Stanford students win hard-fought victory on elevating Black studies
Task force approval to create department a university milestone
Black student activists at Stanford scored a longfought victory last week when a university task force said the campus should transform its program in African and African American studies into a full-fledged academic department.
The decision was more than 50 years in the making, with students saying they have pushed for a department dedicated to Black studies since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Administratively, elevating a program into a department means giving it the funding to recruit and hire its own faculty, instead of borrowing professors from other departments to teach courses and advise students.
For African American studies, these bureaucratic moves mean a department could one day offer graduate degrees and become a magnet for promising students and high-profile scholars from around the world, students said. Giving African and African American studies more prominence also could improve equity across campus and position Stanford to become a leader in advancing research and education into race, history, politics and culture, students said.
“This is a historical and political moment, in terms of what it means for the university,” said Kimya Loder, the president of the Black Graduate Students Association.
“But it’s also an intellectual moment, to know that Black studies is a thriving and constantly growing discipline, in part because we’re at a point in global history where we have to come to terms with antiBlackness and how it manifests itself in the United States and beyond,” added Loder, whose Ph.D. studies in sociology focus on grassroots political organizing in Black communities.
The death of George Floyd last May and the ensuing protests and national conversation about racial justice prompted the BGSA and the Black Student Union to renew calls to departmentalize African and African American studies. For the 2020-21 year, 44
students are majoring or minoring in the program.
Stanford actually was a bit ahead of the curve back in 1969, when it became the first private university in the United States to create an African American studies program. A year earlier, to the north, San Francisco State became the first university in the country to establish a department with a Black studies curriculum. UC Davis and UC Berkeley also founded their respective departments around this time, as Black studies was becoming a part of American higher education.
But the next five decades saw Stanford fall short in devoting more attention to its AAAS program by not moving to full departmentalization, Loder and other students said. The galvanizing cultural moments of the past summer inspired
the BGSA to hold teachins, town halls, demonstrations and a letter-writing campaign. A petition circulated around campus garnered more than 5,600 signatures.
In the fall, the university established a task force to consider new infrastructure “for the study of race and the effects of race on society,” according to a statement. Last Monday, Provost Persis Drell announced that the task force recommended departmentalizing. She called the recommendation an “exciting first step.”
Now the task force must establish a subcommittee to “work out the details.” Drell warned it would not be until next year that faculty who want to move to the department can develop proposals for the School of Humanities and Sciences dean, an advisory
board and, ultimately, the Board of Trustees, which must approve a new department.
In their push, students acknowledged they “shamed” campus leaders by pointing out how Stanford was lagging behind some of its prestigious competitors, including Princeton, Duke, UCLA and Columbia, which have moved to establish African American or Black studies departments.
Students also brought up the fact that Stanford houses a collection of Black Panther primary documents and hosts the Martin Luther King Research and Education Institute, developed by history professor Clayborne Carson, who was personally selected by Coretta Scott King to edit King’s papers.
Finally, students pushed back against the idea that
African and African American studies is a “narrow” discipline — unlike, say, history, economics or political science.
Reagan Ross, vice president of the BGSA, said that Black studies are no more “narrow” than other disciplines focused on history and culture, such as East Asian Languages, German studies or Iberian and Latin American Culture, each of which are departmentalized at Stanford.
“The idea that the scope of African and African American studies is too narrow comes from a fundamental misunderstanding about what Black studies is,” Ross said, noting that people may wrongly think the curriculum is limited to slavery or the civil rights movement. “It’s a global discipline.”
Alex Ramsey, who graduated with an AAAS degree
in 2017, said studying the Black experience through the lens of history, literature and other disciplines gave him excellent preparation to study law at Harvard.
Junior Mohammad Faisal Gumma, a premed biology major, likewise said that classes for his AAAS minor are teaching him to critically assess how race impacts health care as he aims to become a doctor.
“We’re not one-dimensional,” he said, describing fellow students in the AAAS program. “We’re interested in the law, technology, science, public health, the arts. Those things intersect and allow students to gain so much in applying Black studies to different disciplines.”