Chronicle of Higher Education, DECEMBER 2, 2020
What Does African American Studies Need to Thrive?
UCLA’s department has been rocked by accusations of misconduct. Is the
university to blame?
By Emma Pettit
A couple of Robin D.G. Kelley’s colleagues are not speaking to him right
now — colleagues for whom he’s written book blurbs and recommendation
letters, colleagues he’s known for years.
Those relationships have been collateral damage in a crisis that has
rocked the African American-studies department at the University of
California at Los Angeles — and spurred a small faculty exodus.
The crisis began in March, when a group of master’s students anonymously
posted criticisms of the department and its chair, Marcus Anthony
Hunter, on social media. Students complained of, among other things,
inadequate funding and alleged a Title IX violation in the department.
They said Hunter had ignored their concerns and engaged in unethical,
unprofessional behavior.
Publicly, Hunter said nothing. Months later, through an attorney, he
called the statements by the students — who were now going by the
moniker “Concerned AfAm” — “libelous.” And he claimed that Kelley, a
professor of history and African American studies, along with a junior
professor in the department had either helped the students prepare their
allegations or endorsed them.
Delete and retract, the lawyer demanded, or “we will commence
appropriate legal action against all those responsible.”
Now, Kelley and at least three of his colleagues have taken steps to
leave the department. A couple others are considering it.
Academic culture is notorious for big fights over stakes large and
small. But the accusations and counter-accusations that have rocked this
well-respected department point to more than just clashing personalities
or ego run amok. They offer a cautionary tale of what can happen to a
department when a university neglects it for years.
In any department, people will make mistakes. But when a department is
starved of resources, those mistakes are much more difficult to mend.
As more African American students gained entry into predominantly white
colleges in the 1950s and 1960s, they clamored for those institutions to
admit more Black students and to support the study of Black history and
culture.
That energy percolated at UCLA. During “Negro History Week” in 1967, a
year before the first Black-studies department would be founded at San
Francisco State University, students demonstrated with signs that read
“Why one
week?”_the<https://dailybruin.com/1995/01/29/twenty-five-years-of-history>_/_Daily
Bruin
<https://dailybruin.com/1995/01/29/twenty-five-years-of-history>_/, the
student newspaper, reported. They wanted a center that would launch the
field at UCLA.
The university committed to it. The following year, students met with
administrators to establish the center’s protocols. But leadership at
the brand new center became a revolving door. Even as Black-studies
programs sprung up across the country — hundreds existed by the early
1970s — many white scholars at UCLA viewed the field with suspicion.
“Almost all of the UCLA faculty thought that Negroes had no history,” a
former interim director told the/Daily Bruin./
The center, later named the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American
Studies, eventually found steady leadership. Under Claudia
Mitchell-Kernan, who directed it from 1976 to 1989, the center produced
a wide range of research, publications, and special projects. Academics
who went on to have distinguished careers taught courses for the
program. The field grew in stature.
But as at many other institutions, African American studies remained an
interdepartmental program, meaning it was unable to tenure faculty
members and lacked access to many institutional resources.
Over the years, reviews of the program suggested or recommended that it
be made a department. Meanwhile, other ethnic-studies programs were
raised to that status at UCLA. So were African American-studies programs
at other institutions.
UCLA-AfAm_RobinKelley.jpg
MADELENE CRONJÉ, UCLA
Robin D.G. Kelley, a professor of history and African American studies
at UCLA.
By the 2010s, the wind had finally shifted. After meeting with
frustrated faculty members, Alessandro Duranti, dean of social sciences
at the time, got to work. At the time, finances were exceedingly tight.
Space was scarce, and there were no extra faculty lines to give away,
Duranti said, though he was able to make one available after someone
retired.
Kelley, who was tapped to steer the process, encouraged senior faculty
members across campus to move parts of their lines into the new
department, and moved 50 percent of his own line.
He also made the case for a department to the UCLA community. In 2014,
Black students made up just 3.8 percent of undergraduates,_he wrote in
an op-ed
<https://dailybruin.com/2014/02/05/submission-afro-american-studies-has-right-to-be-department>_.
A good number of those students were athletes, and UCLA paid millions in
coaches salaries. But “when it comes to teaching our students why
college-age Black men are overrepresented in our nation’s prisons,” for
example, “we are reluctant to spend the money.”
It also became clear to Kelley that before he got involved, slim
resources had been earmarked for the new department. It wouldn’t have
its own staff, he said.
So he used what power he had: “I went on the job market.” It wasn’t
entirely altruistic, he admits, but he got an offer, which he leveraged
to get three faculty lines, all of which would have a primary
appointment in the department. (Duranti declined to go into specifics
about the negotiation but said Kelley played a role in identifying at
least two scholars for target-of-opportunity hires.)
Granting a program departmental status is one thing. Treating it
like a department is another.
In the spring of 2014 — 47 years after students demonstrated on campus
in support of the field — the university_announced
<https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/faculty-senate-unanimously-votes-to-create-african-american-studies-department>_that
Black studies would be a full department.
But granting a program departmental status is one thing. Treating it
like a department is another.
The department’s early years brought both promise and frustration. The
faculty is “unmatched” in its scholarship production, an external
reviewer would later comment.
But even with its new status, the department had to rely on faculty with
split appointments. It did not offer a doctoral degree. And money was a
constant struggle.
Faculty members could feel overburdened as they performed “double work”
for both of their units, according to a recent department self-review,
which examined the past 10 years. And, according to the self-review,
instead of hiring tenure-track faculty, UCLA’s administration would
allocate temporary resources to hire lecturers. That money was never set
in stone, and it often wasn’t enough. Or if it was, the commitment came
too late to hire all the lecturers needed, the review says.
Students felt the pinch, especially master’s students. They complained
of a narrow range of courses, and a lack of teacher training, and of
advising. The assistant to the chair took on advising duties, along with
student-affairs and department management. That person, Eboni Shaw, is
clearly overworked and underpaid, one student commented on a
graduate-council survey. But students felt they had “no one else to go
to.” (Shaw did not respond to an interview request.)
Kelley, who began a stint as chair in 2016, remembers fighting for more
staff members and for a raise and promotion for Shaw, which ultimately
failed.
The budget was always tight. Kelley says he would sometimes pay the
honorarium for department-sponsored events out of his own research
funds. The department wanted to fund its master’s students, Kelley said,
but with no firm commitment from the graduate school, every year was a
scramble. Second-year students often felt “underfunded and financially
neglected,” according to the department’s self-review.
And many thought the physical site of the department in the basement of
Rolfe Hall was evidence of the university’s lack of investment. It was
too small to host events or department meetings. Just a few faculty
members and the chair had their office there, which could feel isolating.
When Marcus Hunter became chair in 2017, the bathroom near the
department wasn’t being regularly cleaned, he said, and dust and debris
from nearby construction filtered into the building. These space issues
could make people feel “deeply shameful,” he said. Something as simple
as getting a sign that said the department’s name was a struggle, he said.
Despite these challenges, the department did blossom in some areas.
After Hunter took over, the faculty FTE nearly doubled, including
through a few 100-percent hires. He also set up what he called a
wellness lounge, a space where Black students could just be themselves
and “not feel surveilled,” he said.
And many students had a good experience. Master’s students often gained
entry to top-rated Ph.D. programs. But faculty members in the department
thought that very success allowed the university to overlook the
program’s needs. The department was treated, said Hunter, like an
“unfunded mandate.”
UCLA-AfAm_Hunter1-1030x687.jpg
MARY BRASWELL, UCLA
Marcus Anthony Hunter, the former chair of the African American-studies
department at UCLA.
Scot Brown, an associate professor of African American studies and
history, admired Hunter for his initiative. He got students to actually
show up and participate in department events, Brown said.
Others were put off by how he operated. He would work “quite
independently” of other faculty members in the department, which
alienated some people, said Shana L. Redmond, a professor of musicology
and African American studies.
Dominic Taylor, a professor of theater and African American studies,
remembers one disagreement. Hunter wanted to explore recruiting famed
writer Roxane Gay to UCLA and had discussed this possibility with the
chair of another department on campus, Taylor recalled.
At a faculty meeting, some professors questioned why Hunter hadn’t
discussed it with them first. (In an email, Gay confirmed that she was
recruited and got relatively far in the process but said that after
negotiations started, “they ghosted me.” It was “the strangest
experience of my career,” she added.)
Taylor, the acting chair of the theater department, said he understood
that Hunter was trying to be enterprising. “UCLA is a gigantic ship,” he
said, and as department chair, “you’re trying to navigate your little buoy.”
For Redmond and for two other faculty members who spoke to/The
Chronicle/anonymously, for fear of being retaliated against, the
department’s culture under Hunter’s leadership quickly soured.
Discussion and debate were not encouraged, Redmond said, and requests
from certain faculty members for a curriculum review, particularly at
the graduate level, went unheeded.
The environment “became one of foreclosure and toxicity.”
The environment “became one of foreclosure and toxicity,” she said.
In January, those festering problems came to the surface. An external
review of the department cited low morale, which one reviewer observed
was “not simply the byproduct of failed relationships, but of
institutional neglect.”
Reviewers also heard of “situations” that contravened Title IX
guidelines, including verbal and sexual harassment, and incorrect
responses to reports of harassment. Graduate students complained of late
paychecks and delayed teaching-assistant assignments, saying Shaw told
them their Social Security numbers had been lost. And some — primarily
women, one reviewer observed — said they were discouraged from writing a
thesis, as if, another reviewer commented, the department thought they
were incapable of rigorous research.
The disappointed grad students, the first reviewer wrote, felt they had
been sold “a fake bill of goods.”
By early March, some students had reached a boiling point. An unknown
number of them wrote a letter under the signature “Graduate Students of
African American Studies at UCLA” to express their concerns regarding
the “condition, climate, and experiences” in the department.
It’s unclear what, exactly, prompted them to go public. The anonymous
group did not make anyone available for an interview and would not send
a statement to/The Chronicle/without advance access to the article.
Questions sent by/The Chronicle/went unanswered.
Some of their complaints echoed what external reviewers had heard,
including inconsistent funding and a lack of training.
Amid the program-wide critiques, the group also lobbed criticism at
Hunter and Shaw. Students had brought their concerns to them “to no
avail,” the letter said. The funding problems revealed Hunter and Shaw’s
“lack of financial integrity,” they said. They claimed “administrators”
had “forced” grade changes. And they said “administrators” in the
department had been informed of “a Title IX concern” and done “nothing.”
They demanded a full faculty meeting and an “assessment” of Hunter and
Shaw by the faculty and by “relevant campus administrators.”
The March 3 letter was posted on social media the same day. It
detonated. People scrambled to react to the fallout.
The dean of social sciences, Darnell Hunt, told the department that
several university offices, including his, would be investigating the
allegations and scheduled a “town hall” between faculty members and
students. Some master’s students reached out to Hunt, telling him they
didn’t agree with the letter and felt their voices had been co-opted.
UCLA-AfAm_Darnell Hunt UCLA.jpg
UCLA
Darnell Hunt, the dean of social sciences at UCLA.
Department faculty grappled with how to respond. Some saw the letter as
an affront to be countered. They thought it unfairly blamed Hunter and
Shaw for problems outside their control and that some of the claims were
salacious.
Those faculty members were also worried about the department’s
reputation. Nobody wanted the outside world to think that a group of
African American faculty members couldn’t run their own unit, said Uri
McMillan, an associate professor of African American studies and
English. Black-studies departments have_been historically stereotyped
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/black-studies-swaggering-into-the-future/>_as
sites of dysfunction, antagonism, and financial mismanagement.
Others, including Redmond, felt frustration on behalf of the students,
and sympathy for them. She said she’d heard some of their concerns
before, at a December workshop organized by junior faculty, which only
three senior faculty members attended.
Kelley thought the faculty was obligated to listen to the students’
allegations, even if they didn’t agree with all of them, and even if
some were framed as personal attacks. Giving them the benefit of the
doubt “doesn’t mean that they’re right,” he said. “It means that they’re
students.”
One junior faculty member, SA Smythe, whose pronouns are they/them,
decided to voice their general support of the students and share some of
their own negative experiences. In a five-page letter, obtained by/The
Chronicle/, Smythe told their colleagues that they had been telling
staff and senior faculty members about those student concerns since the
fall term began. “That is how I know that we did not need to get to this
point,” they wrote.
Smythe, who was hired in 2018 and began their appointment in 2019, also
detailed their own problems with department management: a missing
paycheck, an accommodations request that went mostly ignored, an
outsized expectation on junior faculty to advise graduate students with
little to no guidance.
And, Smythe said, they had been routinely “antagonized, misgendered, and
isolated” since joining the faculty, despite their attempts to talk to
staff members and Hunter about their concerns. Smythe said that Hunter
told them, “We cannot change what people think.” (Hunter in an email
to/The Chronicle/called Smythe’s characterization “false and
misleading,” saying he promptly took several steps to address their
concerns, including by inviting a UCLA discrimination-prevention officer
to give a training at a faculty meeting.)
However, Smythe wrote, the issues the department now faced were bigger
than two people. They implored senior faculty members to reflect on what
went wrong in order to “restore faith in our ability to right this ship.”
What was needed, Smythe wrote, was “a reckoning, a clearing of the air.”
No such reckoning came.
Instead, faculty members aligned behind competing drafts of public
statements. One associate professor circulated a letter that defended
Hunter and Shaw. But a few were too concerned about Smythe’s experiences
to sign onto that draft. They and others also thought it was too harsh
toward, and too dismissive of, the students — who had since surfaced a
second letter focused more on calling for program changes, like
appointing a full-time graduate-student adviser.
Kelley and some other faculty members signed onto a different letter
that they thought was more evenhanded, that acknowledged the students’
concerns and still defended Hunter and Shaw’s right to be protected from
reputational harm. But some thought that version didn’t defend Hunter
and Shaw enough.
Twenty-two faculty members signed a version of the initial draft, which
wasposted on Twitter
<https://twitter.com/public_archive/status/1237951051010936833>and
instructed UCLA to not treat the “damning and condemnatory allegations”
as facts.
Eleven others did not.
The department held the “town hall,” which Concerned AfAm declined to
attend, saying its members feared retaliation. At some point, the
department’s executive committee assembled. The three members examined
the latter student letter and made some immediate recommendations for
improving the graduate-student experience, including pairing each
master’s student with a faculty adviser.
By late March, the coronavirus pandemic was in full swing, upending all
university operations. Weeks later, at least a few faculty members began
to worry that the department was not coordinating its response to the
student complaints.
In early May, Kelley wrote a letter to Hunter and the dean, which he
also sent to the faculty and the Concerned AfAm email address. First
citing his own failures as chair years ago, he implored the department
to collectively respond to the students’ demands. “Most of their
requests are not complicated,” he wrote. And he urged that students and
faculty members be protected from retaliation for criticizing the
department. A climate of fear was already brewing.
“If we cannot move forward on these demands,” he wrote, then “I doubt we
will survive very long as a department.”
Concerned AfAm on Twitter thanked Kelley for his support.
Hunter never responded.
Six weeks later, Kelley received a letter from Hunter’s lawyer.
Where others saw a group of students voicing their concerns, Marcus
Hunter saw a conspiracy against him.
In an interview with/The Chronicle/, in emails he provided, and in
letters his attorney would send, Hunter claimed that the March letters
were a coordinated campaign, led by what he called a rogue group of
students, encouraged by what he saw as a rogue group of professors
who’ve had problems with his leadership for years.
And, Hunter believes, rather than defend him against such a campaign,
the university left him in a lurch.
The current silence by UCLA, in all its muteness, actually speaks
very loudly.
Hunter felt he was being both blamed for problems that were not in his
job description and being branded with a “scarlet letter,” especially
because he was accused of ignoring conduct that violated Title IX — a
claim he denied to/The Chronicle/. An employee in the Title IX office
later told Hunter that no complaints had been filed against him before
the March letters, according to emails that Hunter provided to/The
Chronicle/.
On March 6, Hunter wrote to the chancellor, provost, and vice
chancellor, saying he was disappointed by the university’s lack of
response or defense of him as an employee. “The current silence by UCLA,
in all its muteness, actually speaks very loudly,” he said.
He demanded an investigation of the allegations against him. His
reputation was at stake, he told them. If UCLA did not “promptly address
this issue,” he said, he’d seek a lawyer.
On March 12, the provost, Emily A. Carter, responded. She commiserated
with Hunter, saying she, too, was “very concerned about your and Ms.
Eboni Shaw’s reputation.” UCLA’s practice, Carter continued, has been to
not engage with the claims on social media. “So please do not take our
standard approach as somehow singling you or the department out,” she wrote.
Days went by. Then, on March 26, Hunter got an email from Hunt, the
dean, asking if, given the added responsibilities the pandemic had
thrust upon department chairs, he planned on continuing in his role.
Hunter took that as a threat. He forwarded the email to the provost,
saying he was “bewildered, anxious, stressed, and worried, with an
increasing concern about the overall lack of support, action, and
process due to me given the current climate.”
UCLA-AfAm_Emily+Carter.jpg
DAVID KELLY CROW, UCLA
Emily A. Carter, the provost at UCLA.
In response, Carter said the dean had tried to get in touch with Hunter
for the past two weeks and had not been successful. “As you must know,
being department chair requires that you be responsive to your dean,”
she said. “No threat was intended by his letter, rather we just need to
get on with business.” Hunter replied that he’d been unable to speak
with the dean because of previously scheduled dental surgery.
Hunter wanted a meeting. He wanted a public rebuke of the allegations.
At that point, he got an attorney, Daniel J. Kolodziej. “I had no other
recourse,” Hunter said. Kolodziej went on the offensive, sending letters
to administrators at Duke University, where a professor had served as an
external reviewer in the department’s recent review; to a host of UCLA
administrators; to assumed members of Concerned AfAm; and even to Kelley
and Smythe.
Of UCLA, the letter demanded, among other things, that anyone who had
prepared or spread false and defamatory information about Hunter be
disciplined, that the university refute the allegations in the student
letters, and that it specifically investigate faculty members who were
involved.
Kolodziej demanded that the faculty and students immediately delete the
defamatory material from their social-media accounts and publish a
retraction to avoid legal action.
In June, Concerned AfAm shared screenshots of Kolodziej’s letter on
Twitter alongside an interview that Hunter once gave to NPR. Hunter told
the outlet in 2019 that social media was one of the best places for
people without power to go to start a conversation. It “democratizes
your access to power,” he said at the time.
UCLA-AfAm_Shana Redmond.jpg
UCLA
Shana L. Redmond, a professor of musicology and African American studies
at UCLA.
Now, Concerned AfAm was doing just that, the group wrote in a tweet, and
was being threatened. “THIS is what retaliation and harassment looks
like,” it wrote in another.
Hunter’s decision was an act of psychological violence, one of the
anonymous faculty members told/The Chronicle/. Redmond, too, was angry.
That last quarter, Hunter “completely disappeared,” she said. No emails,
no faculty meetings. So it was “pathetic and unfortunate” that legal
threats would be the last word of his administration, she said.
Smythe, the assistant professor, declined to comment for this story, but
provided a letter to Kolodziej from their attorney, denying that the
Concerned AfAm letters had been written by Smythe.
They also reached out to Hunt for support, according to emails obtained
by/The Chronicle/, writing that Hunter’s legal threats were a further
escalation of the hostile work environment they had experienced. The
dean responded that “the whole matter” was “very unfortunate” and said
he “sincerely hope[d]” for a resolution.
But did he intend to help? Smythe asked. The dean suggested that they
ask the university legal counsel for advice. As far as he knew, the
university is not party to the legal dispute, he said, and “as dean, I
have no official response to it.”
When Kelley got the lawyer’s letter, he was stunned. He’d written a
letter of recommendation in Hunter’s Guggenheim Fellowship application,
blurbed one of Hunter’s books, and made the written case for various
promotions. In a long response to Kolodziej, Kelley rejected the claims
one by one. He had nothing to do with the student letters or sharing
them. He doesn’t even have a Twitter account. Nor was he involved in
“hatching some kind of plot” against Hunter.
What’s more, Kelley said, it’s a professor’s obligation to respond to
student concerns. Supporting students is not evidence of scheming
against Hunter. In the scholarly world, anyone with authority will be
criticized. But “criticism,” he wrote, “is not defamation.”
Kelley sent his response to not just Kolodziej but to everyone in the
department.
On the thread, Gaye Theresa Johnson, an associate professor of Chicana
and Chicano studies and African American studies, appealed to her fellow
faculty members. Now was the time for unity.
“Some of you have really been needed for a long time. The students
needed us, the junior faculty needed us, and [Hunter] needed us too,”
she wrote. But Kelley’s letter was a chance to reconcile, Johnson wrote.
Or at the “very, very least” not harm one another.
“Because all this among us — at any time but especially now — is a tragedy.”
A faculty member responded to Johnson’s plea with one request: “Please
remove me from this email thread.”
When puzzling over what went wrong, Kelley says he doesn’t think Hunter
is to blame. Rather, a larger question is at play: What does a
Black-studies department at a premier research institution need to truly
thrive?
It’s clear, at least to some professors, that they weren’t getting it.
The department was long starved of adequate space, staff, faculty
positions, and funding. It was a “second-class citizen” on its own
campus, one external reviewer remarked.
The dominoes fell from there.
Hunt doesn’t see it that way. The “issues in question,” he said in an
email, stemmed from “the growing pains of a young department, animated
by passionate faculty members” who were “endeavoring to get on the same
page with respect to the unit’s future direction.”
Department defenders think that there’s a risk of blowing the situation
out of proportion. Cheryl L. Keyes, the new chair who took over this
summer after Hunter’s term was up, says it’s had “challenges” but not
the type of turmoil that would permanently destabilize it. Scot Brown,
an associate professor who is now the department’s vice chair, warned
against the “pathologization of Black studies.” If all departments were
put under the same microscope, he said, “you wouldn’t have enough pages
in/The Chronicle/.”
And some of the department’s issues seem to have been sewn up. Back in
March, when the student letters first emerged, various university
offices began investigating the allegations. The registrar’s office did
not find any evidence of improper grade changes for the course in
question, Hunt said. In regard to insufficient financial support for
incoming graduate students, “three cases” required attention, including
one that involved a “significant amount of funding due to a
misunderstanding about a promised teaching-assistant position,” Hunt
said. All three have been resolved.
Hunt said he could not say if the Title IX investigation was still
underway. But so far, he has not been notified by that office, or by the
Discrimination Prevention Office, of any violations that required his
attention, he said.
And he has “complete confidence” in Keyes to lead the department and
thoroughly address “all of the issues raised.”
He called attention to the university’s June announcement of a slew of
resources to support Black students and scholars, including a commitment
over the next five years to recruit 10 faculty members whose scholarly
work “addresses issues of Black experience.” Those faculty lines will
reside in the Bunche Center with appointments in other departments. And
Carter, the provost, said in an emailed statement that UCLA also began
to update a “space utilization study” to improve the department’s
physical home.
It’s the sort of investment for which Black scholars have long been
advocating. It will eventually make the department, according to Hunt,
one of the most highly resourced among its peers.
But those promises may have come too late. Black faculty members at the
university feel “borderline despair at the lack of support,
compensation, resources, and recognition,” said Safiya U. Noble, an
associate professor of information studies and African American studies,
in an email. Their work commands those things outside of UCLA, she said,
but not within it.
Some faculty members are leaving the department. At least four —
Johnson, Smythe, Kelley, and McMillan — have now either moved or taken
steps to move out. Redmond said she’s considering it, as is one of the
faculty members who asked to remain anonymous.
A June announcement of more resources may have come too late.
Leaving wasn’t an easy decision, said McMillan. But “the toxicity in the
department had just become too much.”
Even if Kelley doesn’t blame Hunter, he says the former chair’s decision
to threaten legal action against students and Smythe is partly what
prompted him to step away. All students have the right to complain, even
if it’s not the right tone or venue, Kelley said. You don’t punish them
for it.
Johnson, who was vice chair and had stepped in to steer the department,
went so far as to resign from that position two weeks before it was up.
(She did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
In an email obtained by/The Chronicle/, Johnson told Hunt that given the
path Hunter had taken, she could not “in good conscience be vice chair
any longer.”
“Things had gone far enough long ago,” she continued. “But to hear that
students and junior faculty are suffering in this way, people over whom
a full professor and chair has so much power, is much more than a final
straw.”
“I am frankly embarrassed,” she continued, “that I hung in this long.”
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