Word: afro
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...major issues students want to discuss is how much Africa will remain in Afro-Am. The department now seems inclined to limit its academic focus to the Black experience in America. But many students and alumni believe that real Afro-American studies cannot be divorced from the study of Africa...
SOME NEW VOICES rose up this week to question the direction in which Harvard's Afro-American Studies Department is moving. A group of alumni have formed the Committee to Support Afro-American Studies, which took out a full-page advertisement in The Harvard Crimson raising several issues of philosophy and tenure policy at Afro-Am. Also last week, members of the Black Student Association (BSA) met with Department chairman Nathan I. Huggins to ask for a greater student voice in some of these issues, and came away somewhat discouraged...
...common theme running through these two developments is a belief that the unusual circumstances under which Afro-Am was formed entitle students to a greater-than-usual voice in departmental policy. Afro-Am was a direct outgrowth of the student riots of 1969, and a lot of the discussion about forming a department came during the days when students sat in University Hall...
...tenure denial as discrimination, and part of a concerted effort of the department to root out Africanists. They say that the Isaacs case is a crucial opportunity to force the department to study the African side as well. A leader of the alumni committee has said that limiting Afro-Am's focus to events since the slaves arrived in America implies Blacks are a slave people's and works against Third World unity by obscuring Black people's roots. With the History Department's recent decision not to fill its chair in African studies next year--a decision which will...
...BELIEVE that granting tenure to Prof. Isaacs might be a good way of meeting this need for Africanists in Afro-Am. And we agree with those who suggest a role for a greater student voice. While any department must seek to maintain its academic integrity, we do not believe a formal student voice on policy questions would be antithetical to this goal. This is particularly true in Afro-Am, the only Harvard department with an outside committee of scholars to decide on tenure decisions. If there is such a strong need for the opinions of outside scholars, certainly there...