Falling Back Asleep

Monday's paper was one where I woke up, looked at it, and wanted to go back to bed.

My sudden pang of not-wanting-to-be-awake-anymoreness stemmed from a well-reported article by Alex on New York's first city-wide Asian American student conference.

Spec has had problems covering Asian American studies at Columbia for a number of reasons. First off, as has been reported before, Spec's staff is disproportionately white. While as reporters, it's not a good excuse to not know what's going on in any community of campus, the fact remains that we as a paper know less about stories that don't affect us personally so we have fewer of them in our paper. I'm always going to know more about conferences centering around the urban studies program--like the exhibit on Robert Moses put on by Hillary Ballon, whose classes I have taken twice--then one centering about Asian American studies. And while we have taken some steps to mitigate this particular issue, appointing Alex Klingenstein to cover Asian American cultural groups on campus, it is just a first step in many that are necessary in bridging an institutional divide.

The second problem we have, and this will sound ridiculous, is a grammatical one. At Columbia, we have a major called Asian American studies. This is a relatively new, evolving, and dynamic discipline that, as part of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, has been at the center of the controversy surrounding what students describe as that program's underfunding and general inadequacies. That said, according to copy style, there should be no such thing as Asian American studies, but, rather, it should be a compound-adjective, or "Asian-American studies." This is a term that those in the program find deeply offensive and in the past when we have made that mistake, we have found ourselves running corrections and letters to the editor. We made that mistake in Alex's article.

But the big mistake was in the headline, which referred to "Asian Studies"--not "Asian American" (or, for that matter, even "Asian-American") studies. Asian studies is the study of a region that, while it exists, was not discussed at the conference and is not a part of the curriculum at Columbia. It's a mistake that I knew and that I should have caught well in advance of the story's going to print, and I spent a good amount of time apologizing to members of the group over the last two days, ensuring that a correction ran, and generally feeling stupid.

For those who don't know, reporters don't write their own headlines. Instead, headlines are written by editors who are on for the night. I'm certain that if the headline had been written by Alex K, the same mistake wouldn't have been made and we could have saved ourselves a correction.