DECLINING ADMISSIONS, the (near) absence of Filipino faculty, lack of institutional support of Filipino and/or Filipino American Studies--every year, Filipino students at UC Berkeley are welcomed with a series of grim realities. Ever since Filipinos were edged out of the UCB Affirmative Action recruitment and retention programs [beginning in 1989], the percentage of Filipinos admitted into the University from the applicant pool pas plummeted by 36.7%, by far the biggest drop among ethnic minority groups. This statistic reflects the fact that more Filipinos are applying to enter higher education at Berkeley than ever before [895 in 1995], but fewer Filipinos than ever before are being accepted. While the withdrawal of support from Affirmative Action has been undoubtedly a major factor in our gradual exclusion from the University, our invisibility on the institutional and academic levels has only fueled our growing conviction that UC Berkeley has no interest in providing Filipinos with the support and encouragement necessary for our survival here as an underrepresented minority. This statement of concern serves as a basic fact sheet for understanding our present abandonment and effacement from the University, in the hope that these conditions can be reversed.
IN AN issue of The Daily Californian [1/17/96], contributing writer Larry Luong succinctly outlined the double-dog of filipinos by the University with regard to Affirmative Action: on the one hand we are confronted by the threat of the UC Regents to abolish our one opportunity to significantly reverse the trend toward the declining admissions and enrollment prospective Filipino students; on the other hand we find ourselves defending a strategic program for racial diversity that no longer includes us. Filipinos are caught in a double-bind with lies at the heart of our contradictory status in the University.
From one perspective, our solidarity with other minorities to preserve Affirmative Action in the University is in every respect necessary; without Affirmative Action the rate of admissions for every underrepresented minority will sink even more drastically than each already has, and this will have deleterious effects on all minorities. However, even the existence of Affirmative Action will not change the Filipino trend toward declining admissions.
When examining the significance of the diminishing Filipino population at UC Berkeley, two things must be taken into consideration: first, that our trend contrasts sharply with the overall increasing tendency toward racial diversity; second, that according to the 1990 US census, Filipinos are currently the largest Asian minority in California and one of the largest growing minorities in America. Now, between 1989 and 1995, the nonwhite (citizen and immigrant) UCB student population increased by at least 22%. Yet, in the same period of time, the Filipino student population dropped by 36.7%. Surprisingly, the increasing disparity between the number of Filipinos in the UCB student body and the outlying reality of a growing Filipino population in America has been ignored by the UCB administration and academic community. If the US census is correct in predicting that Filipinos will be the largest "Asian-American" minority group in America by the year 2000, Filipinos are fast on their way to becoming the most underrepresented minority group at UC Berkeley.
AS FAR as Filipinos or Filipino-Americans on an institutional or academic level are concerned, the virtual nonexistence of Filipino faculty members at UC Berkeley has been a source of discouragement among Filipino students for years. Currently there exists only one tenured faculty member of Filipino descent: a blatant contradiction to the self-promoted image of a University that never ceases to brag about racial diversity. Moreover, it is by now common knowledge that there has never existed a tenured faculty member either of Filipino descent or involved in Filipino/Filipino-American Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies since the inception of the department over twenty years ago. Under Ethnic Studies interim chairperson Michael Omi's administration [1993-1994], the tenure-track position for a Filipino studies professor was given away to another applicant whose interests had nothing to do with Filipino or Filipino-American Studies. And despite Omi's promises to support the future recruitment of a Filipino/Filipino-American Studies professor, the Ethnic Studies department did not even nominate such a position for consideration by the University academic committed the following year [1995].
UCB's refusal to address Filipinos as an ethnic minority on both the level of tenured faculty and the level of academic disciplines runs contrary to the strength and perseverance of student interest in promoting the Filipino community through education, outreach, and student services. Given the lack of guidance and near-total absence of faculty mentors, it is nothing less than a miracle that UC Berkeley has one of the strongest and most extensive groups that provides services to the Filipino community in San Francisco and the East Bay; a group devoted solely to Filipino recruitment and retention; an annual semi-professional literary journal; and a cultural studies group that holds an annual national Filipino and Filipino-American Studies conference. Add to this the consistently high level of enrollment in Tagalog-language classes (no doubt aided by an inspirational and supportive language instructor); and you have the picture of a cultural movement built from bottom by eroded from the top. Unless UC Berkeley desists from its deliberate negligence of Filipinos on both the institutional and academic levels, even our foundations will disappear.
THE CONTINUED exclusion and expulsion of Filipinos by UC Berkeley is of course only the latest chapter in a long history involving the repeated displacement of a people once colonized by the United States. UC Berkeley so easily forgets that some of its institutional forbears (Bernard Moses, David Barrows, Hubert Howe Bancroft) were directly and indirectly involved in both the diaspora of Filipinos from the native country and our victimization by racism and exclusion in America. Thus, when a white professor from the Department of English at the University some years back nonchalantly exclaimed to a Filipino tenure-track applicant: "But there is no such thing as Philippine literature!" his ignorance must be understood in the wider scope of America's willful insistence that we be muzzled, effaced, rendered totally invisible. The controversial and heretofore unexplained dismissal of Oscar Campomanes from the same (English) department under the administration of Professor Ralph Rader only serves to corroborate with this conclusion.
And yet, despite our ongoing erasure from the face of society (both majority and minority), we have somehow managed to persevere, sometimes in the very institutions most hostile to the complications we bring to an already complex set of questions regarding race in America. It remains to be seen whether we will continue to do so. For now, suffice to say that the declining rate of admissions for Filipinos and the lack of Filipino representation at UC Berkeley on both the institutional and academic level will not change without strong initiatives on the part of the University to reverse these present realities.
While our support for the retention of Affirmative Action indirectly supports our own incentives toward the inclusion of Filipinos in the academic community, we demand to be recognized as an underrepresented minority at all levels of the University. We appeal to the supporters of Affirmative Action, that we may be joined in our efforts to preserve and foster a racially and culturally diverse community. We appeal to other minority sectors of the academic community who have experiences the plight of enforced invisibility on both an institutional and academic level. As an underrepresented minority, we need their assistance and encouragement even as they need ours. Finally, we call upon all the Filipino community groups across America to hold UC Berkeley accountable for our exclusion and effacement from the academic community. For there is no shame greater than that of belonging to a race which has no name, no face, no future.