by professors from traditional academic departments. That arrangement is unsatisfactory, say the demonstrators, because faculty members have little time or encouragement to concentrate on ethnic studies. Their solution: full academic status for Chicano studies. “We cannot continue to the next necessary step without departments,” says Luis Torres, an English-and Chicano-studies professor at the University of Southern Colorado who also heads the National Association of Chicano Studies. (About 17 percent of UCLA’s 23,000 students are Chicano; many have not joined the campus demonstrations.)
UCLA administrators insist that a field like Chicano studies-touching on history, sociology, literature, feminism and other disciplines-is best left as an interdisciplinary program. That structure encourages the flow of ideas among Chicano-studies faculty and other specialists. Creating separate departments, says UCLA Provost Herbert Morris, encourages a “Balkanization” that the university wants to avoid. “We need the ethnic perspectives to pervade all the departments,” says Morris, who does agree that the Chicano program needed improvement.
Chancellor Charles E. Young offered to take several important steps to bolster the Chicano-studies program. First, all ethnic-and gender-studies programs would be exempt from funding cuts for two years-a critical gesture because the UC system is strapped for cash. Second, new faculty would be appointed jointly to Chicano studies and an existing department-history, say, or languages. Also, Young insists that this year’s decision need not be the final one. He suggests that the idea of a full-fledged department can be re-examined in a few years. Seeking an end to the demonstrations last week, university officials offered even more funding and more faculty for the program. So far, the protesters have rejected his offers-as well as food, In a state where minorities now account for nearly half of the student body at some public universities-and sometimes more-the bitter conflict at UCLA will not be the last.
