Word: af
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...While members of Afro, the student association of Harvard blacks, waited in the lobby of the Loeb Drama Center, the Faculty hotly debated whether the concentration in Afro-American Studies should be a full department or an interdisciplinary committee. Although the Faculty voted at that tense meeting to make Af-Am a department, that debate continues today. Over the past ten years, the University and the department have clashed over budgeting and tenuring professors, but this year rumors of possible demotion to a committee added fuel to these smoldering disagreements, sparking renewed student protests...
Although much of the rhetoric in the controversy over Af-Am has been political, the basic issue in the debate is an educational one. Critics of the department say the Afro-American perspective does not constitute a separate discipline any more than, for example, the Jewish or woman's perspective. The study of a particular culture is interdisciplinary, they add, and ought to draw on a number of departments and scholars. Moreover, they say scholars in Afro-American Studies do not employ a single methodology but instead approach their research using the tools of history, anthropology, or economics...
Rosovsky says, however, while no "restricted funds"--bequest money tagged for a specific purpose--are earmarked for Af-Am, many departments have no such nest egg. Rosovsky adds that his office juggles unrestricted funds to assure financial security to departments with no restricted money of their...
Perhaps because of the imminence of reading period, students did not continue to organize after the protest. Af-Am dropped out of the headlines, and the petitions distributed before the boycott, with their several hundred signatures, never reached Rosovsky's office. "We're thinking about doing something with them in the fall. We're not sure," Estis says...
Cudjoe said earlier this year that in 1972, more than 1000 students took Af-Am courses, and 80 per cent were white. Now, he said, only 314 students take the courses, and one concentrator is white. "The University's deprecation of the department is supported by the views of students who refuse to take our courses," Cudjoe adds...