me vs. the critics at the national council for black studies

Fabio

Last week, a panel at the annual National Council for Black Studies discussed recent work on the history of that discipline. I was quite honored to have my own work included in that panel discussion. Jonathan Fenderson, an energetic and talented PhD student at the WEB DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies at U-Mass Amherst, led the discussion. The dialogue was very interesting. Jonathan gave me permission to summarize some of our exchanges.

First, Jonathan raised an excellent point about my treatment of black nationalism. In my book, I used the term in the way that Michael Dawson used it in his book on black public opinion and ideology, as that kind of thought that emphasizes black control over political and cultural institutions. Jonathan called me out on this point, arguing that my depiction of black nationalism was thin and underdeveloped. I’d agree here. It *is* a thin description. I presented a rather streamlined version of black nationalism so I could quickly move to a discussion of how nationalism – broadly defined – impacted campus politics. In many cases, the particular stream of nationalism was not so important, especially from the point of view I push in the book, which focuses on how institutional elites responded to the black student movement. I’d argue that the average academic dean wasn’t so concerned about the differences between cultural nationalists and political nationalists. Any type of nationalism was persona non grata, as far as they were concerned. A good question is whether the particular type of nationalism adopted by activists had a discernible impact on the institutional outcomes I look at in the book. It might be the case that the social organization of the black student movement was strongly shaped by the ideology, such as the split between the Panthers and the US Organization, and that may have impacted academic programs.

Second, Jonathan, and others, raised an important methodological point – why and how did I select the case studies of indvidual black studies programs (Chicago, UIC, Harvard). There were a few criteria. I selected programs that had left behind a substantial archival record so I could examine the administrative history to determine how these programs survived or failed. The intricacies of budget meetings, enrollments, and other bureaucratic matters aren’t really best retrieved through oral histories (though I did conduct those as well). Another criteria was that each case study had to be a plausible representative of a common trajectory for a black studies program. Chicago had a program that never quite got off the ground; UIC had a program that did well and then slowly declined; while Harvard’s program peetered out and then was completely reborn in the 1990s.

Third, one discussant said that my book did not define success for a black studies program. That’s also true. I tried to avoid the issue of success, which merits a discussion that’s independent of the political sociology that I wrote. It’s more of a policy question. But it is worth discussing how success might be defined and how often black studies programs achieved that standard. For example, one might define success in market terms, such as the number of students enrolled in the courses or in the major. Here, the evidence is mixed. Some programs have healthy enrollments, while others are limited to a few courses. It is not uncommon for Afro Am to be a popular intro course, but yield few majors. More research is needed. One could also examine academic impact, and, here, I’ve partially addressed this over at the Journal of Black Studies, in a study of publication patterns among professors teaching in the black studies PhD programs. But there is obviously much more that can be said.

As you can see, the discussion was engaged and thoughtful. My summary only hits a few of the highlights. It was also encouraging and I thank the discussants for their thoughtfulness and support of the project. Discussions like this one will raise more questions that can be answered in future research and advance both sociology and black studies.