Innovation today tends to have an automatic association with computers, electronics and 21st-century engineering. But at Stanford, the impetus to rethink and reimagine stretches well beyond the mechanical.
There's no more ardent hotbed of transformation, for instance, than the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. To grapple academically with some of the most contentious issues in American society, the center has been assembling a youthful teaching and research corps of national notice.
Six key scholars hired in the last three years have been faculty of color. That's a visible asset to the University's diversity objectives, but also fits into the goal of freshening all the center's work. The push has been on to add faculty members who can shake up their fields or break new ground, and at least one prominent outsider whom Stanford tried unsuccessfully to recruit cites a cluster of strengths in the center's strategy.
Among the significant accomplishments, says Harvard professor David Carrasco, a Mexican-American historian of religions, is "a very smart series of steps in a different direction" from the black-white experience that "still dominates" race and ethnicity programs. The center's comparative vision—looking at multiple populations in relation to each other instead of separately—contributes to a "deeper focus . . . than any other similar center" in the United States, Carrasco wrote in an email.
Carrasco also notes that the center's approach is "seriously empirical," insistent on describing "the actual experiences of race and ethnicity in local, national and borderland situations." It's gratifying praise, and from the perspective of history professor Al Camarillo, hard earned. As special assistant for Stanford's faculty development initiative, Camarillo has committed himself to a task that requires a dogged talent scout who's not afraid to pass the academic torch.
"Stanford already has an established presence in higher education in the study of race and ethnicity," says Camarillo, noting that the center dates to 1996. "But we want to go further. We want to make Stanford the best university in the world doing this work.
"How do we do it? We bring in the best faculty with creative minds, young faculty as well as more established scholars. But we're really looking at younger faculty, who have the possibility of linking with current faculty and taking ethnic studies to the next level of development. Breaking paradigms, changing interpretations, bringing new empirical research. My generation laid the ground, we established the beachhead, and now we're looking for scholars that are pushing and advancing this to the next realm of research and understanding."
In late 2007, Stanford launched its multimillion-dollar faculty development initiative to hire "rising stars in the humanities and social sciences" while incrementally filling 10 faculty positions affiliated with the center. Success was anything but preordained; not every offer of employment has been accepted. But three years into a five-year process, the roll call represents an assortment of disciplines and interests.
The first to come on board were Gary Segura, professor of political science and chair of Chicano and Chicana studies for the center, and Tomás Jiménez, assistant professor of sociology. Next came associate professor of education H. Samy Alim, MA '02, PhD '04, and José David Saldívar, professor of comparative literature. The latest hires, with backgrounds in African-American topics, are assistant professor of sociology Corey Fields and assistant professor of English Vaughn Rasberry. All their school and departmental appointments are based on contributing a specific share of time and courses to the center.
Jiménez's work, to cite one example of what Camarillo calls next-generation research, focuses on how ongoing Mexican immigration helps shape the assimilation of later-generation Mexican-Americans. Camarillo believes there are broad implications for larger society.
"I think that one of the things that sets us apart more than other similar kinds of programs," says Jiménez, a former assistant professor at UC-San Diego, "is we are not principally focused on the racial or ethnic identity of a particular group, but we're interested in the lives of people with multiple skin colors, multiple ancestries, multiple nationalities and multiple backgrounds. There's no silo here—no Asian-American silo or Chicano silo or silo of any kind."
Alim, an expert on street language and hip-hop culture, is a former associate professor of anthropology at UCLA. Stanford offered him a "dream scenario."
"Something that I've always wanted," he explains, "was to be able to do interdisciplinary work across three areas, which were education, linguistics and an explicit focus on race and ethnicity. . . . I'm going to the [center's] faculty seminar series and showing up with this community of scholars from all over the University, who are coming at the issues from their particular perspectives, with their particular insights, which is enhancing my work and my thinking."
"One of the real successes of the faculty development initiative," says the center's executive director Elizabeth Wahl, PhD '96, "is that it has provided a model for what you can do to attract the best and brightest universitywide. And by making the center the focus of that, it offers an intellectual home on race and ethnicity issues regardless of someone's department."
