SPECTRUM

The old-style Black Studies discipline has refracted into a rainbow of African American research.

In some ways, the state of the African American Studies discipline has never been healthier.
According to the National Council for Black Studies, four schools currently offer doctoral studies in the discipline. That list doesn't include Harvard University, which announced plans to upgrade to the Ph.D. beginning this year, or Duke University, which has received faculty lines but still is awaiting the final go-ahead on its plans.
And today's Black studies faculty members are generally more experienced and wield more power at their respective institutions than at any previous point in the discipline's admittedly brief history.
"There are fewer programs than there were in the '60s and '70s," notes Dr. Nellie McKay, professor of American and African American literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and former chair of its Afro-American Studies Department. "But the ones that have lasted are feeling much better about themselves.
"We're less embattled; our faculty and our research are receiving some recognition. We have a greater sense of security and along with that comes the desire to move the agenda forward. It's a desirable position to be in," she says.
Then she pauses.
"Of course, that doesn't mean there are no problems."
Indeed, the story of African American Studies in 2000 is most definitely a good-news-bad-news kind of tale. Through the sacrifices and hard work of two generations of scholars, the discipline once known as Black Studies has come a long way from "no way."
It is rare to find a campus where the discipline is a despised and marginalized subspecialty forced down the gullets of unwilling university administrators by activist students and faculty.
In fact, students clamor for the courses — admittedly, more loudly in some regions of the country than others. And what they're getting is a rich mixture.
If old-style Black studies was a meat-and-potatoes kind of affair, with heaping portions of history and literature and sociology, the current state of the discipline is more like fusion cuisine, a scholarly kitchen serving up Caribbean culture, dance and visual aesthetics and West African languages along with the staples.
But this diversity of approach has not been easily won.