Transcending the Classroom

Men of scholarship and prophetic insight must show us the right way and lead us into the light which is shining brighter and brighter."
 — Carter G. Woodson
   
Over the past 15 years, the Black Issues staff has interviewed thousands of faculty. So, it was no small feat to come up with 15 faculty members that we thought personified outstanding scholarship, service, and integrity; and whose work has had a substantial impact on the academy over the past 15 years. When we finished the list, we were struck by how many of the scholars selected were "activist scholars" in the tradition of W.E.B. DuBois. And how many, like University of Maryland professor Ron Walters, deliberately modeled themselves after DuBois.
But the times demand activism. The doors to higher education are being closed on many Brown and Black students and efforts to diversify the curriculum are branded as "political correctness." Moreover, at the dawn of a new century the number of minorities who are prepared to enter a career in the sciences is woefully inadequate.
Michigan State history professor Darlene Clark Hine so eloquently summed up the past 15 years when she said, "There is a real cultural war going on in this country right now and we're all part of it. People who have invested their life's work in creating or constructing a certain vision of American history are not just going to lie back and die and say, ‘Okay, you're right, you young Turks, just take it and go with it.'"    
   
1) Molefi K. Asante
His critics consider many of his ideas to be intellectually wrong-headed, but Asante, a leading advocate of Afrocentric scholarship, set out to turn the academic world on its head. He exposed the Eurocentric view of much of the nation's scholarship and went on to train a new generation of scholars to look at the world through Africa by establishing the nation's first Ph.D. program in African American studies at Temple University.
   
2) Cynthia Flynn Capers
During the 15 years Cynthia Flynn Capers  spent teaching, she  helped make the nursing profession more aware of the importance of cultural diversity in recruiting and retaining professional nurses.  Capers received the Distinguished Nurse Award from the Pennsylvania Nurses Association in 1995.  Recently, she has become dean of the University of Akron's College of Nursing. With her arrival, the college has a renewed emphasis on research, forming collaborative research groups into such areas as domestic violence. In 1999, the college's faculty has received several new major research grants to support their work.