Qiyu Yang ASA002 A01 Week 6

Week 6 Blog

Qiyu Yang

ASA002 A01

Professor Valverde

For this week, I first read the “Open the box: an international Asian women scholar’s fight” written by Akiko Takeyama. Akiko is a Japanese woman, and in this reading, she talked about her tenure track experiences in details. When she first went to the US, despite the language barriers, she found difficult with some misconducts of some students. However, when she talked with her male colleague, she surprisingly found that they never have the same experiences. Yet, same things happened with other female colleagues. So, she spent extra time and efforts in dealing with these problems with her students; although she “failed” in the research, she still got high rating every year. For her experiences in publication, she first had been rejected for many times, so slowly she became afraid of doing these, but finally Standard University Press accepted. But later something happened, and people said a lawsuit would worse the case. She experienced panic attacks. Many colleagues wrote letters for her and, and finally she got approved for associate professor. One thing I felt she was different is what she wrote a section “lessons to learn”. I felt for majority of the reading I read previously, most of them just talk a lot about their unfair experiences. But Akiko brought up some lessons, so after that people might not need to went through what she had been. Also, she encouraged other international scholars to share about their experiences which others might be able to avoid those painful steps. And lastly, she also mentioned that she was more comfortable when spending time with other Asians, and I felt the same way actually. She raised awareness of structural inequality in the US academia. I wonder do European Americans also felt the same way? Do they experience the same things?  

References 

Taylor, K. (2020, January 2). Denying a Professor Tenure, Harvard Sparks a Debate Over Ethnic Studies. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/02/us/harvard-latinos-diversity-debate.html 

Valverde, K. C. (2013). Fight the Tower: Asian American Women Scholar’s Resistance and Renewal in the Academy. Rutgers University Press