A New Collection Available at CUNY Digital History Archive

March 31, 2020

The Fight for Asian American Studies at Hunter College Collection documents the history and activism surrounding the Asian American Studies Program (AASP). The program was established in response to years of student and faculty demand dating back to 1970 when Dr. Betty Lee Sung taught the first Asian American studies courses at City College. For years, students, faculty, staff, and community members agitated for classes and programs and sought to raise the visibility of Asian American Studies at CUNY and in NY. Finally in 1993 Hunter established an Asian American Studies program and named Peter Kwong its inaugural director. As items from the collection show, many of the AASP’s early projects and programming were dedicated to amplifying Asian American artists and writers, women’s and feminist issues, and issues of labor and migration.

The CUNY Digital History Archive presents online access to hundreds of primary documents in over twenty collections related to the history of CUNY. These collections explore a wide range of topics, from the convening of CCNY’s Rapp-Coudert Committee in the 1940s, which resulted in the firing of over fifty faculty members, to the activities of Occupy CUNY as they confronted rising tuition costs, education debt, and police violence in the 2010s.