Department, Program, Institute or Other?

When officials at the Alabama Commission on Higher Education announced in February that they would not approve a Black Studies major at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, it was a slap in the face to university officials and students who say they have been fighting since desegregation to bring the discipline to their campus.
That the commission reversed the decision last month and gave the university the green light was of little consolation to some faculty and students who say they now have to persuade  the administration to give the discipline department status.
"Having the major is a good starting point, but until we get department status, it just won't be sufficient," says Dr. Adeniyi Coker, director of the program.
Just as the curricular emphases of African American Studies units may vary considerably depending on the faculty's interests and training, the school's collections and the geographical location, the units themselves can take a variety of forms.
Some schools offer programs, others have departments, and still others prefer the research center. Hybrid arrangements may have evolved at some institutions, with research centers attached to — or even separate from — a departmental program.
And then there's the question of whom the unit is intended to serve. Does the institution offer an interdisciplinary undergraduate or graduate major? Or is the program merely a concentration of courses within a more traditional discipline? Are there plans to attempt to offer the Ph.D.? And what will that Ph.D. be in? African American Studies? Or will the school opt for one of the new joint programs and offer a Ph.D. in African American Studies along with one in a traditional discipline?

 The History
The debate has a history. When African American Studies units were emerging out of the ferment of late '60s and early '70s campus activism, there were those voices that insisted on establishing programs rather than departments.
"There was the feeling that African American Studies was so marginal that the faculty would not be respected unless they were appointed from other disciplines," notes Dr. Nellie McKay, professor of American and African American literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her school, she is careful to add, fought hard for a department and won.
In contrast, there was the approach taken by Armstead Robinson, the founder of the University of Virginia's Woodson Institute. Daryl Scott, associate professor of history at Columbia University, relates that officials at Woodson rejected departmental status in favor of the greater flexibility offered by being a program-cum-research center.
Decades have intervened, but the battle still rages. Dr. Hazel Carby of Yale University made headlines earlier this year when her long-simmering frustrations over program status erupted into a tense standoff with Yale's president, Dr. Richard Levin.
After Levin appeared to slight Yale's program at a dinner party attended by Harvard University's Dr. Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, Carby resigned as chair of African American Studies. Only a promise from Levin to upgrade the program into a department persuaded her to reverse her decision.
Though Carby did not return phone calls about the matter, her reasoning was crystal clear to observers around the nation. Departments make the university go round — they have access to funds, the ability to hire  and, some say, more respect.
"With programs, you just don't have the same kind of clout," argues McKay. "The faculty is too dispersed. When issues or problems arise, you can't fight in the same way."
But the program need not be, by definition, inferior to the department, notes Dr. Dianne Pinderhughes, professor of political science and director of the Afro-American Studies and Research Program at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
"It's true that as a department, you have power, but not every department is powerful," she cautions.
Scott, who's leaving Columbia University's history department at the end of this academic year to revive the moribund program in African American Studies at the University of Florida, has thought long and hard about the program vs. department debate.
He says he tends to agree with Pinderhuges, pointing out that Black Studies departments tend to be small and that — particularly with broadly interdisciplinary fields like diaspora studies — coverage of necessary fields of study can be a problem.
Programs, however, "have the advantage of always bringing in fresh blood from the other disciplines," he says, explaining that this allows much greater "nimbleness" in responding to new developments within the various fields.