“Unfortunately, that was the attitude, but we did it,” he adds. “You are always going to have a certain amount of resources. Therefore, it is an issue of priority. Is it a priority or is it not?”
Monanabela and his colleagues in the Africana studies department are trying to make it a priority at TSU and begin the development of African American doctoral studies at HBCUs.
“We are pushing now to put ourselves in a position to establish a master’s program and we are hoping we can do that in the next four years,” he says. “Once we get our foothold with the master’s, we certainly want to go forward with the Ph.D. program.”
TSU may not be the first to start a program though, as FAMU is aiming to re-propose a doctoral program in African-American studies in the next two or three years, Jackson says.
“Because the board turned us down doesn’t mean that it died,” he says. “It is just a matter of when are we going to go back and when is the university going to put the resources into it. My target is after the university turns itself around in the next couple years to try to get that proposal back on the table.”
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