The Justice

Media Credit: Julian Agin-Liebes African and Afro-American Studies major Nathan Robinson '11 speaks at an open forum.

Students and faculty expressed resentment with the Curriculum and Academic Restructuring Steering committee's proposal to convert the African and Afro-American Studies department to an interdisciplinary program and worried about threatening the status of a department established 40 years ago in the wake of the Ford Hall takeover.

Last Sunday, the Union Senate passed a resolution, drafted by East Quad Senator Jenna Rubin '11 and Senator for the Class of 2011 Lev Hirschhorn, to oppose making the AAAS department a program.

In 1969, students took over the Ford Hall building and presented a list of 10 demands to the University, the first of which was the establishment of an African and Afro-American Studies department. Today, students as well as former and current faculty fear that changing the department's status to a program could jeopardize the institution's symbolic significance.

"I think that it's a bad decision on the part of the University to change the AAAS department to a program," Hirschhorn said. "There's a dangerous symbolism in that action," he added, referring to the implications of eliminating a department that the University established in order to increase minority representation.

Prof. Ronald Walters, the founding chair of the AAAS department at Brandeis, decried the proposal as a significant threat to the status of African American studies here. "The dismantlement of the [AAAS] department will also dismantle much of the significance of Ford Hall as that historical beginning to students in that setting today," he wrote in an e-mail to Nathan Robinson '11.

Prof. Ibrahim Sundiata (AAAS), who served as chair of the AAAS department in the 1990s, said that he doubts the proposal's merit, particularly since Brandeis was one of the first American universities to establish an AAAS department.

"The [students who took over Ford Hall] in the 1960s wanted [the AAAS department] for a very good reason," Sundiata said. "AAAS would … interface with other departments, but as an equal department. Now, [the University] is going in a sense backward because a lot of [schools] are still fighting … to get their programs as departments."

Continued...

Page 1 of 2 next >

Article Tools