Professor’s Case Underlines Chicano Studies’ Struggle for Recognition : Education: Successful age bias suit by Rodolfo Acuna against UC leaves scholars, activists debating future of such programs.

The recent legal victory by Cal State Northridge professor Rodolfo Acuna in his age discrimination lawsuit against the University of California not only vindicated a prominent figure in Chicano studies but underscored a provocative debate about the evolving field and its future course.

Technically, the federal lawsuit’s central question was whether Acuna, a well-known historian and political activist, was rejected by UC Santa Barbara because of his age: Acuna was 59 when he sought a tenured faculty position in the UC system’s only full-fledged Chicano studies department.

But scholars and Latino leaders widely agree that the case was as much about Chicano studies as it was about ageism, with the field’s continuing struggle for academic recognition often overshadowing Acuna’s quest for a prestigious post.

The trial “brought up the issue of what constitutes Chicano studies and what do we want it to be,” said Mauricio Mazon, a Chicano history professor at USC.

It also raised complicated questions including how to balance political activism with conventional scholarship; whether the University of California’s predominantly white administration has stymied the growth of a discipline that is especially important to the region’s growing Latino community, and whether the academic debate over Acuna’s scholarship became politically charged and blown out of proportion.

What makes the case all the more sensitive is Acuna, who has an aggressive style that many admire but others find too combative.

Acuna took on the UC system with the same crusading fervor that marked his role as one of the founding professors of Chicano studies about 30 years ago.

His most important book--an overview of Mexican American relations and Chicano immigration called “Occupied America”--was the first of its kind to be written by a Chicano when it was published in 1972 and remains a widely used textbook.

So when UC cast doubt on the quality of Acuna’s research, Acuna fought back, attempting to show that the system’s disparaging observations about his work were really symbols of its contempt for his field of study.

“This was truly the monkey Scopes trial of Chicano studies,” Acuna’s chief lawyer, Moises Vazquez, said in reference to the landmark 1925 prosecution of a Tennessee public school teacher for introducing Darwin’s theory of evolution to his class.

Filed in 1991 and decided in Acuna’s favor Oct. 30, the case was born of dissent among the very UC Santa Barbara colleagues Acuna had hoped to mentor. And it came to illuminate a broader debate among Chicano scholars nationwide.

Half the voting faculty of UC Santa Barbara’s tiny Chicano studies department did not support Acuna’s appointment when he applied in the fall of 1990. Their reasons ranged from simply not wanting another historian in the small department to being unimpressed with Acuna’s interviews and presentation.

“Of the five people in the department now, only one [remains who] voted for him,” said Denise Segura, a UC Santa Barbara sociologist and former member of its Chicano studies department. “If professor Acuna really cares about Chicano studies, does he care what they think?”

Segura abstained from the departmental vote on whether to hire Acuna, was a witness for UC during the trial, and said in an interview that she has been harassed by Acuna supporters for her public dissent--a charge Acuna adamantly denies.

“It’s like Chicano McCarthyism,” Segura said.

Legal motions arguing whether Acuna, now 63, should join the staff at UC Santa Barbara are under review by U.S. District Judge Audry B. Collins, who is expected to rule on the issue next month. Collins had dismissed Acuna’s earlier charges of racial, ethnic and political discrimination, leaving only the issue of age bias to be decided by a jury.

Both sides had agreed before the trial began in mid-October that Acuna would receive $326,800 in lost pay for the UC post if he won. UC says that agreement included a waiver of his right to the actual job, and that to demand the job at this point is reneging on that agreement.

But Acuna, who interprets the pretrial agreement differently, says he is entitled to the job, and he looks forward to starting the nation’s first doctoral program in Chicano studies at Santa Barbara.

His court victory, he said, obligates him to press for the post. “If I took the money and ran, there would be an awful lot of people who would rightfully consider me to have sold out.”

The scenic Santa Barbara campus holds a special place within the small but growing field of Chicano studies because it is the only one of UC’s nine universities--and among a handful in the country--with a Chicano studies department, an outgrowth of student and community protests in the 1960s.

The relatively young field has perhaps a few hundred scholars worldwide, scattered in a diaspora of history, psychology, sociology and literature. By refusing to create and fund distinct Chicano studies departments, advocates say, the University of California is stunting its growth and leaving the discipline particularly vulnerable to budget cuts.

Although the case stirred controversy, it also cemented Acuna’s standing as a popular instructor who has inspired hundreds of students, Latino and non-Latino alike. Dozens filled the courtroom each day of the trial.

Testifying during his trial, he spoke with obvious pride of how he helped build the Cal State Northridge department into the largest of its kind in the nation, with 22 faculty members and 3,500 students taking courses each semester, including 100 majors.

A formidable political activist with community ties in the San Fernando Valley and East Los Angeles, and among area labor unions, Acuna says scholars shouldn’t be “confined to the libraries,” but have a moral mandate to “get out there and become model citizens for our kids.”

“At UC Santa Barbara,” he added, “I want to send a message, I want to work with local labor and community groups, go to children at elementary schools and tell them, ‘ Si se puede, ‘ it can be done.”

But his evaluators at UC Santa Barbara concluded that his activism was more a weakness than a strength.

The campus’s Committee on Academic Personnel, or CAP, found him to be “an admirable fighter for what he perceives as right and justice for the Chicano community. . . . But we do not judge his fiery brand of advocacy appropriate for a professorship in the University of California.”

The reviewers also found that, “Acuna, at age 59, has never trained doctoral students,” and that “younger scholars would think him obsolete”--observations that became key pieces of evidence in his charge that age had been a factor in his rejection.

One particularly galling statement in the reviewers’ report, Acuna’s supporters said, was that Acuna “lacks the kind of reflective, theoretically sophisticated mind that every department needs in its older members to serve as model.”

“This is especially true,” the report continued, “in a field as yet so inchoate and lacking in firm intellectual identity as Chicano studies.”

A white job applicant working in a more mainstream field would never have drawn such “outrageous” and patronizing comments, Vazquez and others said.

Still others say that Acuna’s rejection reflected nothing more than the active debate over whether Chicano studies should be rooted in political activism or a cooler scholarship that avoids openly taking sides.

Since the publication of “Occupied America,” new generations of scholars have begun looking beyond the economic and social injustices suffered by Mexican immigrants and their descendants to such topics as sexism and homophobia in the Chicano political movement, as well as Chicano gangs, crime and health.

“Acuna’s critical focus has been the labor exploitation of Mexican workers. Clearly, that experience has been a central part of Chicano experience but we are more than just that,” said Tomas Almaguer, an associate professor of sociology and American culture at the University of Michigan.

Some even consider the term Chicano obsolete as more of the nation’s Latino emigres are no longer Mexican but Central and South American, with different experiences crying out for scholarly scrutiny.

“The field of Chicano studies is passe,” said one Chicano scholar who asked not to be identified. “The Chicanos are assimilated Mexican Americans and the field is out of touch with reality.”

Whatever the outcome of Collins’ decision on whether Acuna should be appointed to UC Santa Barbara, on one point Acuna’s UC reviewers seemed prophetic:

“To turn down this nomination,” they wrote, “will have wide political repercussions in the Chicano community.”