We, the undersigned, are shocked at the Advisory Committee’s decision to deny tenure to Professor Allan Punzalan Isaac.

Professor Isaac exemplifies the University’s goal of fostering a faculty which integrates teaching and scholarly activity to benefit students. His innovative pedagogy and his absolute commitment to education have been fundamental in transforming the ways in which countless students write, read and understand literature and the world. This dedication, however, is not limited to the classroom setting; he has advised many senior theses as well as independent student research projects. He is currently a favored advisor choice for those students conducting research in Asian American Studies, and Ethnic Studies, more generally. His brilliance as a teacher, scholar and intellectual is needed on Wesleyan’s campus.

Professor Isaac not only teaches in the English Department, and consistently teaches the major’s core course (Study of Literature), but he also has affiliations with the American Studies Program and the Program in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies. The English Department unanimously supported his award of tenure. His commitment to interdisciplinary study—across the fields of literary studies, comparative literature, Asian American Studies, critical race theory, feminist studies, cultural criticism, amongst others— accepts the challenge of comparing and synthesizing various intellectual projects. Professor Isaac’s scholarship interrogates literature and culture within a comparative and transnational context: a project which is deeply in line with the University’s Strategic Plan for 2005-2010 that encourages Wesleyan to become “engaged with the world” and express “cross-cultural competence.” Allan Punzalan Isaac’s strength as a professor, of course, is not limited to his wonderful pedagogical abilities. This becomes quite clear to anyone who has engaged with his scholarship, particularly his “American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America,” which was published in 2006 by the University of Minnesota Press.

Furthermore, the Advisory Committee’s decision to deny Professor Isaac tenure speaks to the University’s failure to successfully articulate the importance of Asian American Studies in the Wesleyan curriculum. Given that the 2006-2007 academic year marks the end of the Freeman Asian/Asian American Studies Initiative, the loss of Professor Isaac marks another shortfall of Asian American Studies at Wesleyan. Despite Asians and Asian Americans amounting to 15% of the class of 2010, only temporary, soft-money projects, such as the Freeman Initiative, have gone towards Asian American Studies at this institution. Ellen Widmer, who has taught courses in Korean American literature, is retiring at the end of this semester. Thus, Allan Punzalan Isaac is the only professor who consistently teaches courses in Asian American Studies. Establishing Professor Isaac as a permanent faculty at Wesleyan would be a progressive step for Wesleyan as an institution that lacks the support for Asian American Studies that many comparable schools in the Northeast possess.

As such, we demand that the Advisory Committee reconsider its decision to deny tenure to Professor Allan Punzalan Isaac at once.

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