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Thomas Burkman is director of UB's Asian Studies Program
What is the Asian Studies Program?
I have a couple of teenagers at home who are looking into colleges. The kind of higher education I want them to have will acquaint them with the world's myriad peoples and will lead them to appreciate the intrinsic worth of other cultures. It will give my children the desire and skills to communicate with and learn from people of color down the street and continents away. It will invite them to engage in an open world where mutuality supplants control as the means to prosperity and security. When the Asian Studies program functions as intended, it contributes in that kind of humane education.
Asian Studies (AS) is an interdisciplinary, service unit of UB. We encourage and equip departments and schools within the university to make Asia part of their program. AS has a director, a half-time secretary, and a graduate assistant—and no faculty. It administers a minor in East Asia Studies and, come August, a new major in Asian Studies. It induces and cajoles departments to establish and staff the courses needed for its academic concentrations.
Though AS is administratively housed in the College of Arts and Sciences, its mission extends across the university. AS helps the School of Management orient its students headed out to China. Through a federal grant it seed-funded a sinologist faculty line in the School of Informatics. AS has secured funding and artists for a series of residencies in the departments of Music and Theatre and Dance. Our Asia at Noon series of seminars, in its eighth year of operation, is well established as the interdisciplinary forum for Asian research at UB.
Check out AS on the web at http://wings.buffalo.edu/asian.
How many students/faculty are involved in your program?
UB's Asian studies faculty are housed in various departments. During the past decade since AS was constituted, their numbers have grown from eight to 20. In addition, another 20 faculty who were not trained as Asian area specialists are actively involved in research where Asia plays a major part. We list them as associated faculty. The number and variety of Asia-focus courses have mushroomed in this environment. Not counting 20-some language courses, UB will offer 29 Asia-focus, undergraduate classes next fall, and an additional 13 at the graduate level. Asian Studies publishes a list of such courses for each upcoming semester.
It is hard to measure the place of Asia at UB, but there are some handles. Some 600 students in any semester are taking an Asian language for academic credit. Last year, 16 students studied abroad in Asia through exchanges maintained by the university's busy Office of International Education. Many more participated in internships and short-term study in China through the School of Management and the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.
Over 1,500 UB graduate students call Asia home. The university's Asian alumni are numerous and influential—like Zhou Ji, the new Minister of Education in the People's Republic of China.
Does UB connect with Asian resources at other universities?
We have to. For research in vernacular materials in the humanities and social sciences, UB graduate students trek to the University of Toronto and Cornell, since Lockwood's East Asian Collection is just getting started by comparison. AS has forged links and co-sponsored a conference with UT's Asian Institute.
Next October, some 200 Asia scholars from across the state and southern Ontario will convene at UB for the annual meeting of the New York Conference on Asian Studies. Several UB faculty and graduate students will present their research at the NYCAS meeting. The conference theme is "Walls in Asia," in the spirit of a major art exhibition coming to UB and Buffalo in 2005 and titled "The Wall." You can link to the NYCAS conference from our Web site.
At UB, Asian studies focuses on Japan, China, Korea, and Southeast Asia. What about Central Asia? The Middle East? Asian-American studies?
UB has led from its East Asian and Southeast Asian strengths, which include critical masses of faculty specialists in those areas; mature language programs in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean; library resources; and overseas university ties. Nonetheless much of the Asian world remains underserved at UB. Aside from language offerings in Hindi and Arabic, UB offers next to no courses about India and the Islamic world. It is clear that this gap puts us at a disadvantage in addressing the contemporary world. Here is an area where decisive administrative action coupled with donor support could make a difference.
The field of Asian American studies is blossoming at major universities across the country. AS is responsible for Asian American studies at UB, and it offers basic undergraduate courses each semester in the history, literature, and culture of the significant Asian population in North America. Nine percent of UB's undergraduates claim Asian heritage. Asian Studies looks forward to the day when key UB departments will hire Asian American specialists and a modest program can be established.
Your academic specialty is Japanese history. We hear the occupation of Japan following World War II cited as a model for postwar Iraq. Would that work?
The differences in the Japanese and Iraqi cases far outnumber the similarities. The United States engaged in detailed planning of the occupation of Japan during nearly four years of war. When the war ended, the U.S. mandate to remodel Japanese state and society was endorsed by not only Japan's former enemies and neighbors but also the Japanese people and emperor themselves. There was no ground invasion of the home islands before surrender. The victor did not dismantle the Japanese government—there was no looting in Tokyo—but worked to revive Japan's earlier practice of parliamentary democracy.
1945 was a unique moment when the world tolerated social tinkering by a victor, and the victor had the patience to spend seven postwar years on the project. These circumstances do not adhere today. The world's superpower, who will countenance only a quick and antiseptic victory, has no stomach for a painstaking process of political, social and cultural regeneration. Nor will the world community tolerate such an intrusion. In short, the United States has unprecedented power to topple regimes, and less ability and space than ever to determine what will take their place.
How can Asian Studies be more effective at UB?
In contemporary academia, foreign language and area studies programs face unprecedented challenges and opportunities. By integrating the study of Asia and Asia-America, UB can treat Asia as a global phenomenon, no longer delimited by geography and assigned to race. We have local models for this: Korean literature written in Toronto and sold in Seoul; a Buddhist group meeting at Westminster Presbyterian Church.
While universities encourage interdisciplinary approaches, disciplinary departments still provide the structural model. By moving boldly in interdisciplinary work, Asian studies can remove the essentialized, exotic images that are associated with its own past, and at the same time provide models for intellectual cross-fertilization.
As alumni and community come to value UB's Asian connection, the Asian Studies Program may be able to develop its own financial base to supplement strained institutional resources.
In the shrinking world of today, the cultural richness and economic importance of Asia command attention. An alert university like UB is giving place to Asia—more so than any other SUNY school. Every college and professional school at UB has its Asian connection. The Asian Studies Program's function is to give curricular and programmatic shape to some of this dynamism that knows no disciplinary boundaries. Asian Studies also forms and nurtures a community of students and scholars whose intellects and careers are Asia-connected. But most of UB's Asian ties are generated in the various schools by faculty and students with their own agendas. The Asian Studies Program simply stands aside and cheers.