Several other committee members dismiss Yeh’s complaints, pointing to Yeh’s upcoming meeting with Sollors as well as their own unofficial, informal open-door policies as proof of student involvement.

“There’s been student input in that students have met with various members of the committee and also, the students drafted a proposal which we have in front of us,” said Professor Mary C. Waters, chair of the sociology department. “There are definitely avenues for students to make their thoughts known and definite openness on the part of Faculty members.”

Some professors even question whether students should be allowed to attend the committee’s meetings.

“It’s a Faculty committee,” says Elizabeth Doherty, a CES member and assistant dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for Academic Planning. “It’s for the members of the committee which will award the certificate to talk through those details.”

The particular difficulty CES faces in creating a certificate program for ethnic studies revolves around what some Faculty say is the nebulous nature of the field. Unlike other certificate programs, such as African Studies and Latin American Studies, whose courses are somewhat bounded by geography, the field of ethnic studies has a less concretely defined domain.

New CES member Jennifer L. Hochschild, a professor of government and African-American studies, says committee members are having difficulty determining what set of courses could count as requirements for a certificate, as well as facing problems with creating an advising system.

“On the one hand, dozens of courses could plausibly [count]...but that’s a meaningless certification,” she says.

Still, several major universities—Brown, Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley and Yale among them—have programs, if not departments, devoted to ethnic studies. Some, like Berkeley, even have Ph.D programs.

Hochschild says she thinks students have little to worry about.

“My general feeling is that all of us are sympathetic to the idea, to the concept of ethnic studies, but all of us also saw some pretty substantial logistical problems with any proposal,” Hochschild said.

She says those logistical problems are exactly what must be solved in order to get the program running.

Ronald Takaki, chair of the Ethnic Studies Department at Berkeley and one of the field’s pioneers, says the changing demographics of the nation alone should cause universities to reconsider the importance of ethnic studies.

“We’ve entered the 21st century,” Takaki says. “No longer do we think of race as the black-white binary.”

“As a premier institution in higher education, Harvard has this obligation and also this opportunity to lead. By just sticking with the black and white paradigm in scholarship and in teaching, it’s not leading,” he adds.

The most recent concerted effort to bring ethnic studies to Harvard was in 1995, when the academic affairs committee submitted a proposal to the College for an ethnic studies concentration.

Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles dismissed the feasibility of the roughly 150-page proposal in a letter to students, citing philosophical questions over how to study a variety of ethnic groups and financial obstacles to hiring new Faculty members. Instead, Knowles advocated studying ethnicity within the departments, sticking to the system that was already in place.

In 2000, a group of students calling themselves the Campaign for Ethnic Studies passed out more than 600 green ribbons in support of ethnic studies at that year’s Cultural Rhythms. They also obtained more than 200 signatures, including that of Rhythms host Matt Damon, Class of 1992, on a petition calling for ethnic studies.

But none of the past efforts have ever come as close to establishing a formal program of ethnic studies at Harvard as the certificate proposal.

“It’s just frustrating,” Yeh said. “We had word last semester that it was going to start this fall and while it’s understandable that they’re trying to work this out, it’s just the feeling that we’ve taken a step back.”

—Staff Writer Juliet J. Chung can be reached at jchung@fas.harvard.edu.