BLACK STUDIES AT NORTHWESTERN BY JAMAL WATSON

NU plans black studies PhD
A push to raise school's diversity

By Jamal Watson
Tribune staff reporter
Published July 25, 2004

For years Northwestern University, with one of the oldest black studies programs in the nation, watched newer programs at Harvard, Princeton and the University of Chicago grab attention and vie for celebrity professors.

But now, even as some scholars question the long-term value of African-American studies, Northwestern is making a high-stakes bid to become a national leader in the field.

Over the last three years, the university has appointed seven new full- or part-time faculty members in African American Studies.

Last fall Northwestern scored a major victory in wooing Darlene Clark Hine--arguably the country's most prominent black woman historian--from Michigan State University.

Now college officials want Hine, 56, to do something that will position them as a leader in the field: create a PhD program by 2006 in African American Studies. It would be one of only six such doctoral tracks in the nation.

Northwestern's entry into this academic arms race is part of a larger effort to promote diversity on the Evanston campus, officials say. A nationally prominent program in African American Studies, they hope, will help in recruiting minority students as well as making the university more appealing to minority scholars in all fields.

"Race and ethnicity are important issues that we want our students and faculty to talk about, and our African American Studies Department is leading this discussion on campus," said Daniel Linzer, dean of the university's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

When Hine arrives at Northwestern this summer, she will be one of 10 professors to hold the highest faculty rank, Board of Trustees professor. With that title comes a six-figure salary and the flexibility to pursue her interests.

This status places Hine in the same circle as scholars such as Princeton's Cornel West and Harvard's William Julius Wilson and Henry Louis Gates Jr. Gates receives a yearly salary of about $170,000 and controls a multimillion-dollar budget.

"There's no question that we are trying to hire the best scholars and gain a competitive edge over our sister institutions," said Lawrence Dumas, provost of Northwestern, who has played a critical role in recruiting minority stars.

Northwestern's black-studies department was founded in 1968, in the ferment that followed Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.

That May, about 110 black students stormed a campus building and refused to leave until their demands--including creation of a black-studies department--were met.

Initially the department was popular on campus, with noted author Leon Forrest serving as chairman for many years. But by early 2000, the program was languishing, with only a handful of majors and three full-time faculty members.

Two years later, Northwestern lured Dwight A. McBride, a rising star in the field, from the University of Illinois at Chicago to lead the department. McBride, who is well-known for his work on African-American literature and black gay and lesbian studies, began rebuilding the department.

One of his first steps was to recruit Hine.

"Others have tried to get her in the past," he said. "But we succeeded, in part because she buys into our mission and vision for African American Studies."

Hine, who spent the last 17 years at Michigan State, has written more than a dozen books and was instrumental in creating a PhD program in African American and African Studies there.

"I think that universities that want to create graduate programs and attract top-flight students have to go after scholars that have proven themselves to be publishing figures and leaders within their field," said Hine. "There are not quite as many people doing this work out there as we like to think there are."

The competition for celebrity academics is nothing new.

A few years ago, Harvard lured political scientist Michael Dawson from the University of Chicago, and the University of Pennsylvania snatched up cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson from DePaul.

The University of Chicago replaced Dawson with Cathy Cohen, a political scientist who was at Yale, and Princeton warmly welcomed philosopher West back to campus after he bolted a few years earlier to join Harvard.

In addition to their academic cachet, many of these scholars are also celebrities outside academe.

Dyson has written a book on slain rapper Tupac Shakur and Marvin Gaye, and West has recorded a hip-hop album. Gates writes regularly for The New Yorker and produces documentaries for PBS.

But as their appeal and salaries have grown, the celebrity-swapping game has become the exclusive province of major private universities with big endowments.

"Certainly we do not have the resources that Harvard, Northwestern and Princeton and some of the other big names have," said Curtis Stokes, director of African American and African Studies at Michigan State. "It's difficult to lose someone like Darlene. Obviously, we wished she stayed, but we know that this is a great opportunity for Darlene and Northwestern."

Northwestern officials say that a strong African American Studies Department will likely bring more African-American students to campus. African-Americans make up about 12 percent of the student body.

With plans to create a doctoral program, Northwestern is positioning itself to compete for students against top-tier institutions like Princeton, which has big-name faculty members like Toni Morrison, K. Anthony Appiah and West but no African-American studies graduate program.

There are no graduate-level degree programs in the interdisciplinary subject in the Chicago area.

About 250 schools award 6,000 degrees each year in black studies, according to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. In 2000, nearly 55 percent of those bachelor's degrees went to white students.

Other academic institutions are closely watching the growth of Northwestern's black-studies department with interest.

"What they're doing is long overdue," said Nathaniel Norment Jr., chairman of Temple University's African American Studies Department, which was the first in the nation to offer a PhD program in 1988. "Having a program at Northwestern and in the Chicago area makes sense. The more programs we have, the better and more competitive this will be for the discipline."

Northwestern officials say African-American studies, although a relatively young discipline, will likely have staying power in the ivory tower.

The university has increased its pool of undergraduate majors and minors to 56 students, including many who are white, which faculty members say is an indication that there is broad interest in the field.

Despite the popularity of African-American studies in some quarters, critics argue that such departments tend to be too liberal and activist-oriented.

Some say that in the spirit of political correctness, college officials blindly hire well-known black intellectuals and support such programs out of a sense of white guilt.

"Black studies is still, after all of these years, a very confused discipline. It's a more political than intellectual discipline," said Shelby Steele, a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute.

He said that Northwestern's plan to create a PhD program and build its department is a step in the wrong direction, adding that funds should instead be spent on traditional academic departments.

"It's almost like giving students a second-class degree," said Steele, who has a doctorate in English literature. "I feel sorry for any student who gets this degree, because people will look down on it."

But McBride scoffs at the criticism, saying that black studies has transformed higher education for the better, and Northwestern's program has the potential to "forge a new ground regionally and to add to the field nationally."

"These kind of comments are simply naive, ill-informed and unfortunate," McBride said. Black-studies programs have "created a paradigm shift in the way we produce knowledge. We are part of a generation of scholars that will help mature the discipline, and I have no doubt that it is in extraordinary hands."


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