There’s no doubt that Andrew Leong depends on the C.V. Starr East Asian Library, which contains one of the largest collections of Asian and Asian American texts in the world. As a graduate student who examines literature written by Japanese and Chinese immigrants, many of the rare books required for his dissertation are shelved in this $46.4 million building, which opened at the University of California, Berkeley, in March.
Yet Leong fears that before the end of the year, the library will be vacant. Now that higher education budget cuts are dismantling programs within the UC Berkeley Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Korean language instruction will be slashed by 66 percent, along with similarly high removals in Chinese and Japanese.
“The first generation of Korean, Japanese and Chinese immigrants often did not write in English,” says Leong, who is a graduate student at the UC Berkeley department of comparative literature. “The point of the new library was to bring texts out of storage so that they could be read … but this library will become a vault — an elegant, beautiful but empty mausoleum. It will house the remains of our ancestors and of our heritage with no one to care for them because nobody can read them.”
Leong is part of the Committee to Save East Asian Languages and Korean Studies at Berkeley, a coalition that is combating the effects of the impending budget cuts. On May 16, the group spoke at the Korean American Economic Development Center in Los Angeles as part of their state-wide campaign to preserve the curriculum. In order to maintain the program for one year, the Committee must raise approximately $500,000 to ensure the job security of more than a dozen language lecturers that will otherwise be dismissed.
“Korean language classes are bursting from the seams,” says Christine Hong, a committee member and postdoctoral fellow in English at UC Berkeley. “These cuts strike at the heart at who UC Berkeley — and the UC system — is today. As of fall 2008, students will be restricted from studying Asian languages. This, without question, must be stopped.”
The slashing of Asian language courses is in response to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s $418 million budget cut for the 10-campus UC system. Along with having fewer language classes to choose from, the budget shortfall will require a 7 to 10 percent hike in tuition for all students.
At Berkeley, Asians represent 45 percent of the student body. Over the past decade, demand for East Asian languages among both Asian and non-Asian students has skyrocketed, and long before the cuts were announced, many students were wait-listed or unable to enroll due to lack of space.
“The 1,500 students who will be barred from taking language courses by the fall do not even include the hundreds of students who are already turned away each semester,” says Leong. “If UC Berkeley is a public institution, it should be responsible to this number of students who want and demand this type of education.”
