Faculty at Chapman’s Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, where interdisciplinary minors like Africana Studies and clusters like Latin American Studies are offered, were not initially informed of Mark Hopson’s appointment as senior director of Ethnic Studies. 

That rang alarms in Wilkinson College, said Stephanie Takaragawa, associate dean of the school’s Academic Affairs. The school currently houses the Ethnic Studies cluster and just recently received approval for its Ethnic Studies minor to be offered this fall 2021 semester.

Hopson’s newly created position was announced in an April 15 newsletter from the School of Communication, where Hopson will also start working Aug. 1 as a professor. For his administrative role in the Provost’s office, however, his title has since changed its name from “Senior Director of Ethnic Studies” to “Senior Director of Ethnic Studies Programs,” according to two separate email clarifications Hopson sent The Panther on April 23 and May 5. 

It is not clear whether concerns voiced by Wilkinson faculty and staff influenced Hopson’s new specialty in working with stakeholder groups to schedule ethnic studies-related programming, speakers and events at Chapman University. Hopson initially told The Panther April 23 that his role in Ethnic Studies would include collaborating with faculty to expand the curricula within the cluster and hopefully expand it to create a major. Hopson’s programming budget hasn’t been solidified. 

“Wilkinson was concerned in particular because it sounded like he was coming in to direct a program that was created by Attallah College and Wilkinson College,” Takaragawa said. “It was actually just missing one word in the title; he is overseeing the programming, not the program.”

Provost Glenn Pfeiffer did not respond to multiple requests for comment on whether the change in position title was due to the office’s lack of communication with the students and faculty in Wilkinson College.

Vice Provost Lawrence Brown told The Panther April 28 that notifying them of Hopson’s appointment prior to The Panther’s article “fell off (his) radar” because he was focusing on COVID-19 related issues. Brown added it was not his intention to leave students and faculty in the dark. 

“Hopefully, now that they are aware of Dr. Hopson’s position, they will be very excited to have someone at Chapman focused on expanding the number of ethnic studies opportunities for students and strengthening the existing ethnic studies programs,” Brown wrote in an email to The Panther.

Faculty and staff are supportive of Hopson’s new role at Chapman, Takaragawa said, one she hopes will elevate Chapman’s profile as a university that offers ethnic studies-related courses and dedicates part of its curricula to related interdisciplinary matters.

Takaragawa and Cathery Yeh, a professor in the Attallah College of Educational Studies, will serve as co-directors of the incoming Ethnic Studies minor. Submitted last fall, the Wilkinson College minor will be added to the 2021-2022 course catalog after a multi-step process saw a recent approval from parties like the colleges, administrators and curriculum committees.

Yeh has been on the Ethnic Studies Curriculum Task Force since its creation, a two-year-long effort to design the program and obtain formal approval, said Ethnic Studies task force member Molly Weitzman. However, Takaragawa said that a variety of curriculum task forces have been developing an Ethnic Studies program for years; it’s just taken shape in various incarnations as different faculty and students pass on the torch once they graduate.

According to the official program, the Ethnic Studies cluster — which the minor will expand upon — examines identity formation in American history, modern-day injustices, social justice movements, public policy, anti-racist ontologies and liberationist epistemologies. Through a cultural-societal lens, the Ethnic Studies minor will aim to engage students in historical and theoretical dialogues to learn about how race, arts and community work shape and impact various ethnic groups in the U.S. 

“We have a sort of homogenized version of what America is that doesn’t actually pay significant attention to the sort of different cultural contributions across the last several hundred years of American history,” Takaragawa said. “It's really important to be a truly global citizen to understand multiple perspectives and multiple disciplines.”

Weiztman, a senior peace studies and integrated educational studies double major and the president of the Ethnic Studies Society, hosted Chapman’s fifth annual Education and Ethnic Studies Summit last week, which drew in over 400 registered attendees. She told The Panther that the curriculum task force has worked tirelessly since the summer to draft program learning outcomes, to cross-reference course syllabi that align with those learning outcomes, to ensure the Ethnic Studies minor was strong enough to stand on its own as a separate discipline from other related minors and to create two new classes from scratch. 

The first new Chapman course introduces students to the premise of ethnic studies to establish theories and a foundational base that will be built upon as the student progresses in the minor. The second offers a research methods-based course that accentuates community activism.

“Every system that we have built in this country is built to work against certain groups of people,” Weiztman told The Panther. “It’s fantastic to hear that we were approved as a minor (because) that's all something that you learn in an ethnic studies class — how to dismantle those systems and transform your community.”

From a national to a local scale, Weitzman emphasized the apparent “burnout” that can come from promoting these issues. She urges Chapman students, faculty and staff to participate in Cross-Cultural Center and civic engagement events in order to support one another and empathize with their community.

As subsequent steps for Wilkinson College, Takaragawa told The Panther that the school is hoping to hire a new professor specifically geared toward teaching Ethnic Studies. Based on community interest, she said, the next item on the list of curricula to prioritize is Asian American Studies.

“We really want the students to be invested in their education, because we don't want to tell students all the time what they should be learning,” Takaragawa said. “We want to (respond to student needs) and ask them, ‘How do we make Chapman a personalized education that we promised to you?’ … We want to offer students that.”