(NAME-MCE) The Intimate University: Korean-American Students and the Problems of Segregation

[Anselmo Villanueva]

The Intimate University: Korean-American Students and the Problems of
Segregation

March 3, 2010  Inside Higher Ed

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/03/03/abelmann

Even as Asian-American enrollments grow at leading American universities,
relatively little in-depth work has been done that focuses on growing
subgroups of those students. The Intimate University: Korean-American
Students and the Problems of Segregation, recently published by Duke
University Press, is an attempt to remedy that. In the book, Nancy Abelmann
focuses on a large population of Korean-American students at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is associate vice chancellor for
research and the Harry E. Preble Professor of Anthropology, Asian-American
Studies and East Asian Languages and Cultures. Abelmann responded to
questions about her new book.

Q: How do you see Korean Americans' educational experience as distinct from
that of other Asian American students, and from other minority students?

A: Like all students of color, among them Asian Americans at large, Korean
Americans are racialized (i.e., marked in some way for their race). With all
Asian Americans, Korean Americans share the experience of being sometimes
considered members of the "model minority," namely exemplary students who
succeed by virtue of their own efforts, and, in some versions of this
perspective, the predispositions of their "culture/s." I argue, however,
that today it is Asian Americans’ image as "instrumental strivers," namely
students motivated principally by practical concerns and material rewards,
that is more important, particularly so for Korean Americans. This
racialized stereotype is foisted on Korean Americans in particular because
of their high rates of self-entrepreneurship (e.g., green grocers, dry
cleaners), indeed the highest in the United States. For Korean American
students, these images fly in the face of what I dub their often deeply held
"liberal dreams" for education, namely ideas of becoming broadly educated,
cosmopolitan people. While these sorts of liberal dreams are shared by many
Americans, I think they are disproportionately shared by Korean Americans
whose parents hail from South Korea, a country whose modernity story is
intimately tied to U.S. economic and political involvement and to an
"American dream." To a considerable extent, these ideals make for what some
scholars have dubbed "intra-ethnic othering," a process through which Korean
Americans often distinguish themselves from a pejorative Korean American
"mainstream."

Q: How crucial are family expectations to understanding the Korean-American
university experience?

A: I think that family is important to the college lives of all students,
especially traditional-aged students, but more so for students from
immigrant families for whom college attendance in the United States fulfills
an often long-embraced and hard-earned dream. As such, the promise and
expectations of college are often richly elaborated in immigrant families in
ways that can be weighty for the students themselves. Korean Americans, as I
indicate above, come from families whose histories are enmeshed in South
Korea’s U.S.-inflected modernity; they bring to college complex and
sometimes contradictory expectations of college – to become both widely
educated and able to practically succeed – tensions at the heart of American
education more broadly. Also important to the university experience of many
Korean Americans is extended family: as for many immigrants, many Korean
Americans have navigated the United States in the dense company of immigrant
kin.

Q: How key is the church role for Korean-Americans and how does that differ
from the experiences of other minority and majority groups?

A: Over 60 percent Christian, Korean Americans are among the most Christian
ethnic groups in the United States. South Korea is East Asia’s most
Christian country (about a quarter of the population) and the church is the
central support institution in Korean American communities. Although most
church-attending Korean American college students grow up in
church-attending families, I argue that ironically these students often
challenge both family and university through their own ethnic student
churches. Fashioning themselves as more authentically Christian than their
parents – whose church attendance they often argue is instrumental in nature
– they often look to the church to answer their liberal desires to become
well-rounded human beings, interested in more than the material gain of the
stereotype in which they are sometimes clothed. An additional irony,
however, is that Korean Americans often attend largely "Korean" churches and
worry that as such they are not sufficiently realizing the promise of the
experience of "diversity" at college. Certainly religion has a place in the
lives of many college students, but the specificity for Korean Americans is,
to reiterate, that on the one hand the church offers a particular
alternative to stereotypes of instrumental striving, while on the other hand
it poses a problem for being oftentimes a largely Korean organization.

Q: You write about issues of segregation at the university. How do you see
Korean-Americans differing from other groups on campus (whether explored by
race and ethnicity or by interests)?

A: Indeed, many college students do not, in the words of many of my
interlocutors, exit their "comfort zones" in college, be it because they
stay with kids from their home towns, their race/ethnicities, or with kids
who share particular interests (e.g., sports). The burden that Korean
Americans share with some other racialized groups is that they are often
troubled by their segregation (i.e., their often singularly ethnic social
lives), worried that it somehow speaks to their own limitations and betrays
the promise of college. It is in this sense that I consider these
"racialized burdens." Most of my interlocutors either bemoaned their own
“self segregation” or worked hard to distinguish themselves from the
"mainstream" of their (more segregated) co-ethnics. It can perhaps be said
that Asian Americans are more prone to talk personal responsibility for
"self-segregation" because anti-Asian American racism is not widely
recognized and named in the United States (e.g., vs. anti-black racism).

Q: How do Korean Americans experience stereotypes and worse in their
university experience?

A: Korean Americans are burdened both by the aforementioned stereotype of
the instrumental striver and by their sense that their segregation is seen
by others as "self segregation." While some students did describe incidences
of outright racism on campus, much more pervasive were stories of the myriad
ways in which they were made to feel that they somehow did not fully belong
in the "American"university. Further, many of my interlocutors were well
aware that even as they experienced the insults of American racism, theirs
is a color that is not fully counted when it comes to thinking about racism
and race-based exclusions. Indeed, with other scholars, I write of the
“minority that does not count” to refer to the ways in which Asian Americans
are often literally not counted as minorities at college (e.g., they are
seldom included in affirmative action programs).

Q: What would you recommend to fellow university leaders (beyond Illinois)
about how to provide a better experience for Korean-Americans?

A: I do not think it makes sense for universities to single out group such
as "Korean Americans" for targeted campus efforts. What does make sense is
for university leaders to think seriously about how academic and
extracurricular programming can educate both students of color and white
students about the continued workings of race in the United States at large,
and particularly in educational institutions at all levels. The college
classroom, for example, is an ideal space in which students can candidly
express their thoughts about segregation, and work through these concerns in
their social, historical, and political contexts. At the University of
Illinois I co-founded and co-direct an initiative, The Ethnography of the
University, in which students conduct archival and ethnographic research on
our university through affiliated courses. Tellingly, among the most popular
topics of student inquiry is segregation: students wonder about the apparent
ethnic/racial concentrations in particular dormitories, activities, or even
majors, just as they are often perplexed at the apparent ethnic/racial
patterns in dining halls or on the quad. Segregation, I argue, requires
subtle and sophisticated tools of analysis and modes of thinking, perfect
grist for classrooms across a wide array of disciplines and for
extracurricular programming, whether through residential spaces or
ethnic/cultural centers. At my own university, I have observed first hand
the critical curricular contribution made by excellent ethnic studies
programs, such as our own Asian American studies program. I close my book
with a call to the professoriate that was inspired by what I learned from my
Korean American student interlocutors: that we make our classes meaningful
venues in which students can indeed grow and prepare themselves for a
transformed and transforming world. In the current moment of dire fiscal
times for public higher education, I am starkly reminded that professors –
particularly in the humanities – cannot fashion these meaningful venues
unless universities are able to sustain support for excellence in faculty
teaching, research, and service.


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http://www.dukeupress.edu/cgibin/forwardsql/search.cgi?template0=nomatch.htm&template2=books/book_detail_page.htm&user_id=22018327978&Bmain.item_option=1&Bmain.item=19835

The Intimate University: Korean American Students and the Problems of
Segregation

Nancy  Abelmann

Cloth - $79.95
0-8223-4597-8
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-4597-8]

Paperback - $22.95
0-8223-4615-X
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-4615-9]

The majority of the 30,000-plus undergraduates at the University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign—including the large population of Korean American
students—come from nearby metropolitan Chicago. Among the campus’s largest
non-white ethnicities, Korean American students arrive at college hoping to
realize the liberal ideals of the modern American university, in which
individuals can exit their comfort zones to realize their full potential
regardless of race, nation, or religion. However, these ideals are
compromised by their experiences of racial segregation and stereotypes,
including images of instrumental striving that set Asian Americans apart. In
The Intimate University, Nancy Abelmann explores the tensions between
liberal ideals and the particularities of race, family, and community in the
contemporary university.

Drawing on ten years of ethnographic research with Korean American students
at the University of Illinois and closely following multiple generations of
a single extended Korean American family in the Chicago metropolitan area,
Abelmann investigates the complexity of racial politics at the American
university today. Racially hyper-visible and invisible, Korean American
students face particular challenges as they try to realize their college
dreams against the subtle, day-to-day workings of race. They frequently
encounter the accusation of racial self-segregation—a charge accentuated by
the fact that many attend the same Evangelical Protestant church—even as
they express the desire to distinguish themselves from their families and
other Korean Americans. Abelmann concludes by examining the current state of
the university, reflecting on how better to achieve the university’s liberal
ideals despite its paradoxical celebration of diversity and relative silence
on race.
“Nancy Abelmann’s unmatched gifts—a fierce intelligence, a hand that writes
like the angels, and an empathetic sensibility uncommon in her field—are put
to marvelous use in The Intimate University. This book is both a brilliant
achievement and a gift to everyone struggling to understand the kind of
world birthed after three decades of unprecedented global migration. While
the subjects here are Korean American university students in the Midwest,
the lessons we are taught are transcendent.” —Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, the
Courtney Sale Ross University Professor and Co-Director of Immigration
Studies, New York University
“The Intimate University tells an emotionally charged story of Korean
American life on and off the campus of a large public research university in
the American Midwest. It dispels the myths and stereotypes about Asian
Americans through the different voices of college students and their
relatives and through the author’s nuanced analysis and culturally sensitive
interpretation.”—Min Zhou, author of Contemporary Chinese America

“Nancy Abelmann brings to light the oft-hidden maneuverings that Asian
Americans have to perform in schools as students of color and, at the same
time, students whose color ‘does not count’ by virtue of their alleged
overrepresentation or overachievement. The Intimate University is an
incisive and provocative account of university schooling as a site for
navigating the intricacies and contradictions of race, immigration,
community formation, and identity.”—Rick Bonus, author of Locating Filipino
Americans
“Nancy Abelmann’s stunning portrait of Korean American university life will
cause us to rethink our understanding of multiculturalism and diversity in
the academy. This valuable and sobering account of one minority group’s
experience also speaks more broadly to the intersection of race, religion,
and identity, revealing the paradoxical notions on which American diversity
is based. Don’t miss this book!”—Cathy Small, aka Rebekah Nathan, author of
My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a
Student

Nancy Abelmann is the Harry E. Preble Professor of Anthropology, Asian
American Studies, and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of The Melodrama of Mobility:
Women, Talk, and Class in Contemporary South Korea and Echoes of the Past,
Epics of Dissent: A South Korean Social Movement, and she is an editor of
South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema.