Washington, D.C. — In order to live up to the designation of being an Asian-American and Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institution, or an AANAPISI, a college or university must instill the idea into its campus ethos.
That was the heart of the message delivered Wednesday by DeAnza College President Brian Murphy at the third annual Asian & Pacific Islander American Scholarship Fund Higher Education Summit.
“The AANAPISI designation isn’t some sidelight. It isn’t the next cool thing that goes away after the grant goes away,” Murphy said during the summit, held at the Ronald Reagan Building & International Trade Center.
“It’s who we are,” Murphy said of his institution’s status as an AANAPISI. “We are also at the same time Hispanic serving, immigrant serving, poor serving. We have to call that out.”
“We can’t just have our public face be, ‘We’re the totally cool transfer place,’” Murphy said in reference to how despite the fact that his community college enjoys relatively high transfer rates, that overall success overshadows the challenges of various subgroups who matriculate to four-year colleges at lower-than-average rates.
In many ways, how the success of the aggregate conceals these challenges dominated the summit, where speakers lambasted what they described as the stubbornly persistent “model minority” myth that obfuscates the varied educational stories of diverse subgroups within the Asian-American and Pacific Islander, or AAPI, population.
The criticism of the model minority stereotype is by no means new, particularly at the Asian & Pacific Islander American Scholarship Fund’s higher education summit, where the point has been hammered home since the summit’s inaugural year.
