Subject: Dismantling Africana Studies at Rutgers
Dr. Ziva Galili
Executive Dean
School of Arts and Sciences
Dear Ziva,
After agonizing deliberation, I am tendering my resignation as chair of
Africana Studies as a way of protesting the dismantling of our
department.
As I believe the Rutgers faculty, the Rutgers student body, and the
people of New Jersey want a vibrant and robust Africana Studies
discipline, I am making my resignation public so that the dismemberment
cannot occur under the cloak of darkness.
I am troubled by SAS's contention that setting up a tiny department for
African, Middle Eastern and South Asian languages is so imperative that
it legitimates the hasty razing of Africana Studies. The issue before us
is not whether there is intellectual merit for the proposed department;
there is intellectual merit for many kinds of academic reconfigurations.
The question is whether the benefits of having such a new department
make it worth decimating an older department that is central to the
university's undergraduate mission. Since the benefits are not
apparent, I have very reluctantly been forced to wonder whether SAS's
plan is yet another attempt to dismantle our discipline. There is a mass
of potent circumstantial evidence to support a gloomy conclusion.
You are aware of the important background:
* When the Africana Studies department was formed in 1969, it
comprised
three Africa-related curricula - 013 African Languages and Literature,
014 Africana Studies, 016 African Studies. This is the model of Africana
Studies departments at many other first-class universities, including
the one at Harvard. Moving away from this proven configuration
constitutes a serious dismantling of the discipline.
* In the 1980s, shrouded by a very active and successful program
of
diversifying the student body and faculty, FAS initiated the dismantling
of Africana Studies. During that decade, scores of new lines were handed
out and curricula decisions were made that took much of our subject
matter and distributed it throughout other FAS departments. Although
those were days of financial plenty, FAS deans ignored the department's
requests for resources on the grounds that the available funds were only
for departments that were underutilizing people of color. They were not
persuaded by our argument that, like other units, Africana Studies
wanted to expand intellectually, 'racially' and in terms of gender.
Since then, our curricula proposals have often been rejected with the
explanation that other departments are now teaching this material, or,
as under your administration, simply ignored.
* Though the posture of your more immediate predecessors has been
a kind
of 'benign neglect', one of them was so openly hostile to our discipline
that he prevented the promotion of one our faculty by falsifying the
record that was sent to the PRC. (There is a paper trail and a number of
reputable faculty to confirm this. I hope doubters will request the
documentation.)
* In the late 1990s, FAS created the Center for African Studies by
removing the 016/African Studies curriculum from our department. Due to
the fact that this was a faculty-led initiative with which we agreed
(perhaps naively), Africana Studies supported that change. Nonetheless,
the Center for African Studies could have been incorporated into the
Africana Studies department and removing African Studies from our
portfolio constituted a further chipping away at our disciplinary
subject matter.
The substantive evidence of your administration's attempt to wipe out
Africana Studies is:
* Your immediate predecessor asked Africana Studies to develop a
departmental master plan. She signed off on a plan that gave prominence
to African Languages and Literature - an area in which we had been
investing heavily. Given the normal continuity between SAS deans on
matters of this kind, your administration's proposal to take away that
curriculum is an act of unjustified dismemberment.
* You are well aware that African Languages and Literature is
Africana
Studies' most promising growth area. We live in a world in which there
is burgeoning interest in Arabs and Islam and in alternative sources to
Middle East oil. Two-thirds of the world's Arabs are Africans; Islam is
the largest religion in Africa; and, most of our planet's new sources of
oil are in Africa. Our intention, as you well know, is to capitalize on
the current political climate to pursue Title VI and other major grants
that would further develop the African Languages and Literature
curriculum. To strip the department of its most promising area for
expansion at this uniquely propitious moment must also be understood as
an act of dismemberment.
* African Languages and Literature has been a distinguishing
feature of
Rutgers Africana Studies since 1969. The intellectual and curricula link
between language, culture and other aspects of the black experience has
been increasingly recognized and programs around the country, if they
have not already done so, are modifying themselves accordingly. (It was
only in 2003, for example, that the Harvard department inaugurated its
African languages curriculum.) Taking African Languages and Literature
out of Africana Studies would plunge our department into the ranks of
the ordinary after we have always been ahead of the pack in this
respect.
* The SAS deans have surreptitiously called several of our tenured
faculty
members to one side and attempted to lure them away from the department
by misdirecting their attention to the 'conceptual merit' of the SAS
plan .
Whether or not there is conceptual merit to the idea of a new
department, deliberately fomenting rifts within a faculty is promoting
dismemberment.
* Your 'plan' only targets Africana Studies. Only Africana Studies
will be
required to surrender a long-standing, growing curriculum. Only Africana
Studies is being asked to relinquish 40% of its full time faculty,
including its last three hires. If there is a compelling need to have
all the languages of Africa, the Middle East and South Asia together, as
you have argued, why does your plan leave the teaching of Hebrew in the
Department of Jewish Studies? Does this fact not obliterate your claim
to having only intellectual and pedagogical motivations?
* As you know, word gets around in academia. Knowing that
successive
Rutgers administrations have been slowly taking apart Africana Studies,
how are we going to be able to attract outstanding Africana scholars in
the future? Creating these difficult hiring conditions strongly suggests
that SAS does not want an outstanding Africana department.
* Finally, Africana Studies has always wanted to promote the
interests of
SAS and the university. Indeed, in response to your proposal, we have
offered lengthy verbal and written explications of how Africana Studies
would be destroyed by your plan and have suggested several alternative
approaches through which SAS could pursue its purported objectives
without destroying us. The decision to press ahead without modifications
says a great deal about SAS's intent.
The other evidence of SAS's dismantling objectives rests on the
implausibility of your professed desire to create a new department and
on the faulty procedures that have been followed. I disagree with the
judgment that the benefits of a department of African, Middle Eastern
and South Asian Languages outweigh the harm of disassembling Africana
Studies.
But, should this not be a faculty decision? And, even if it is an
administrative decision, the procedure for forming a new department at
our university bears little resemblance to the activities SAS has been
undertaking.
* Your administration quietly invited several SAS units to covet
resources
that have been vested for many decades in Africana Studies. It has also
conspired with these other units to develop a strategy to strip Africana
Studies of those resources. Hence, the 'plan' you are pursuing.
* According to your presentation to our faculty, these covert
activities
had been underway for more than six months before the chair of Africana
Studies was summoned. Moreover, he was called at the conclusion of the
process to be informed that African Languages and Literatures was being
taken from his department. Instead of involving Africana Studies from
the very beginning, we were the last to know about the 'plan.' Was this
a strategy to deprive the department of even a modicum of agency in
matters that threaten its existence?
* Even as you seek endorsement of the 'plan', there is no
well-articulated
basis for it. There is not a single document stating mission, structure,
student demand, funding, intellectual rationale, etc. As it stands now,
the 'plan' to be implemented just involves taking resources from
Africana Studies.
* Full and complete disclosure is essential to everyone's informed
evaluation of the SAS proposal. Africana Studies requested copies of
minutes of meetings, memos, emails and other correspondence pertaining
to SAS's "deliberations." We have been told there are no records of the
meetings with the faculty you say are 'supportive.' Having been
separately summoned to 77 Hamilton Street, these three or four faculty
members have only spoken with the deans individually. They have never
met with each other, so, in the absence of a written record, there is no
way of knowing what they agreed to and whether they agreed on the same
things. In fact, my follow-up conversations indicate that creating a new
department was not a faculty idea at all. It has been an administrative
concoction that has other objectives and SAS has been overstating the
nature and extent of faculty support for it.
* There are emails and other correspondence at SAS having to do
with the
'plan' but Africana Studies has been denied access to them. Despite the
fact that the parties have been acting in their official capacities,
have been discussing university matters, during business hours, you have
curiously dubbed the relevant correspondence "private". Moreover, SAS
has not acceded to our requests to seek permission from the
participating parties to share the correspondence with us.
* Obfuscation is everywhere. Since you will be leaving office soon
and
since these matters are of critical concern to our future, I asked to
tape record the last meeting I had with the deans. That request was
denied on the grounds that a written record would be sufficient. Upon
receiving the draft minutes from SAS, I made some additions. Though
agreeing that my revisions accurately reflected what had transpired in
the meeting, SAS nevertheless said it did not want to include some of my
additions in the permanent record and the vice dean gave me instructions
not to circulate the corrected minutes. Consequently there is no record
of that important meeting.
* Then there is the timing. One must be suspicious of SAS's
keenness to
rush through such major changes as creating new departments and
dismantling others, given the lame-duck status of the senior
administrators. If SAS's plan is a good idea, it will be a good idea in
six months, next year and the year after, when a permanent dean is in
place and when other actions can prevent the sacrificing of Africana
Studies. If it is a good one, the 'plan' does not have to be implemented
by July 1, 2008 as you insist.
* For me, your explications constitute a terrifying example of
what
psychiatrists call "relabeling" aggression. ("This isn't violence, it is
education"; "It doesn't hurt you as much as you say"; "I'm doing it for
your own good"; "I do it because you deserve it"; "I do it because I
love you"; "You make me do it.") The relabeling of the attack on our
department came together most succinctly in the vice dean's memo to the
tenured Africana Studies faculty in which he argued that the SAS plan
was actually a plan for "strengthening" the department.
Many inside and outside the university will resist the implications of
this evidence, as I have in fact done. This is because well-meaning
people do not want reality to conflict with their deeply-held values and
predispositions. A common response in this situation is to deny the
reality. Sadly, Rutgers has some recent experience that emphasizes the
fact that disquieting realities can be just as they seem to be.
It was almost exactly thirteen years ago - November, 1994 - that Francis
Lawrence uttered the infamous assertion that African American students
do not have the "genetic hereditary background" to do as well as
European American students on SAT exams. Even the president's supporters
acknowledged that this claim raised questions about the legitimacy of
African American participation at all levels of the university.
To calm the storm that erupted, Dr. Lawrence played the contrition card.
He explained it was a "slip of the tongue." He said he was amazed that
anyone could believe that the misstatement reflected his true beliefs.
"I don't know how it happened. It is not how I live my life."
Well meaning people (including most of the faculty) gave Lawrence the
benefit of the doubt. We eagerly yielded to portrayals of him as a
'champion of minorities'. We did not want to acknowledge the painful
reality encoded in his remark. We rationalized that the issue was one of
"fairness."
But what happened? Without the rest of the university even being aware
of it, through defunding or discontinuance, the Lawrence administration
systematically dismantled every policy, unit, initiative and program to
help promote a diverse Rutgers. This included the admissions procedure
that found ways of admitting more students of color without quotas or
differential standards. It included the Affirmative Action Office,
Common Purposes, the Board of Governors' Minority Advisory Committee,
the Minority Faculty Development Program, the annual affirmative action
reports to the faculty, and affirmative action lines for
"underutilizing"
departments, not to mention the Multicultural Program the Board of
Governors said he had to institute as a condition of being let off the
hook. As a consequence of the Lawrence administration, there has been a
precipitous decrease in African American, Latino and women faculty and
Rutgers has lost its enviable position among AAU universities when it
comes to "diversity."
The point is that we know from our own tragic experience that sometimes
reality can be exactly the way it seems to be. Senior Rutgers officers
can act to undermine the university's progressive initiatives. You will
appreciate, therefore, that it was not at all reassuring to hear that
the SAS plan had the support of Vice President Furmanski and President
McCormick.
Your proposed actions seem like attempts to dismantle Africana Studies.
Uneasily, I must assume your plan is exactly what it seems to be and
resigning is the only way I can protest against it.
In closing, let me once again reiterate Africana Studies' commitment to
sharing African Languages and Literatures with other units in the
university. Many of them have already benefited from our foresight. We
have allowed substantial cross-listing, shared faculty and promoted
joint programming. The centers for African Studies and Middle East
Studies, in particular, would have had a much more difficult time
establishing themselves were it not for the languages Africana Studies
institutionalized into the curriculum decades ago. Additionally, as it
has been a critical part of their preparation for Africa-based research,
our ability to train graduate students in a variety of African languages
has been a boon to graduate programs in many departments. We are a
reasonable and responsible faculty. We will continue to seek additional,
innovative ways to be of service to SAS. I do not think, however, that
it would be in the university's interest for me to stand idly by while
Africana Studies is taken apart.
As these matters are of broad concern, I am going to ask the New
Brunswick Faculty Council to thoroughly investigate the SAS plan and to
prepare a full report for the faculty.
Respectfully,
Walton R. Johnson
Professor
