Asian American Studies at California’s Public Universities

Abstract

The Asian American Movement began in the late 1960s, sparked by student activists in California looking to bring Asian American Studies to their universities. This thesis explores how the movement drew inspiration from the Civil Rights Movement and anti-Vietnam War protests and how it later influenced Asian American student activists at the University of California, Irvine in the 1990s. This thesis also uses computational linguistics and corpus linguistics techniques to analyze the rhetoric of Asian American student newspapers at UCLA from 1969-1974 and UC Irvine from 1991-1997. This quantitative data, combined with historical context, paints a picture of Asian American student activism that collaborates with other oppressed peoples, refutes the model minority myth, and drives change in their communities.