The Creation of the Doctorate in African
American Studies at Temple University: Knocking at the Door of
Eurocentric Hegemony
by Molefi Kete Asante
The Emergence of an Idea
The pathway to the creation of
the first doctorate program in African American Studies at Temple
University was not straightforward, direct, or immediate from
conceptualization to execution. It had begun as an idea, an idea
only, while I was sitting in either Boniface Obichere’s, Ronald
Takaki’s or Gary Nash’s history class at the University of California,
Los Angeles, nearly twenty years earlier, listening to lectures
on the nature of the African presence in America. What if
there could be an entire department devoted to the study of this
phenomenon? What if a university could create a school that
would explore every facet of the African story of civilization,
from the earliest of times to the present? These were questions
for daydreaming, but what was not a question for dreams was the
telling of the African story in America. I always believed and
knew that such a story would have to be told from the African
perspective because if people told it from any other perspective
it would not be the African’s story. At that time, the late
l960s it was difficult to hear the authentic voice of the most
numerically significant ethnic presence in America. This was prior
to the creation of Black Studies departments and most African
American history classes. The idea was a kernel of energizing
agency in my mind. Studying the colonial history of America in
preparation for my dissertation and asking where are the Africans
had catapulted me forward.
The Departmental Situation
By the time I arrived at Temple
University as full professor and chair of the Department of African
American Studies I had already directed the UCLA Center for Afro
American Studies where I had established the Master’s degree program,
chaired the Department of Communication at SUNY-Buffalo, and for
a year simultaneously chaired the Departments of Communication
and African American Studies. My interest in developing
graduate programs had been tested at SUNY where I had overseen
the recreation of the doctorate and Masters programs in communication.In
addition, I had served as the director of the diploma program
for journalists at the Zimbabwe Institute of Mass Communication
in the early l980s.
In 1984 I came to Temple University in Philadelphia with the mandate
to rebuild its faltering department of African American Studies.
It had been a program of some significance during the decade that
had passed and had suffered at the hands of several deans whose
only inclinations appeared to be the elimination of every vestige
of the program. One after the other of the deans had begun by
forcing faculty members out of the department, not tenuring others
and when they left, not replacing them. The department had fought
vigorously for its integrity.
The decimated faculty did not take the assaults without a fight.
They fought internally through committees and externally through
community organizations. They were all committed to the department’s
mission and believed that the attacks on the department were politically
motivated and accentuated by the unbridled racism that appeared
to hold some of the white faculty members in an iron vise. Like
other universities of the period, Temple’s faculty included those
whites who believed that there was not enough substantive information
to have a department of African American Studies. They used terms
like “lowering of standards” and “feel good programs” to castigate
the intellectual enterprise of examining phenomena from an African
standpoint.
A Brief History
Temple’s Afro-Asian Institute
was created in l971, making it one of the first programs during
the great wave of departmental and programmatic creation during
l969-72. It was the most dynamic intellectual program in
the Philadelphia area, bringing to Temple, which is located in
a heavily African American community, a new resonating insight
into political, economic, and cultural issues. The program was
designated the The Afro-Asian Institute initially but it soon
changed its name and purpose becoming the Department of Pan African
Studies. Finally, in l984 the name was changed to the Department
of African American Studies. The Afro-Asian Institute, heavily
influenced by the Muslim students, was a program; Pan African
Studies took the form of a department with a reporting mechanism
that was comparable to other academic departments and the establishment
of an undergraduate degree.
There had been a
struggle for recognition and legitimacy from the very first creation
of the Afro-Asian Institute. Faculty members at Temple regularly
called for the abolition of the program. Its students were constantly
harassed and some of the faculty who participated were intimidated
by colleagues who wondered how they could squander their time
and career on something as ephemeral as Black Studies. Numerous
African and African American faculty members paid for their involvement
in the department’s battles with collegial and university committees
by being refused tenure. The department persisted in its academic
rights and succeeded in gaining a faculty of thirteen, including
the adjuncts and part-timers, by l977. Professor Odeyo Ayaga was
the chair of the department and he immediately began to establish
contacts in the University, the city and the state governments.
Odeyo Ayaga was a remarkable leader at a time that demanded stedfastness,
integrity, and commitment to the intellectual project of African
American Studies. I am indebted to him for sharing generously
with me his impressions of the university and his insights into
the political nature of the Temple campus. Since I was new
in Philadelphia, he graciously passed on to me his contacts and
sources from the various government and civic bodies.
The Creative Context
When I arrived at Temple there
were only three professors in African American Studies: Odeyo
Ayaga, Alfred Moleah, and Tran van Dinh. All other departmental
faculty members had been chased away, humiliated, denied tenure,
or otherwise forced to change departments (Wilbert Roget, Sonia
Sanchez, and John Davis). Professor Dinh took early retirement
in the Fall of l984 and that left three of us in the department.
There was an air of optimism on the campus because a new administration
had taken over the university and a new dean would likely be coming
aboard. The community sensed the possibilities inherent in such
a situation and demanded to see a rebirth in the department. The
highly valued Community Education Program had been left languishing
and a community leader, Maisha Ongonza, was leading the remnants
of that program and essentially running the day to day affairs
of the departmental office.
It was my belief that both Professors
Ayaga and Moleah were exhausted by the constant battles with the
administration. They had become experts at writing memoranda to
defend the department and their understanding of the mission of
the undergraduate program. They had put up as good afight as possible
given the fact that Ayaga was Kenyan and Moleah was South African.
Both had been radicalized by their involvement with the department
because the type of racism they confronted at Temple was different
and unexpected; they vowed to save the department but knew that
they had to save themselves first. Stress took its told on them.
I informed them that even with
three faculty members we had to propose what we saw as a revitalized
vision of the department and fight for it. They essentially
said, we have had our fight, now it is your time. With swiftness
and because there was some hoopla around my appointment I took
advantage of the momentary goodwill by proposing to hire three
new faculty members over the next two years and introducing a
Masters degree. The Provost gave me the green light on the hiring
but did not commit to the graduate proposal which had to go through
the university committees.
The Initial Proposal:
The Master’s
Using the programs I had written
for UCLA and SUNY I drafted a graduate program in African Amercan
Studies to be submitted to the Graduate Committee of the College
of Arts and Sciences. There already existed Masters programs at
Cornell University, Ohio State University, UCLA, Yale, SUNY-Albany,
and Atlanta University. What was different in my conception
was the elevation of the Afrocentric paradigm as the instrument
to guide programmatic development. It seemed to me that most of
the departments had no clear philosophical basis to the aggregation
of courses that existed in their programs.
I proposed two divisions: cultural
aesthetic and social behavioral. Courses were created and grouped
according to these concentrations. For example, in the social
behavioral track or concentration I included seminar courses such
as: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, JR., Cheikh Anta Diop, W. E.
B. Du Bois, and Zora Neale Hurston. Some courses were proposed
but not approved.
In the cultural aesthetic track
or concentration I included courses such as the following: African
Aesthetics, Ebonics, African American Drama, African American
Art, Negritude, and African literature.
All students had to take three
core courses regardless of the track that they chose as their
principal area of concentration. These courses included Proseminar
in Graduate Studies in African American Studies, African Civilization,
and Research Methods in African American Studies.
The initial reading of my proposal
by the Graduate Committee of the College produced considerable
discussion and the academic scramble. Some professors felt that
there was just no way that African American Studies was going
to have a graduate program. They did not believe in it as a field
or a discipline and that it represented a catering to the notion
of “relevance” in education. Others believed that such a graduate
program would cheapen the graduate programs in English, history,
and sociology, bringing unnecessary competition for a decreasing
pool of students. Still others said that no students would enroll
in the program because they would want to have degrees that were
more traditional. Perhaps the harshest criticism came from Emma
Lapzansky, a black history professor who was in the Dean’s
office as an assistant. Lapzansky wrote that the program “would
ghettoize” education. My response was that our aim was to correct
the ghettoization of education inasmuch as Temple’s curriculum
and departments without us was nearly a ghetto of whiteness in
curriculum, departmental theories and methods, and faculty representation.
After my response there was silence from the Dean’s office and
soon thereafter Emma Lapzansky left the university. No other opposition
to the program surfaced in letters to me; others I know objected
to the proposal but were careful not to write their objections.
They whispered that there were limited materials to teach at the
graduate level in African American Studies. But they spoke out
of ignorance and did not have to be confronted head-on except
as I handled all of the objections in my several revisions of
the proposal.
The Doctoral
Possibility
Once the Graduate Committee
of the Colleges of Arts and Sciences had made its decision to
return the initial proposal for a Master’s degree to me, I decided
to research the possibility of a doctorate degree. Examining about
two hundred programs at various other universities I discovered
that there were at least twenty doctorate granting programs in
the nation with less faculty than we had at the time. By this
time we had added Kariamu Welsh, Sonja Peterson-Lewis, and C.
T. Keto. We had lost Professors Odeyo Ayaga and Tran Van Dinh
to early retirement. Professor Alfred Moleah was the senior professor,
having been in the department the longest. However, he did not
participate in the creation of the graduate program. His interests
were external to the department at the time.
I attempted to add a Social
Policy component to the proposal as a third concentration to answer
the need for a track for those students who were interested in
transforming the way we studied and researched the areas of social
welfare, health, transportation needs, and other delivery mechanisms
in the African American community. This Social Policy component
was rejected by the university committee for both the Master’s
and the doctoral program. By the time I had brought along the
new faculty members, Welsh, Peterson-Lewis, and Keto, into the
vision and mission of the university there was a new turn of events.
A new dean, Lois Cronholm, was appointed to the College of Arts
and Sciences. It would be Lois Cronholm and her assistant
dean, Jayne Kribbs, who along with Barbara Brownstein, the provost,
and H. Patrick Swygert, the Executive Vice President, who would
become our strongest supporters, even in the face of faculty opposition.
President Peter Liacouras played a major role in articulating
the vision that was to give Temple the best department of its
kind in the nation but he could not force the faculty to act on
the proposal.
The approval of the Masters
and doctoral programs by the Graduate Committee of the College
of Arts and Sciences created euphoria in the National Council
of Black Studies. It was a national, indeed an international achievement
for Temple University. We had achieved a great victory and all
of the arguments and setbacks and delays and threats of obliteration
were reduced to memories, recorded, but memories nevertheless.
The outsiders reviewers who had visited our campus to offer advise
and suggestions included Professor James Turner of Cornell University,
Professor William Nelson of Ohio State University, Professor Delores
P. Aldridge of Emory University, Professor Maulana Karenga of
California State University, Long Beach, and Professor Marimba
Ani of Hunter College. Their advice and suggestions were incorporated
into the final report.
In an attempt to forestall
any objection to the admission standards of the new programs we
introduced the highest grade point average requirement in the
College of Arts and Sciences at the time. A student had to have
a 3.0 to enter the program and a 3.6 to apply for the teaching
assistantship. A year of two later we would up the admission requirement
to 3.2. One of the reasons for this was that we experienced an
unusually high number of applicants, contrary to the speculation
of the nay-sayers who believed that there would be no or only
a few students interested in the graduate program.
Approval and Recognition
In l987 when the Temple
University Board of Trustees approved the proposal for a doctoral
program in African American Studies it represented one of the
most historical developments in American higher education. There
were three reasons that came readily to mind at the time : (1)
it represented a major breach in the structure of white supremacy,
(2) it introduced a new paradigm, and (3) it minimized the significance
of race in theoretical and conceptual innovation. In the
first place the proposal to create a new doctoral program in a
major white institution in the United States was a bold act. I
knew it then and believe it now. The granting of terminal degrees
had always been held by whites, even at predominantly black institutions
where the doctorate was offered, it was usually based on some
model of a white doctorate program. In other words, there were
no doctorate programs in the United States not created by white
people. The doctorate in African American Studies at Temple
was the first time that a new terminal degree was written and
proposed entirely by an African intellectual and then accepted
and approved by a predominantly white institution. Secondly, the
construction of a new way to approach and interrogate phenomena
of the African experience created, inter alia, space for radically
new interpretations of data. By introducing the idea of studying
phenomena from the standpoint of African agency, that is, as subjects-acting
and not simply acted upon, the Afrocentric perspective opened
up an entirely fresh field of research. One could now examine
the American Constitutional Conventions from the perspective of
the Africans who could for the delegates or who drove their carriages.
What were these black folks thinking while the white folks were
thinking? Perhaps independence was a gift of Europe, but freedom
was a gift of Africa. Thirdly, the introduction of the doctorate
program in African American Studies shattered the idea that blacks
could not propose any intellectual program from which whites could
learn. Heretofore the idea that whites created and everyone else
participated in their creation had been the common educational
practice, but the development of the doctoral program at Temple
was a radical change in that equation. It served to minimize race
in the construction of concept and theory and thereby added a
blow for equality in theorizing about any phenomenon related to
the African experience.
New Doctoral Programs
In March 2000, twelve years after the Temple
University doctorate in African American Studies there are now
four universities offering the Ph.D. degree: Temple University,
University of Massachusetts at Amherst, University of California
at Berkeley, and Harvard University.
