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Robin D.G. Kelley: Says he's leaving Columbia because he was shunned

Robin D.G. Kelley, the well-known African-American studies scholar, is not getting a raise or any other perks when he leaves Columbia University for the University of Southern California this summer. So why is he bailing out on the Ivy League?

Mr. Kelley says Columbia's history department shunned him — forcing him to take an appointment in anthropology when he joined the faculty in 2003.

"I'm sort of tired of being at an institution where my own department doesn't accept me," says Mr. Kelley, who has worked with Columbia's Institute for Research in African-American Studies and its Center for Jazz Studies. A prolific writer, he is conducting research for a book on Thelonious Monk.

Mr. Kelley, who led the history department at New York University before moving to Columbia, says he thought he could handle working outside his discipline, but "I felt disconnected."

Alice Kessler-Harris, the chairwoman of Columbia's history department, said at first the department did not offer Mr. Kelley a position because it already had a historian who did similar work. Later, historians offered to extend Mr. Kelley a courtesy appointment, she said, but he never took the department up on the offer.

At Southern Cal, Mr. Kelley will be both a history professor and a scholar in the university's program in American Studies and Ethnicity. "USC's ethnic studies program is one of the largest and most vibrant in the country," he says.

But there is a back story — a woman, to be precise. "You can say, He's going for love," says Mr. Kelley, who will not identify his new partner by name, but says she is a "high-profile celebrity" in theater, television, and film.

Mr. Kelley and Diedra Harris-Kelley, who have a daughter, are divorcing, and Mr. Kelley says he'll move to Los Angeles "as soon as possible."

Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Education