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?'"