Flag Politics
Many VSAs do not use the official flag of Vietnam to designate their country of origin, and instead often use the flag of South Vietnam, what is now known as the Vietnamese Heritage and Freedom Flag, which is banned in Vietnam. Such VSAs have adopted this flag through formal resolutions or de facto usage.
- In 2004, some Vietnamese American students at the California State University, Fullerton threatened to walk out on their graduation ceremony to demand that the university use the former flag of South Vietnam as well as the current flag of Vietnam to represent its Vietnamese students. This resulted in the university scrapping all foreign flags for the ceremony.
- In 2006, Vietnamese-American students at the College of Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington requested that the university add this flag in addition to the communist flag as a part of its student diversity in the Hall of Flags, Nedderman Hall. After several weeks of protests from the Vietnamese-American community in the area, the president removed all the flags from display in its Hall of Flags.
With the rise of international students from Vietnam studying overseas, there has also been a conflict concerning the opposing flags. While there is no definitive study concerning flag usage of all Vietnamese student groups in the world, a few groups exist whose membership consists of Vietnamese international students, and who do use the official flag of Vietnam, such as the Vietnamese International Student Association of Adelaide. In the United States, they remain a minority among Vietnamese students, with approximately 8,800 international students out of 153,000 college-enrolled Vietnamese Americans as of the 2007 American Community Survey.
Read more about this topic: Vietnamese Student Association
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—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)