By Ashley Ip and Yashita Kandhari (Spring 2021)
Davidson College was never made for students like us. Throughout our time at Davidson, we’ve had to work to build community in order to increase the resources and support we have as Asian students on campus. The inspiration for our project, “A History of Asians and Asian Studies at Davidson,” comes from our own experiences on campus and the lack of a vocabulary or context about what it means to be an Asian student at Davidson.
After the Neo-Nazi doxxing incident on campus in 2018, we began to have broader conversations about race and racism at Davidson. We felt the need for community and dialogue around Asians and Asian Americans and the importance of establishing Asian American Studies as an academic discipline. Along with 3 other students, we formed the Asian American Initiative and started to advocate for Asian American Studies. When we were doing our preliminary research on what Asian American Studies could look like, we struggled to find any stories about Asian students who had come before us. By chance, we later stumbled upon the Twitter for “ExpectAsian,” a working group of Davidson students who also advocated for Asian American Studies between 2017-2018. Had it not been for their Twitter, we would not have known about the work of past Asian American Studies’ advocates at Davidson,
Last summer, with the increase in anti-Asian hate and violence in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic—as well as the uprisings in the U.S. against the racial state, which called for justice for Black lives—we began to have more conversations about the role that Asian students played at Davidson. We wondered how we fit into discourses around racism, solidarity, and justice. We then approached Dr. Sarah Waheed to be our faculty supervisor for this project, and her support and advice has been invaluable to this project.
We began by speaking with the college archivists about the records they already had about Asians and Asian Americans. We found that these records were extremely limited and only contained documents and posters that highlighted events from an administrative perspective. The archive sorely lacked the voices of Asian students, faculty, and staff. We knew then that our project’s main focus would be to tell the lived experiences of Asian students and faculty and that oral histories would be the main method of our project. Oral history simultaneously disrupts and enriches institutional narratives of history. Through oral histories, people remember and recount their experiences in the form of a narrative, including both what they have witnessed and what was told to them. It is important to record personal historical narratives in order to highlight experiences and stories that are often overlooked and made invisible by institutional narratives.
“Oral history simultaneously disrupts and enriches institutional narratives of history.”
We collected over twenty-five oral histories from Asian students, staff, and faculty. These oral histories span over sixty years: from 1949 to 2018. By combining these stories along with some materials we found in the Davidson College Archives, we were able to gain an understanding of how Asians students and faculty have existed on campus over time, the ways Asian and Asian American identities have been defined and situated on campus and how that has shifted and the contributions that these students have made to Davidson. Still, there is an incredible amount of work that Davidson needs to do.
One of the highlights from this project was getting in contact with the first recorded Asian American student at Davidson, Dr. James (Jimmy) Jung, who graduated in 1949. Jimmy, also known as “Dragon” by his peers, is from Kannapolis, North Carolina. He majored in Physics and was the captain of the wrestling team. After graduating from Davidson, he went on to spend most of his career as a Chemistry Professor at Campbell University. Jimmy did not know that he was the first Asian American to attend Davidson, and states that he was not treated differently because of his race. Multiple articles from the Davidsonian cover his amazing performances on the wrestling team and an article covering a match that he lost has the headline, “Dragon’s Wings Clipped.”
Our other interviewees graduated beginning in the 1980s and the following decades. We found that during the 1980s, there were very few East Asian students. There was no real sense of community among those on campus, and there was an expectation for students to assimilate into the dominant campus culture. Many of the alums we spoke to had grown up in areas that were predominantly whiteand did not have other expectations from Davidson regarding diversity. On the other hand, there was a thriving South Asian student community, with as many as twenty-four students from South Asia being admitted in a single year—1989. During this time, Dr. Bill Mahony and Dr. Job Thomas led the South Asian Studies Program, Davidson’s non-Western academic focus, and the Davidson in India semester abroad program. The South Asian Studies Program was one of the best in the country. We also learned about a play South Asian Students staged together in 1989, called The Procession, that helped to create group identity among students and solidified the South Asian presence on campus.
The 1990s saw a change in the expectations of students towards increasing diversity and inclusion, as more non-white students were admitted and the college expanded its curriculum. One alum remarked that it was surprising that Davidson was a top ten liberal arts college that claimed to be diverse, and yet did not have Asian American Studies or any Asian organizations. Another stated that Davidson did not recognize that Asian international and Asian American students needed different resources and support from the institution.
We also learnt of various racist incidents that took place. In a Political Science class that an interviewee took, they were forced to argue with a student in class who was justifying Japanese internment. The professor never intervened and the labor was left to the student. There was also a lack of acceptance of students practicing faiths other than Christianity, and those students oftentimes experienced insults and verbal abuse.. While Davidson had an Asian Studies concentration—which offered multiple courses—there were still no Asian cultural organizations or events. Students generally remained ignorant and continued to perpetuate racist sterotypes and remarks;they were never taught otherwise.
With the increase in the number of Asian and Asian American Students at Davidson during the 2000s and 2010s, it became more important to acknowledge the complexities of Asian identity. Who is Asian or Asian American? We come from a vast continent with diverse cultures, and have vastly different socio-political backgrounds. Within America as well, Asian Americans have extremely different experiences. Conversations began to take place about how to simultaneously create space for and represent different Asian identities, while at the same time trying to build community for Asians as a whole given that—as many of our interviewees remarked—it is extremely difficult being non-white at Davidson. It is productive to build solidarity and alliances. To this date, we continue to have these conversations.
Over the years, we have found that students have been able to find community, support, and mentorship at Davison, whether that was through friends, faculty, or staff. There are people who want to help bring about changes to the institution, but the burden of this consistently falls on non-white students and faculty. Students would have not had the resources that we have today, had it not been for the labor—first and foremost—of Black students and faculty, who in many ways have always laid the blueprint for change and mentorship.
At Davidson, there is a reluctance to change or to acknowledge injustice. The college encourages Asian students to attend Davidson to satisfy their agendas to diversify, but students have to struggle to find legitimacy for their needs and demands in the eyes of the institution. Despite this, change is possible, and we have seen how it has taken place over the years. We have a greater appreciation for our community and all the invisible labor people have done to make all the work we are doing today possible.
Our work is only the beginning: there are a lot more stories to be told. We hope that our project enables future students to understand their place and histories at Davidson much better. We are grateful that the Archives will preserve these stories, which can be used to hold the college accountable and encourage greater institutional change.