Approximately 40 students protested Harvard's unwillingness to sponsor ethnic studies yesterday in a rally in front of the Science Center.

"This is not about separatism or identity politics," said Hyewon T. Chong '95, a member of the Ethnic Studies Action Committee. "This is about honest scholarship. Cornell, Columbia, Stanford, Brown and over 700 other universities have recognized the importance of ethnic studies. Harvard has not."

Protesters said they want the same kind of classes offered in the Afro-American Studies department, in such areas as Asian-American, Latino-American and Native American studies.

"It is hypocritical of Harvard's administration to assume that the entire non-white experience can be reduced to the African-American experience," said one protester who declined to give her name.

Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles revamped the ad hoc Committee on Ethnic Studies last year, and has studied the possibility of instituting an ethnic studies program.

Knowles also created a subcommittee of the Educational Policies Committee specifically to draft a report on the state of ethnic studies at Harvard.

But the Faculty of Arts and Sciences rejected the subcommittee's recommendations, and has refused to promote the ad hoc Committee on Ethnic Studies to the status of standing committee, Chong said.

Chong speculated that perhaps certain faculty fear that new ethnic studies offerings might upstage more conventional classes. She cited the popularity of English 179c, a course on Asian-American literature.

"More than anything else," said Chong, "this is about our desire to explore the ways that we are being shortchanged in our education."