For Asian American Students, Science Success Bears A Cost

Editor's Note: This is the first of a two-part series on Asian Americans in academic science. It addresses issues concerning Asian American students. The second part, to appear in the May 29 issue, will examine the representation of Asian Americans on academic faculties and in university administration. A growing number of government and private programs throughout the United States are aimed at increasing the ranks of underrepresented minorities in university science classrooms. But one minority group--those of Asian ancestry- -is commonly perceived to be disproportionately represented in academia compared to the general population. MAKING IT BIG: Founder Chang Yi Want, center, talks with United Biomedical staff. Statistics from the National Science Foundation and other governmental and professional organizations seem to confirm this perception. Anecdotal evidence obtained by The Scientist through interviews and correspondence over the Internet also point toward a substantial Asian representation in the academic student body. For Asian Americans, this heightened presence can be a double-edged sword. While Asians on campus may be ubiquitous, Asian Americans and others report, they are far from completely accepted. In academia, they say, the slights, slurs, and discriminatory practices tend to be more subtle, but are there just the same. "I think overt forms of prejudice tend to be less pronounced in a university setting," says economist Gabriel Manrique of Winona State University in Minnesota, who, along with his wife, Cecilia, a professor of political science at University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, is studying the immigrant experience in the university. Gabriel Manrique is of Filipino ancestry. In the course of his research, however, Manrique has come across numerous cases that have been less than subtle: "Perhaps one of the most egregious that comes to mind is the dean who directly told a search committee not to hire any more Indians because that college already had 'too many' Indians. "I have come across faculty members who have been called 'gooks,' not only by students, but by colleagues. In one particular instance in a Southern university, an Asian professor was not only called a 'gook' by his colleague, but a 'lying gook.'" But perhaps more insidious than overt prejudice for many Asian Americans are the assumptions inherent in the same statistics outlining their achievement and representation in the academic community. Broad generalizations are used in compiling data on Asian presence in academia, lumping various segments of the highly diverse Asian population together--citizens and immigrants with visiting students, for example--with little regard for the various circumstances that bring them to the campus. Trends detected and perceptions developed from this approach often find their way into the administration and culture of academic institutions at all levels, resulting in further discrimination and decisions that address neither the concerns nor the aspirations of Asian Americans. Statistics indicate that people of Asian ancestry are indeed the most highly educated segment of U.S. society: In 1992, the percentages of people in the labor force identifying themselves as Asian or Pacific Islander, and who had finished college with a degree, was 55 percent for males and 47 percent for females, twice the figures for non-Hispanic whites, according to Martin Carnoy, a professor of education and economics at Stanford University and a researcher on the economics of race. Carnoy, author of a recent book, Faded Dreams: The Politics and Economics of Race in America (Cambridge University Press, 1994), compiled these figures from data provided by the U.S. Bureau of the Census. (The Census Bureau definition of Asian ancestry includes anyone whose family originated in Asia, south of Russia, east of Iran and Afghanistan, or anywhere in the South Pacific or Indian Oceans, except Australia.) But these figures are misleading, some Asian Americans and others point out, because they include not only U.S.-born individuals and naturalized citizens, but also those who are in the U.S. on a student visa and who intend to return to their home countries, Asian immigrants who intend to remain in the U.S., and even illegal residents. Although there are copious statistics on Asians in academia--much of them from the National Science Foundation's Division of Science Resources Studies (NSF/SRS)--not all data make a clear distinction between these groups. Furthermore, Asians are not one cultural--or even racial-- group, but many disparate groups, and differentiating data do not exist to any appreciable degree. Even Census Bureau statistics are unreliable, according to NSF/SRS economist Mark Regets. For example, the bureau mistakenly classified, in its ancestry data, more than half the people who identified themselves as being of Indian ancestry--the Indian subcontinent--as Native Americans. Because Asians or Pacific Islanders made up only 2.9 percent of the U.S. population in 1990 according to the census, statistics seem to back up a widely held perception in academia: There is a disproportionately large percentage of Asians reaching the highest levels of education in science, mathematics, and engineering. Both NSF figures and anecdotal accounts seem to verify this. According to NSF/SRS, the proportion of people granted Ph.D.'s from 1988 to 1992 who identified themselves as Asian was 36.5 percent in engineering, 30.5 percent in math/computer sciences, 23.4 percent in the physical sciences, 13.9 percent in the life sciences, and 6.8 percent in the social sciences. However, according to NSF's Selected Data on Science and Engineering Doctorate Awards: 1993 (NSF 94-318), of the 7,166 science and engineering Ph.D.'s granted in 1993 (the latest date for which figures are available) to those who identified themselves as Asian, only 710 (9.9 percent) went to U.S. citizens, 892 (12.4 percent) went to noncitizens on permanent visas, and 5,564 (77.6 percent)were granted to individuals on temporary visas. An as-yet-unreleased NSF report (Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering: 1994) presents a similar picture. In 1990, 91 percent of the Asian labor force in science and engineering receiving doctorates in the U.S. was foreign-born. Because the bulk of these statistics do not differentiate among Asian groups, a skewed picture of educational tendecies among Asian Americans can emerge. For instance, the majority of the Ph.D.'s granted to foreign-born Asians are in engineering (38.5 percent), followed by the physical (23.8 percent) and life (20.6 percent) sciences. Native-born Americans of Asian ancestry are granted a preponderance of Ph.D.'s in the life sciences (35.4 percent), physical sciences (22.3 percent), and social sciences (21.7 percent)--more closely mirroring the percentages of degrees in these fields granted to native-born Caucasians. Anecdotal evidence of a strong Asian presence also abounds. Approximately half of his fellow chemistry graduate students at Princeton University are Asian, according to Ph.D. candidate Ron Shigeta, a Japanese American. And Michael Lin, a first-year M.D.-Ph.D. student at the University of California, Los Angeles, writes on the Internet, "Here in California, specifically UCLA, the science departments swarm with Asian undergrads and grad students." Behavioral ecologist Robert Madden, a Japanese American professor of biology at Marymount College, Tarrytown, N.Y., says that for the first time in his life, he is in a classroom "where a majority of the students are Asian," referring to a biostatistics course he is taking at Columbia University. But Madden also sees that, unlike him--a native New Yorker--a majority of his classmates are foreign-born. % of U.S. Ph.D. Recipients Who Are Asian (by Race), April 1993* *The numbers are for those who received Ph.D. degrees from U.S. institutions, were under 76 years of age, and were resident in the United States in April 1993.Source: National Science Foundation's 1993 Survey of Doctoral Recipients. The tendency to assume Asian students are foreigners, combined with more traditional prejudices against Asians of all backgrounds, has made the academic experience a difficult one for Asian Americans, many report. Some researchers point to language problems, real or perceived, that may impact negatively on scientists of Asian heritage. Virologist Alice Huang, dean for science at New York University, recalls that in the 1960s and 1970s, it was not uncommon at meetings for people to "just get up and walk out" when they saw an Asian scientist get up to speak. STRAIGHT TALK: Kuan-Teh Jeang of NIAID, who has once labeled "inscrutable," says many people expect a language barrier "just because you look Asian." "Just because you look Asian doesn't mean you can't speak American," emphasizes molecular virologist Kuan-Teh Jeang of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), who also recalls that in high school in Texas, his teachers labeled him as "inscrutable," a stereotype aimed at Asian Americans. Lee Kim, a chemistry senior at Duquesne University, wrote over the Internet, "Even though I had stressed in my graduate school applications that I was a U.S. citizen, having been born in Berkeley, Calif., four of the six schools [applied to] had sent me a post card asking me where my TOEFL [Test of English as a Foreign Language] scores were and/or whether or not I was a U.S. citizen!" Traveling up the academic ladder may require more from an Asian than a white. "Almost to a person," Gabriel Manrique says, "everyone that we interviewed [for their immigrant experience re-search] was very specific. Good is not good enough when you're being compared to a white." Immunologist Chang Yi Wang, a founder and chief scientific officer of United Biomedical Inc., a vaccine, im-munotherapy, and diagnostics company in Hauppauge, N.Y., originally came from Taiwan to study at Rockefeller University. "To be extremely successful in science," she states, "in addition to scientific expertise and management skills needed to lead a group, communication skills have to be top-notch." Wang, whose company is in the forefront of developing AIDS diagnostics and vaccines, is successful beyond most immigrants' wildest dreams. After receiving her Ph.D. from Rockefeller, she moved to Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, where she became the youngest head of a laboratory. But, she says, it isn't easy: "We have to prove, prove, prove ourselves constantly." STRUGGLE: Ravi Sinha cits fear among non-Asians who "think they're losing ground." Ravi Sinha, a professor of geology at Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina, dismisses notions of a language barrier as a reason for obstacles Asian Americans face. "It's not the language; that's all nonsense," he contends. Sinha, who emigrated from India and previously worked for an oil company, where he was the only nonwhite on his floor, believes it's a struggle with people who "think they're losing ground." He points out: "The demographic changes in the U.S. in the last 30 years have been profound. Thirty years ago, the word 'America' was synonymous with white America." Sinha maintains that the nation must adapt to its changing demographics and "take [the nonwhite population] into the mainstream of the country." Princeton's Shigeta acknowledges that cultural differences between immigrant Asians and American interviewers on the job market, for example, may produce misunderstandings. "The interviewer often doesn't know the full meaning of what candidates are saying, misinterpreting modesty or respect as a lack of quickness or aggressiveness--modesty and respect being valued in a lot of Asian cultures, and aggressiveness being valued in a lot of American corporate and academic culture." By the same token, he believes there may be subtle cultural differences between someone like him, "a fourth-generation Japanese American," who has "many friends who do not culturally distinguish me from European Americans" and other Americans. "This does not mean that the way I go about things and the way I like to work in a group are not different." Despite the hardships and hard work required for a scientist of Asian ancestry to reach the top, United Biomedical's Wang is convinced that there is no place in the world with greater opportunity for immigrants. She points out that U.S.-born scientists would not be as well received in England or Japan as Asian-born scientists are in the U.S., and she firmly states, "I think this country's the most generous and open in the world. We have excellent opportunity here." Shigeta, a voice of the future generation of scientists, sees it somewhat differently: "The scientific community can either recognize its increasingly diverse nature to its benefit, or ignore it to its own ultimate loss." Myrna Watanabe is a science writer based in Yonkers, N.Y.

For Asian American Students, Science Success Bears A Cost

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