Our Secretariat, currently based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, recently informed your officers that our association has reached a membership roster that now exceeds 1,000.  I am extremely pleased to share that news with you.  Just two years ago, we had a membership count of less than 760, but because of the hardworking and proactive efforts of our officers, secretariat staff and volunteers, conference organizers, and the Johns Hopkins University Press administration, our community is now, more than ever, expansive and robust in terms of our reach and character.  On behalf of your officers, I would like to thank you for the remarkable energy you invest in the sustenance of our collective and I encourage you to stay connected and engaged in the activities of our association.

The growth of our collective coincides ironically with and despite the significant downturns of local and global economies. These conditions are now considerably affecting the larger and deeper contexts of our academic lives, ranging from tuition hikes that will definitely reduce access to schools for many of us and our allies, to programmatic budget cuts that will erode at the ways we nurture our field.  Many of us are already struggling with salary deductions, and for those of us who hold unsecure positions, a bleak future looms.

It is not surprising that our association, organized around and through intersecting race-based struggles, is profoundly entangled in this challenging set of events.  We are, after all, fundamentally a set of communities of color whose historical formation as well as contemporary labors simultaneously constitute and resist our society’s political, economic, and social arrangements.  In this spirit, therefore, and in this moment of our collective’s growth and struggle, I would like to enlist your help in expressing our solidarity with and support of those who are taking action against policies that will threaten access to and retention within public higher education, particularly those who are on the campuses of the University of California system.  Their fortunes and struggles are intimately tied to us, and I think it is this moment that they need our community’s increasing strength to address the forces that threaten our schools’ commitments to access and social justice.

In solidarity,

Rick Bonus

President

Association for Asian American Studies