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The new president of the California Alumni Association has broken a barrier many believe should have been left standing. When Irene Miura '60 takes office July 1 for a two-year term, she will be the first CAA president to hold a Ph.D. from Stanford University. CAA President Irene Miura '60 took office July 1. "I'd better be careful here," she says in talking about the steps that led her to Palo Alto instead of Berkeley (where she was also accepted) for doctoral work in her specialty, child development. "The main reason I chose Stanford over Berkeley," she finally says, "is that Palo Alto has better parking." Chair of the program in child development at San Jose State, where she has also served as chair of the academic senate and been named Outstanding Professor, Irene Miura is only the second woman--and the first Asian--to head the CAA in its 125-year history. Miura is a third-generation Japanese-American. In 1905, her great- grandparents left Japan and went to Hawaii, where a vacationing Caucasian family from the Midwest convinced them to go to Burlington, Iowa. Irene's father was born there, and he was named Iowa Takei. "Japanese people always thought it was incorrectly written, that his name must be 'Iwao,'" Miura says. Two years later, the Takeis moved to Santa Cruz, where Irene was born in 1939. Six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Takei family was sent to an internment camp in Poston, Arizona. Irene went to pre- school and kindergarten in the camp. She was taught Japanese there and spoke only Japanese when her family was released in September 1945. "But of course my parents spoke English, so my mother worked with flash cards to teach me English when we returned to Santa Cruz." At Santa Cruz High School, Miura was the only Japanese girl in the school. She was, she says, a serious youngster and was elected secretary of the student body. Her only choice for college was Cal, which her father loved after attending for two years before the stock market crash in the late 1920s, and where her uncle graduated in 1937. Cal was a different place in the 1950s, when Asians made up only about 3 percent of the student body and were barred from fraternities and sororities. But Miura loved her time on campus. "The intellectual environment here was really stimulating," she recalls. She was head pompon girl and accompanied the football team to the Rose Bowl and the basketball team to two consecutive Final Four appearances, including the national title in 1959. Irene Takei was a pre-med major before she met Neal Miura '60. Given the mores of the time, she planned to get married and have a family. "But my father said, 'You've got to get your meal ticket.'" So she switched her major to child development, with a music minor, and picked up a teaching credential as an insurance policy. After graduation and marriage, Irene and Neal Miura moved to San Mateo, where they still live. Three children were born in quick succession: David, who earned two degrees at Stanford and then an MBA at Berkeley; Greg, who received his B.A. in molecular biology from Cal in 1985; and Jennifer, who graduated from Berkeley in sociology in 1986. Irene was a housewife for 12 years and then began teaching at the private school her children attended, Saint Matthews Episcopal Day School. She taught seventh-grade science and music for six years and was then switched to second grade, where she became fascinated in the gender differences in math she noticed among 7-year-old students. She decided to pursue graduate work and college teaching in child development. After earning a master's degree at the College of Notre Dame, she headed toward the easy parking at Stanford. "In the early 1980s, there were four of us in school at the same time," Miura says. "My son David and I were at Stanford, and Greg and Jennifer were at Berkeley. We were all at Memorial Stadium in 1982 for the Play. Neal and I were in the Cal alumni section, Greg and Jennifer were in the Cal student section, and poor David was in the Stanford rooting section. At Thanksgiving Dinner that year, David and his friends said, 'All right, we're going to let you heap abuse on us for only 15 minutes, and then we don't want to hear any more because we was robbed!'" Miura joined the child development program at San Jose State in 1984 while finishing her dissertation on individual differences in computer interest and use. Under her direction, the program has grown from 250 majors to more than 500 and has been honored for making outstanding contributions to the field. Miura remains interested in gender differences and in the effects of technology and science on people. Her most recent work has focused on how cognitive and language differences help shape the differing performances between Asians and non-Asians in math and science. "Asian" is not a term she likes. "I have a real bias against the lumping of Asians together," she says. "I think you have to look at the immigration status of different peoples from Asia. The reasons that Chinese or Japanese or Koreans or Vietnamese came here, and the experiences each group has had in this country, make each of them very different groups. The Japanese were singled out in America and sent to camps during World War II. The Vietnamese were not immigrants to this country; they came as refugees. "As a teacher, you might look out over your class and say, 'Oh, there are two ten-year-old boys in my class, and they're both Asian.' But one could be a seventh-generation Chinese American, whose distant ancestors came here to work on the railroads; the other could be a recent immigrant from Hong Kong. And their experiences will be very, very different, despite the fact that they are 'two ten-year-old Asian boys.'" Nor does Miura see a different focus for the California Alumni Association during her presidency, despite the fact that she is its first "Asian" president and that the "Asian" population at Cal has grown to nearly 40 percent of the undergraduate body. "We certainly need to diversify our membership to match the changing composition of graduating classes. But I think the common theme has to remain love of the University. That's why my parents gave Neal and me life memberships in the CAA; and that's why I bought life memberships for my three children. I think you join this Association because you love the University and you want to be tied to all the other people who also love Cal." Irene Miura sees three primary challenges for the Alumni Association during her two-year term. The first is the CAA's $10- million campaign to raise money for student scholarships, the "We Grow Leaders" campaign. The second is the recent purchase of a new site near camps Blue and Gold at the Association's Lair of the Golden Bear family camp in the Sierra. "For the first time," Miura says, "we've got a large enterprise that we get to shape, 'we' being the whole, diverse CAA family. There are some people who would like to see the new camp be just like the two traditional ones; there are others who are saying, 'This is a time for us to be more creative and perhaps bring in people who are not traditional Lair campers.' A third challenge Miura sees is the eventual expansion of Alumni House, the CAA's home since 1954, when both the staff and the number of alumni programs and services were much smaller. "We simply need more space," she says, "and I'd like to see that happen." Comparing the Berkeley campus of the '50s with the 1990s, Miura says: "In my day on campus, assimilation was the model. You wanted to be like the mainstream. There were barriers to that when I was an undergraduate, but the more like the mainstream you were, the more you felt you had an identity. "That has changed in recent generations of Cal students. You see a proliferation of ethnic clubs and special interest clubs among alumni. Before, you were in an Asian club because that's where you felt most comfortable; now, you join such a club because you want to. I think the California Alumni Association, as we approach the 21st century, has to be a place where everyone feels comfortable." |
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