The Crisis:

Declining admissions, the (near) absence of Filipino faculty, lack of institutional support for Filipino and/or Filipino-American Studies--every year, Filipino students at UC Berkeley are welcomed with a series of grim realities. More Filipinos are applying to enter higher education at Berkeley than ever (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.

The Asian American category covers a large and diverse community.  Though there may be a large percentage of Asian American students, there are several ethnic groups within this category that are underrepresented (Filipinos, Cambodians, Laotian, Mien, Hmong, and others). Filipinos are currently the largest Asian group within California and one of the largest growing people of color communities in America. If the U.S. 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.

Ever since Filipinos were edged out the UCB Affirmative Action recruitment and retention programs (beginning in 1989), the percentage of Filipinos admitted into the University from the applicant pool has plummeted by 36.7%, by far the biggest drop among ethnic minority groups.

As far as Filipinos or Filipino-Americans on an institutional or academic level are concerned, the virtual nonexistence of 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.

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 the UC Berkeley has one of the strongest and most extensive assemblages of Filipino student organizations in the entire country. The list of active organizations includes a recruitment and retention group that provides services to the Filipino community in the Bay Area and beyond, 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 and you have the picture of a cultural movement built from the bottom but eroding from the top. Unless UC Berkeley recognizes their abandonment of Filipinos on both the institutional and academic levels, even the foundations will disappear.  The willed 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 forebearers (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. We are continually confronted with America's willful insistence that we be muzzled, and rendered totally invisible. The controversial and heretofore unexplainable dismissal of Oscar Campomanes from the Department of English only serves to corroborate with this conclusion.  And yet, despite our ongoing erasure from the fact of the American Society (both majority and minority), we have somehow manages 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.

• Filipinos have to be recognized as an underrepresented minority at all levels of the University.

• We need to appeal to the supporters of Affirmative Action, so that we may be joined in our efforts to preserve and foster a racially and culturally diverse community.

• We need to appeal to other minority sectors of the academic community who have experienced the plight of enforced invisibility on both the 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.