Robin Wilson: Are Black Studies Programs Obsolete?

Robin Wilson, in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (4-18-05):

... 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....

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."

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....