Building Support for a Major

The push for more representation and education about Asian identities at Amherst College has been a multi-decade affair. It’s involved protests and urging from all levels, from students to university leaders. This fall, all of that coalesces into an academic major in Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) studies at Amherst.

When Dr. Pawan Dhingra first arrived on campus as a faculty member more than five years ago, conversations around wanting AAPI content were already being had, he says. He joined in.

Dr. Pawan DhingraThe school had already witnessed a fervent desire from students for more representation, as was the case in 2015 during the Amherst Uprising, when students and faculty and staff members occupied a campus library for multiple days and made demands of the administration for racial and social justice, says Dhingra, Amherst’s Aliki Perroti and Seth Frank ‘55 Professor of U.S. Immigration Studies.

The hate exhibited against Asians during the COVID-19 pandemic and the Atlanta shootings of 2021 also added fuel to the fire, flaring Asian American issues into national ones.

“Then, it became a topic of conversation on campus beyond the curriculum or the field [to be] about wellbeing, safety, experiences, and the silencing of Asian Americans in a variety of ways across the country, including on campus,” he says. “All of that then helped affirm that Asian Americans themselves are a very distinct population.

“We have different experiences. You can’t collapse us into being another version of something else that already exists. We have to be understood on our own.”

This campus sentiment contributed to a bold push for AAPI studies from students, from faculty, and – with Dhingra’s eventual rise to become Amherst’s associate provost and associate dean of the faculty – from Amherst administrators.