Thanks to all who attended the GSCA's end of the year celebration this past
Saturday!  Everyone I have spoken to about it had a great time.  I think
Dr. Evans, who we all appreciate and love, was very happy to have us and
had a wonderful time as well.  Therefore, our event was a true
success.  Again, thanks for attending.  The following discussion is
FYI.  Peace.

Kamautu

Forward ever, backwards never ... by any means necessary.


>X-Mailer: Novell GroupWise Internet Agent 6.5.2
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>Date:         Mon, 18 Apr 2005 10:12:31 -0400
>Reply-To: RODNEY COATES <[log in to unmask]>
>Sender: Association of Black Faculty and Staff <[log in to unmask]>
>From: RODNEY COATES <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: After 35 years on campuses, black-studies programs struggle to
>survive
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>FYI...and we at Miami U. are thriving..going against the national
>trend..rodney c
>
>The Chronicle of Higher Education The Faculty
>
>http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i33/33a00901.htm
>
> From the issue dated April 22, 2005
>Past Their Prime?
>
>After 35 years on campuses, black-studies programs struggle to survive
>
>By ROBIN WILSON
>
>Minneapolis
>
>The "on air" sign lights up in the recording studio here at the
>University of Minnesota, and Quintin Brown begins to read from a script
>in a strong voice, carefully articulating every word. Two professors
>listen closely, offering pointers from the studio's cramped control room
>as Mr. Brown -- an African-American high-school student -- narrates a
>multimedia presentation aimed at attracting undergraduates to the
>university's black-studies department.
>
>By the fifth line of the presentation, Mr. Brown gets to the crucial
>question: What exactly can you do with a major in African-American
>studies? He lists several real-life examples of students who majored in
>black studies and went on to hold jobs in government, academe, the arts,
>and other fields.
>
>But black students on this campus do not seem very interested in the
>message. Most of the dozen or so students gathered in the Black Student
>Union at lunchtime one recent day have eschewed black studies for more
>practical subjects like architecture, chemical engineering, law, and
>marketing.
>
>Alton Robinson, a freshman who stops by the Black Student Union to watch
>TV and hang out between classes, feels an affinity for black studies.
>"Since I'm African-American, I should want to study it," he says. But
>major in it?
>
>"I don't think society would take that seriously," he says. "They
>wouldn't be impressed."
>
>Minnesota's black-studies program, founded in 1969, is one of the oldest
>in the country. But it is facing an identity crisis, and it is not
>alone. Black-studies programs at many public universities are having
>trouble attracting students and are suffering from budget cuts that have
>whittled down their faculty ranks. Meanwhile, classes with
>African-American perspectives are cropping up in departments like
>history, women's studies, and English, diluting the need, some say, for
>separate black-studies departments.
>
>"It's a struggle for survival," says Edmond J. Keller, a professor of
>political science at the University of California at Los Angeles who
>teaches African-American studies.
>
>To stay alive, black-studies departments at many public universities are
>scrambling to reinvent themselves. They are changing their names to
>"Africana" and "African diaspora" studies and broadening their courses
>from a focus on black Americans to black people in Africa, Europe, and
>the Caribbean. A few departments, like Minnesota's, are trying to sell
>themselves to students by explaining just what they can do with a
>black-studies major.
>
>"We face some daunting challenges," says Keletso E. Atkins, chairwoman
>of the department of African-American and African studies at Minnesota.
>"But we're trying to turn this thing around."
>
>Some black professors outside the discipline, however, question whether
>it is worth the effort, and whether black-studies programs have simply
>grown obsolete. Established in part as a symbolic gesture of academe's
>commitment to diversity, the programs may have run their course, as
>multiculturalism and diversity have become concerns throughout higher
>education. "These programs may have been a victim of their own success,"
>says Carol M. Swain, a professor of political science and law at
>Vanderbilt University. "Other departments now see the need to teach
>these courses, and we need to assess whether the need today for
>black-studies programs just isn't as great."
>
>Shelby Steele, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover
>Institution, takes an even more critical view. To his mind, universities
>never had a legitimate reason for establishing black-studies programs.
>
>"It was a bogus concept from the beginning because it was an idea
>grounded in politics, not in a particular methodology," he says. "These
>programs are dying of their own inertia because they've had 30 or 40
>years to show us a serious academic program, and they've failed."
>
>Elites Thrive
>
>Black-studies programs were established on campuses in the wake of
>Martin Luther King's assassination in April 1968. King's death touched
>off protests among the growing number of black students at predominantly
>white institutions. The students accused their universities of ignoring
>black culture and history, and pressed the institutions to establish
>black-studies departments, to create scholarships for black students,
>and to step up efforts to recruit them.
>
>Taking their lead from the civil-rights and black-power movements, some
>of the student protesters staged sit-ins and strikes. At San Francisco
>State University, protesters shut down the campus for four months. While
>police arrested hundreds of people during the incident, the university
>did accede to students' demands and created a black-studies department
>in 1969.
>
>That kind of student activism no longer exists. "The clock has been
>turned back," says Valerie Grim, interim chairwoman of black studies at
>Indiana University at Bloomington. "The students we have today don't
>even know who Martin Luther King is."
>
>The number of students seeking degrees in African-American studies
>nationwide is minute. In the 2001-2 academic year, according to the U.S.
>Department of Education, just 668 undergraduates earned bachelor's
>degrees in the field, representing only 0.05 percent of all degrees
>conferred. That doesn't mean black-studies programs are short on
>students. In fact, on many campuses the courses are quite popular among
>students who are majoring in other subjects but want to have a black
>perspective on history or literature, for example. Within the financial
>politics of most universities, however, it is still the number of majors
>in a field that matters.
>
>Clearly, not all black-studies programs are in trouble. Those at elite
>private universities -- like Cornell, Duke, Harvard and Princeton
>Universities -- are thriving. They are attracting students and hiring
>new professors because they have plenty of resources and are home to
>star professors like K. Anthony Appiah and Cornel West.
>
>"Fortunately, I don't live in that kind of environment," Henry Louis
>Gates Jr., chairman of the department at Harvard, says of the problems
>plaguing black-studies programs at public institutions. But while
>Harvard's department may be healthy -- it has lost some high-profile
>professors lately but is planning to hire several new ones this year --
>Mr. Gates says it is important that black-studies programs flourish
>elsewhere.
>
>"The field can't take root if there are only a half-dozen sophisticated
>departments and they're at historically white, elite, private schools,"
>he says.
>
>Black-studies departments at some public institutions, including the
>University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Illinois at
>Urbana-Champaign -- are holding their own. And while programs at many
>other public universities may be struggling, few have actually been shut
>down. About 450 colleges and universities offer either an undergraduate
>or graduate program -- or both. That number hasn't changed much in a
>decade, says Abdul Alkalimat, who directs the Africana-studies program
>at the University of Toledo and keeps track of figures nationwide.
>
>Still, some programs are barely limping along because administrators
>have cut support but are reluctant to eliminate them for fear of being
>accused of bias. "Some are surviving only in name, for political
>reasons," says Mr. Keller, of UCLA.
>
>While many programs are contracting, graduates of the nation's
>half-dozen Ph.D. programs in African-American studies are still finding
>faculty jobs -- in part because many of those scholars are marketable
>not only within African-American studies but also in English, history,
>political science, and psychology.
>
>In better times, Minnesota talked about expanding its course offerings
>for graduate students by starting a master's degree in African-American
>studies. But right now all of the focus is on shoring up its
>undergraduate program. Only 19 students are majoring in African-American
>studies at Minnesota this year, making it less popular than all but one
>of the 29 other majors in the College of Liberal Arts -- statistics.
>
>In all, 1,282 of the undergraduates at Minnesota's Twin Cities campus
>are black, or 4.5 percent of the student population. When Ms. Atkins
>took over as chairwoman of the department of African-American and
>African studies nearly four years ago, she says, administrators here
>warned her "we were in serious trouble and had to do something" to
>increase the number of students majoring in the discipline. While she
>doesn't believe the university "is going to cut off our head,"
>administrators have made it clear that "if we don't get our numbers up
>they won't renew our faculty lines, and they will let us die a slow,
>natural death."
>
>That's a painful prospect for John S. Wright, who has been here since
>the beginning. As a graduate student he helped lead a handful of black
>students who staged a sit-in at the Morrill Hall administration building
>in 1969, demanding that the university create a black-studies program.
>Now, Mr. Wright is an associate professor of African-American and
>African studies here.
>
>"The university is forced to place increasing emphasis on the numbers
>game -- the number of majors and the number of students enrolled," he
>says. "We are a bottom-line enterprise now."
>
>Since the mid-1980s, Mr. Wright has watched the number of full-time
>professors in African-American studies slip from a high of 10 to just 6
>today. The department has stopped offering Swahili because Ben Pike, the
>professor who taught the language for about 25 years, is retiring.
>Minnesota is working on a plan to bring Swahili back, but for now the
>department points students who want to learn African languages to
>programs at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
>
>At the same time, African-American studies has seen other academic
>departments at Minnesota encroach on its territory. "Everybody is
>poaching," says Ms. Atkins. "Women's studies is teaching
>African-American women's literature. History taught a survey of African
>history. Where does that leave us?"
>
>Steven J. Rosenstone, dean of the college, says the spread of courses
>with an African-American perspective is just natural. "To have scholars
>in American studies, in women's studies, who are concerned about race is
>a very good thing," he says. But that doesn't mean, he adds, that the
>black-studies program at Minnesota is endangered. "We don't use
>spreadsheets to make decisions about academic investments."
>
>But that is not the message that professors in black studies here seem
>to be getting. As far as Ms. Atkins is concerned, the department's life
>is on the line. A 5-foot-tall, straight-talking dynamo with a ready
>laugh, she is the department's most energetic cheerleader and is not
>afraid to throw stones.
>
>While other departments here may offer a course or two on black issues,
>Ms. Atkins says, those classes lack the in-depth approach that black
>studies provides.
>
>"It is fashionable to read a number of novels by black writers, but do
>the professors know the entire context -- the history of black people
>and of the authors?" she asks. "We have folks in our department who have
>all of their expertise in these fields." Ms. Atkins and her colleagues
>even have a name for courses with an African-American perspective that
>are offered outside her department: "African-American and African
>studies lite."
>
>The black-studies department here uses an interdisciplinary approach.
>Students who major in the subject take classes in literature, social
>sciences, economics, political science, and history, for example. They
>also commonly take courses on research methods. Like other liberal-arts
>degrees, the program does not train students for a specific career. But
>it develops "self-knowledge," says Ms. Atkins, and hones students'
>critical-thinking skills.
>
>This year Ms. Atkins is trying to get that message out with an
>unprecedented campaign to tell black students about careers they could
>pursue with a major in African-American studies. "They don't see the
>relevance until it's shown to them," she says.
>
>Last November her department started tacking up big posters across the
>campus featuring 13 prominent black Americans who earned degrees in
>African-American studies. Among them: Mae C. Jemison, the first black
>female astronaut to go into space, who majored in chemical engineering
>and African-American studies at Stanford University; and Aaron McGruder,
>who pens the cartoon strip The Boondocks and earned a bachelor's degree
>in African-American studies from the University of Maryland at College
>Park. The poster lists 65 other careers -- from "ambassador" to "zoo
>administrator" -- that people have pursued after earning a black-studies
>degree.
>
>The department is also busy assembling a brochure that offers "150
>Answers" to the question: "What can you do with a major in
>African-American and African studies?" It lists short biographies of 150
>people who majored in black studies. Some of them gave Minnesota
>personal testimonies, including Claudia Thomas, the country's first
>black female orthopedic surgeon, who in the late 1960s changed her major
>at Vassar College from mathematics to black studies. For her senior
>thesis, Ms. Thomas -- who knew she wanted to be a doctor -- studied
>sickle-cell anemia in African-Americans in the Poughkeepsie, N.Y., area.
>
>Clearly, the famous people Minnesota features in its brochure and poster
>could have become scientists, lawyers, and journalists without an
>undergraduate major in black studies.
>
>But Ms. Atkins contends their black-studies background not only gave
>them "a knowledge of who they are and where they came from," but also
>provided "an understanding of the most important issue that confronts
>all of us in this society, and that is the problem of the color line."
>Race, she says, is a crucial issue if you are a lawyer who may have
>black clients, a doctor whose patients are members of minority groups,
>or a journalist in an urban area.
>
>By the end of this academic year, Ms. Atkins hopes to send the brochures
>and the multimedia CD's to Midwestern high-school students who have
>indicated an interest in attending the university. She wants to appeal
>not only to black Americans but also to the huge influx of African
>students who have migrated to the Twin Cities.
>
>"The African population here has grown since 1990 by 620 percent," she
>says. "It is the fastest-growing immigrant population in the state."
>That, says Ms. Atkins, presents a "golden opportunity" for the
>department. She has already tried to capitalize on it by hiring young
>women from Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Somalia to run the department's
>office. One of the women -- Hibaq Warsame, an undergraduate who works as
>the department's part-time secretary -- brought 220 Somali high-school
>students from the Twin Cities to the campus in February. "A lot of
>African Somalis don't know the black experience here," she says. "They
>didn't know about African-American studies."
>
>A Tense Relationship
>
>Ms. Atkins's own scholarly specialty is South African labor history and
>the historical connections between South Africa and black Americans. She
>has painted the cinder-block walls in her office here a bright aqua blue
>and decorated the space with African treasures, including dolls from
>South Africa and a West African beaded medicine belt.
>
>It isn't clear that her department's efforts to meld African immigrants
>with black American students will work. The relationship between the
>groups is sometimes tense, a dynamic that plays out within the Black
>Student Union.
>
>"The African immigrants are the new group in town, and everyone is
>embracing them at the expense of black students," says Wynfred N.
>Russell, a graduate student at Minnesota, expressing the feelings he
>says some African-Americans have. Whenever African-Americans take over
>leadership of the Black Student Union, he says, African students are
>less active -- and vice versa.
>
>Even as the African-American-studies department here has taken some
>steps forward, it has suffered setbacks. Last year the department hired
>Mr. Russell, who is from Liberia, to help recruit students. But after
>eight months, the university pulled the plug on his position. Now the
>university says it will pay half of Mr. Russell's salary if the
>department pays the other half. But, asks Ms. Atkins, "where are we
>going to get the money?"
>
>Gerald L. Early, a professor of English and African-American studies at
>Washington University in St. Louis, says a shakeout may be coming within
>the field of black studies that will leave only the programs at elite
>institutions standing. Undergraduates at those institutions, he says,
>can afford to major in a field like black studies, one that may be
>intellectually stimulating but does not necessarily lead to a specific
>job. Such students, says Mr. Early, "want to go into public policy and
>be part of the intellectual elite." But students at places like
>Minnesota come from middle- and lower-income families and "want skills
>that are going to be immediately useful for them in the job market," he
>says. That may eventually be the kiss of death for black studies there.
>
>Nonetheless, black professors at Minnesota who are not part of the
>African-American-studies department say it is still important despite
>the small number of students who chose the subject as their major. "I
>think African-American studies communicates an institution's commitment
>to people of African descent," says Guy-Uriel E. Charles, an associate
>professor of law at Minnesota. "It represents the institution's
>intention to take these issues of race seriously."
>
>The Shrinking Faculty
>
>Struggles like those faced by Minnesota's department are playing out at
>other public universities. At the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa,
>money has dried up for the African-American Research Institute, which
>awarded $25,000 each year in grants to faculty members studying the
>American South.
>
>The African-American-studies program at the University of Georgia, which
>at one time had 14 faculty members, is now down to just 8. "The issue is
>the dominance of the Republican cycle in the country, and how it effects
>money and student support," says R. Baxter Miller, director of Georgia's
>program.
>
>Even some of the country's more robust programs have seen their faculty
>ranks thin. Temple University has one of the largest departments of
>African-American studies in the country, with 75 undergraduate majors
>and 65 students who have it as part of a double major. It was home to
>the country's first doctoral program in black studies and since 1988 has
>granted 125 doctoral degrees. While the department once had 14 tenured
>or tenure-track professors, it now has just 7. It has hired part-timers
>and professors on one-year contracts to fill in.
>
>Indiana University's department, which has had as many as 100
>undergraduates with the subject as their major, now has only about half
>that many. But the department is forging ahead, introducing new courses
>that compare the experiences of black people all over the world. The
>department is also drafting a proposal to begin a Ph.D. program. So far,
>only six other American universities have one.
>
>"When you are in a program that deals with the history and culture of a
>particular group," says Ms. Grim, the interim chairwoman, "you are
>constantly having to reorientate with the sense of trying to be more
>inclusive and expand your intellectual base." Three years ago, the
>department changed its name from Afro-American studies to
>African-American and African-diaspora studies.
>
>At Minnesota, Jerold W. Wells, Jr., a sophomore who serves on the board
>of the Black Student Union, is bucking the trend and majoring in
>African-American studies. When he first came to Minnesota, he planned to
>pursue a law degree. "That was a brainchild of my parents," he says.
>After taking a class or two in black studies, he decided "I wanted to do
>what I want to do." Now he plans to be a journalist.
>
>Still, he has had to pacify his parents, who have urged him to declare a
>double major that he might fall back on. And he has found himself
>presented with the same question that the department here is trying to
>answer.
>
>"When I told my mom I was majoring in African-American studies, her
>first question was: 'OK, what are you going to do with that?'"
>http://chronicle.com
>Section: The Faculty
>Volume 51, Issue 33, Page A9