Marlon Hom, the chair of the AAS department believes that the granting of a major is a great leap forward in the discipline: "In terms of Asian American studies, we've been around for 30 years. It was time that we looked at ourselves in the form of existence that we were treated like any other academic discipline. Having a degree puts us in a legitimate position [and says] that we're not something that plays along the peripheral around academia."
He went on to give credit to SFSU by saying, "We at San Francisco State were fortunate because our faculty was active, and we involved ourselves in the campus. We became a part of the campus process ... we were in a better position to read what was going on [within the campus] and to play with the 'big boys.'"
In 1999, SFSU became the second university--after the University of California at Los Angeles--to offer a graduate degree in AAS.
