Week 8: Bryan Ngo, A0

Week 8: Bryan Ngo, A01

Week 8:

Bryan Ngo

ASA 002

A01

More often than not, students usually feel powerless when it comes to making big changes, especially at higher education environments. This feeling is not without good reason too. In the paper written by Do and Deloso, there were times when Deloso went to her college’s townhall meetings to voice her concerns about the budget cuts from their college of ethic studies. There was little to no success that came from these townhall meetings. It’s strange because the purpose of a townhall meeting is to serve as a formal setting for members of the community to come out and voice their concerns. Once voiced, the administration would act on those concerns, assuming that it was a serious one. But when Deloso went, she got nothing out of the meetings every time. It was always the response of `we don’t have the funding to do X, Y, and Z for you`. Because following the procedure was obviously not working, Deloso decided to organize a hunger strike to get the attention of administration. After a 10-day hunger strike, conversations were starting to happen in Deloso’s favor. This behavior from the administration really shows how stubborn educational systems are to change. It’s not until a group of like-minded students become disruptive that concerns are addressed to.

Question:

Higher education has been around for a long time. Different career paths have become well-defined / established since then (i.e. ethic studies, engineering, etc), each with an abundance of student representation. Because of deep roots these paths have established, is there even a right way to go about removing one?

References:

Do, L. L., & Deloso, S. Precariously Positioned: Asian American Women Students Negotiating Power in Academic Wonderland.

Gender in Higher Higher Ed. (n.d.). Retrieved November 12, 2017, from https://visual.ly/community/infographic/education/gender-higher-higher-ed