Asian students and campus culture

how we live — By Bob Riel on January 10, 2007 at 8:05 am

There was an interesting article in the NY Times last weekend on how the University of California, Berkeley, now has a student population that is more than 40 percent Asian, and some of the ways in which that affects the campus culture.

On this golden campus, where a creek runs through a redwood grove, there are residence halls with Asian themes; good dim sum is never more than a five-minute walk away; heaping, spicy bowls of pho are served up in the Bear’s Lair cafeteria; and numerous social clubs are linked by common ancestry to countries far across the Pacific. …

Spend a few days at Berkeley, on the classically manicured slope overlooking San Francisco Bay and the distant Pacific, and soon enough the sound of foreign languages becomes less distinct. This is a global campus in a global age. And more than any time in its history, it looks toward the setting sun for its identity.

This does, of course, change the university dynamic in many ways. For one, the rise of Asians on campus has coincided with a decline in the number of blacks and Hispanics. The fact that the university population does not accurately reflect the composition of state residents has become a topic of debate in some quarters.

Beyond that, though, there are also cultural implications. The article discusses, for instance, a study done by Hazel Markus, a Stanford professor, on the ways in which Asians view education differently than do students from other cultures.

Her studies have found that Asian students do approach academics differently. Whether educated in the United States or abroad, she says, they see professors as authority figures to be listened to, not challenged in the back-and-forth Socratic tradition.

“You hear some teachers say that the Asian kids get great grades but just sit there and don’t participate,” she says. “Talking and thinking are not the same thing. Being a student to some Asians means that it’s not your place to question, and that flapping your gums all day is not the best thing.”

One study at the institute looked at Asian-American students in lab courses, and found they did better solving problems alone and without conversations with other students. “This can make for some big problems,” she says, like misunderstandings between classmates. â€œBut people are afraid to talk about these differences. And one of the fantastic opportunities of going to a Stanford or Berkeley is to learn something about other cultures, so we should be talking about it.”

Interestingly, this week also saw a report on NPR about a class offered by a Berkeley professor which introduces foreign students to the basics of American culture. You can listen to the report here.