FYI...and we at Miami U. are triving..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