What is CSRE?

Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CSRE)

• Mission: “To advance racial equity through interdisciplinary education, research and community engagement.”

• History: “The Stanford University Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity (CCSRE) was established in 1996 when student activists and faculty researchers united to form the university’s most comprehensive race and ethnic studies program. In the 25 years since its founding, CCSRE has grown into a university-wide research and teaching center with over 150 affiliated faculty from 28 departments and six (6) schools. CCSRE offers undergraduate degrees in Asian American, Chicana/o/x-Latino/a/x, Native American, Jewish, and Comparative Race Studies; a Ph.D. program; 200+ courses; and multiple student fellowships. CCSRE also leads major research, publication, training, policy engagement, and public education on diverse topics including art, criminal justice, artificial intelligence, race, and inequality.”

• 2020 Stats: 28 students graduated, 94 total Majors/ Minors, 57 Declarations, 200+ Courses offered

  • Currently: over 100 majors/minors

• Community-Engaged Learning: A core aspect of the Center’s undergraduate program. In nearly 20 courses throughout the year, students work with community partners to deepen their learning and make concrete impacts on racial justice issues in the community. 

• Internships: 20 summer internships in the Center’s Prax

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What is Departmentalization?

Currently, CCSRE is a center which includes interdisciplinary degree-granting programs (IDPs) and a research center. The primary difference between an interdisciplinary program and a department is that departments can hire their own tenure-track faculty. Despite being a very popular program at Stanford, CCSRE is under-resourced. Even though there are many course offerings, if you look individually at each ethnic studies program, the variety of classes is pretty minimal. For example, Native American studies only have six teachers, several which are lecturers.

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Why You Should Care Departmentalization 

• Currently, CSRE lacks its own faculty and relies on the voluntary participation of faculty who negotiate between obligations to their home departments and the needs of CSRE, or the courses overlap with another department.

• A new department will leverage the situational advantages Stanford has in Silicon Valley and aim to “encompass critique and community-building activities as well as knowledge production and dissemination,” - Vaughn Rasberry about AAAS

• CSRE will be able to hire new faculty for the department, and some of these faculty will be located solely in the new department, their primary teaching obligations will be for the new department.

• There is no difference between a degree from a department and a degree from an IDP for undergraduates, according to Satz. 

• CSRE will be able to hire new faculty for the department, and some of these faculty will be located solely in the new department, their primary teaching obligations will be for the new department.

• Departmentalizing CSRE which will offer a wide range of degrees sends the message that the University regards the teaching and research as is related to race, ethnicity, and justice as valuable. 

• Comparative studies in race and ethnicity is Stanford’s primary ethnic studies degree track that promotes the understanding of race in comparison, not singularly but intersectionally

• It contains 4 subgroup programs within it, Native Studies, Jewish Studies, Chicanx/Latinx Studies, and Asian and Asian American Studies

• CSRE as it stands now does not function in the way that it was envisioned

• CSRE was envisioned as a major/department that would centralize and emphasize ethics studies on campus, and it was created due to student advocacy in 1996. Students advocating for a Chicano studies department organized a hunger strike for ethnic studies, and CSRE was created as a result

• CSRE is a center NOT a department, which means that it lacks the funding, centralized faculty, and capacity for courses and student support that is usually attributed to a department

• Essentially, CSRE has no faculty housed in the program. All professors that teach in CSRE must be primarily located in other departments, oftentimes anthropology, sociology, history, political science, etc

  • This means that the faculty that do care about CSRE is spread very thin, as their teaching obligations are located primarily in other departments

  • As director of CHILATS, Johnathan Rosa articulates: is more like volunteer work than a functioning program

• African and African American Studies achieved departmentalization last year, largely due to student activism, and there is no reason that CSRE cant follow in their footsteps

• Departmentalizing would allow us to create an infrastructure to explore what it means to live in a multiracial society, which is incredibly necessary, and it would show Stanford's commitment to a real study of race in our world.

• If CSRE has become what it has with virtually no institutional support and literally no faculty, imagine what the state of ethnic studies at Stanford could look like if we invested in it.