Lessons in Inclusion
Dr. Wallace Loh didn’t quite fit in as a Chinese youth growing up in Peru, and he’s been committed to access and equity ever since
By Lydia Lum
Dr. Wallace Loh still remembers the sting of hearing his high school teachers in Peru call him “el chino” — Spanish for “Chinese boy.”
Why didn’t they simply use his name? After all, they did so with his
classmates. And, they typically didn’t single out students of other foreign nationalities, such as calling the German student “el alemán.”
“I had lived in Lima since age 2,” Loh recalls. “I spoke Spanish with no accent. But I keenly felt that I didn’t fit in.”
As an educator, Loh has shared that story with many students, especially at the University of Washington, where he was dean of law from 1990-1995. In that time, minority enrollment in UW’s law school doubled, reaching more than 40 percent. The boom in minority enrollment was at least partly because race was used as an admissions factor for the program.
