Word: southern
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Since assuming the Afro chairmanship in January 1976, Eileen Southern, professor of Music and lecturer on Afro-American Studies, has implemented many of the policies designed to lend the department the air of respectability that the University has allegedly denied Afro since its creation in 1969. Besides the three examples cited above, Afro has launched a departmental newsletter (a quarterly named Nimba), sponsored its first General Education course (Social Sciences 7, "Introduction to Afro-American History"), and set up the department's first House seminar--Quincy 109, "Conflict and Mediation in Contemporary Africa...
...Southern answers that allegation by saying that Rivera and other students involved in setting up the February meeting did not inform her that non-concentrators would be attending the discussion, nor had they prepared an agenda in advance detailing the issues that would be covered or the students who would discuss them. Rivera says that the concentrators told the chairman that "students" would attend the meeting--he did not specify "concentrators"--and that Afro students have submitted agendas to Southern prior to meetings in the past, only to meet with treatment similar to that met with in the February meeting...
...concentrators on the one hand and leading Afro faculty and especially the University on the other. The 1972 McCree Report on the department mandated that students should be granted access to all Afro faculty meetings except those that discussed honors recommendations and faculty appointments. The 18-month period of Southern's chairmanship has witnessed a steady decrease in the amount of student input into such departmental meetings, a development that several concentrators attribute to the policies and approach of Southern...
George Rivera '77, former chairman of the Concentrators of the Afro-American Studies Department, says that Afro students have not met with Southern and faculty members in a formal context the entire academic year. Rivera says there was a meeting scheduled last March at which the chairman refused to speak with an assembled group of concentrators and some non-concentrators--including several freshmen--about major issues concerning the department. Since that abbreviated meeting in the winter, Rivera says that Afro concentrators have stopped attending meetings in response to Southern's reluctance to give students a hearing, noting that the chairman...
...Southern also says that several concentrators have attended faculty meetings since the February encounter, contrary to Rivera's assertions. One of the two students Southern says did sit in on such meetings--Harvard Stephens '77-3--says he attended only one meeting in February (shortly after his return to Harvard following a semester off), adding that his presence at that meeting "does not indicate an inclination among students to participate" in Afro faculty pow-wows. Stephens has not attended another meeting since then...