Since the Indiana Commission for Higher Education announced the approval of the new doctoral program in African American and African Diaspora Studies (AAADS) at Indiana University Bloomington more than a week ago, John McCluskey Jr. says he has felt both elated and relieved.

This announcement was four years and countless meetings in the making.

“On the one hand I have been elated,” says McCluskey, an AASDS professor who chaired the faculty committee that wrote the proposal for the new degree program. “On the other hand, because we’ve put so much work into it, it is almost anti-climatic.”

The faculty have not celebrated together yet, but in the days since the decision was handed down they’ve already begun recruiting students for their first cohort of five or six students for the fall of 2009, McCluskey says.

“We have a year to recruit, and let students know who we are,” he says. “We are already looking forward to the first class.”

IU became the eighth institution of higher learning in the United States to offer a doctoral degree related to Africana Studies, joining Harvard University, Michigan State University, Northwestern University, Temple University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Yale University.

“This marks the significant evolution in the development of the department here at Indiana University Bloomington,” says Dr. Michael T. Martin, an AAADS professor who will serve as acting chair of the department in the fall. “Our department now has joined the premiere departments offering doctoral programs in the United States.”

In April 2006, the AAADS faculty committee submitted the finished proposal, which took them a year to write, to IU’s College of Arts and Sciences Graduate Curriculum Committee. After being approved by that committee, the proposal traversed through a series of university and state-wide committees and offices before receiving the final approval from the commission on May 9.