We have to have zero tolerance. Any example of racism is one example too much, from the police or any other sector of Harvard University.

–Henry Louis Gates, Jr., as quoted in Friday’s Boston Globe

Last spring a group of Harvard’s Black student organizations held an end-of-year field day on Radcliffe Quad. Students picnicked, played capture the flag, and ran relay races. A good time was had by all…until two Harvard Police officers drove up on motorcycles and asked whether or not this group of Black men and women was actually authorized to be on the Harvard campus.

It turns out that a student in a nearby dorm had mistaken the Black students for tresspassers and contacted the campus police. This incident drew national publicity and strong criticism from Black  students and faculty.

Unfortunately, it seems that Harvard police did not learn from this mistake. On August 8th, a Black person  was seen using tools to remove a locked bicycle from a campus bike rack. Harvard Crimson reporter Jamison A. Hill describes the events that ensued:

According to the HUPD police log, the individual was found to be the owner of the bicycle and an affiliate of the university after questioning by officers. The person has since been identified as a black high school student from the Boston area working at Harvard for the summer. Faust wrote that an investigation into the interaction between the officers and the student has been launched.

One source with knowledge of the situation said that “the conversation between the individual and the officers was laced with obscenities” and that the officers have been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation into how they handled the incident.

Partly in response to this incident, and partly in response to the demands of Black faculty, students, and staff, University President Drew Gilpin Faust has announced the formation of a committee to review Harvard U police practices.

Jamison Hill of the Crimson explains:

An incident earlier this month has raised concerns about Harvard University Police Department’s treatment of racial minorities on campus, leading University President Drew G. Faust to announce the creation of a six-member committee to review HUPD’s practices.

“The review will include consideration of HUPD’s diversity training, community outreach, and recruitment efforts, as well as the ways in which Harvard’s past experience as well as best practices elsewhere can help inform our future practice,” Faust wrote in an e-mail to faculty and senior-level administration.

The committee will be led by Ralph C. Martin II, the former Suffolk County district attorney and currently a managing partner at the Boston law firm, Bingham McCutchen.

The first Black student graduated from Harvard in 1870. Apparently, though, 138 years of Black students at Harvard has not yet been enough time to change the campus community’s perception that student = white.

This problem is not unique to Harvard, but as the oldest university in the nation,  Harvard is uniquely poised to act as a model for other institutions. I will follow this story with great interest and guarded optimism.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Fannie Jackson Coppin (1837 – 1913)

We do not ask that anyone of our people shall be put into a position because he is a colored person, but we do most emphatically ask that he shall not be kept out of a position because he is a colored person.

— Fanny Jackson Coppin, in a speech delivered at a fair in Philadelphia. This speech was anthologized in Negro Eloquence: The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from teh Days of Slavery to the Present Time, edited by Alice Dunbar Nelson (1914).

***

Biographical Notes: Fanny Jackson Coppin (1837-1913) was born into slavery in Washington, DC. She was released from bondage when an aunt purchased her freedom. She had a lifelong thirst for learning, and as a young woman she worked as a domestic servant in Newport, Rhode Island, in order to pay for tutoring. She graduated from Oberlin College in 1865, becoming one of the first African American women to earn a degree from a U.S. college or university.

The America 1900 webpage at PBS.org describes her contributions to African American education:

As a student at Oberlin College in the 1860s, Coppin established an evening school for freed slaves, and was the second African American woman to graduate from the college. Coppin took a position as principal of the female department at the Institute for Colored Youth, a Quaker academy in Philadelphia, where she was later promoted to principal of the school–the highest educational appointment held by a black woman at that time. Coppin anticipated Booker T. Washington’s call for vocational training for African Americans, establishing an industrial department at the Institute in the 1880s. This first trade school for African Americans in Philadelphia was an immediate success and had a waiting list for admission throughout its existence.

The Institute for Colored Youth, eventually renamed Cheyney University, is the oldest Black college or university in the United States.

Coppin State University in Baltimore, Maryland is named in honor of Fanny Jackson Coppin and her contributions to African American education. The Coppin State website describes her later years as a wife and missionary:

In the fall of 1881, Fanny married the Rev. Levi Jenkins Coppin, a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The marriage opened a wealth of missionary opportunities for Fanny. When her husband was made Bishop of Cape Town, South Africa, Fanny accompanied him and traveled thousands of miles organizing mission societies.

She returned to the United States after almost a decade of missionary work and died in Philadelphia in 1913.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

KAMERAD! KAMERAD!
Three colored Canadians imitating the Germans, whom they captured in this dugout near the Canal du Nord, as they put up their hands and shouted “Kamerad”!

(Photo and caption from Kelly Miller’s History of the World War for Human Rights [1919])*

Posted by Ajuan Mance

The 8/21/08  JBHE weekly bulletin describes a recent finding by the Schott Foundation for Public Education that there is, “a serious crisis in the secondary education of black males.” According to the Schott Foundation’s report, there is a 28 point difference between the high school graduation rate for white males and the high school graduation rate for black males: “Nationwide, only 47 percent of black males are completing high school. For whites, the rate is 75 percent.”

(Source: Journal of Blacks in Higher Education)

Considering the two charts above, one thing seems clear: there is an inverse relationship between the size of a state’s Black population and the proportion of Black males who graduate from high school. With few exceptions, those states with the lowest Black populations (less that 5 percent of the overall state population) have the highest Black male graduation rates. On the other hand, those states with disproportionately high Black populations (greater than the national average of 12 percent) have the lowest Black male graduation rates.

One possible explanation for this trend is that youth who live in areas with low Black populations experience less peer pressure to conform to any one particular idea of what it means to be Black. For young African American men and boys, this amounts to a freedom from (among other things) the pressure to conform to those prevailing images and stereotypes of Black maleness and masculinity that position Black manhood as violent, hyper-masculine, and anti-intellectual.

In the absence of these pressures, some young Black men are able to thrive without having to worry about whether or not their passion for oboe or Zora Neale Hurston or physics or pointilism (to give a few examples) measures up to the popular perceptions of the attributes of real Black men. This is not to say that young Black men cannot thrive in majority Black high schools, nor am I suggesting that the overwhelmingly white high school environment is a utopia for African American students . The question, though, of why and how some young Black men are able to thrive in those very environments that conventional wisdom would suggest are the least hospitable to them must be examined in greater depth.

Finally, I must underscore that the freedom from the narrowly drawn popular stereotypes about what it means to be Black and male is not about freedom from the notion that educational achievement is raced and/or constitutes “acting white.” On the contrary, freedom from popular stereotypes about Black manhood and masculinity is about the freedom from the oppressive fact that, in the United States, intellectual achievement and passion is gendered. Brainy guys — the guys who raise their hands in class to answer questions, who get involved in school activities beyond athletics, who play in the orchestra, who like to read for pleasure — are often labeled as sissies or wimps. In African American communities, in which access to traditional channels of male power (high earning power, authority over subordinates in the workplace, political influence, et cetera) is often limited, the investment in owning and projecting the strongest, most unequivocal vision of masculinity is even greater than it is for white, Latino, and Asian American youth.

I hope that the numbers reported in the Scott Foundation report will open up a larger discussion on which aspects of majority white high school  environment are somehow supporting achievment.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

1990s rapper Ahmad Ali Lewis at Compton’s Salvation Army Recreation Center.

(Source: The Los Angeles Times)

I came across this inspiring story in the LA Times. This fall, Ahmad Ali Lewis, whose single “Back in the Day” had heads bumping back in the mid-1990s, will be entering Stanford University. The valedictorian of his community college graduating class, his goal is to earn a Ph.D. in social work and become a university professor.

LA Times reporter Larry Gordon reports:

Ahmad Ali Lewis made a deal with his mother back when he was a high school student: He would go to college unless he got a recording contract for his upbeat rap music.

It was a big if. But Lewis, 17, an honors student and top football player, skipped the college entrance exams and signed with Giant Records. “I said S.A.T. – whatever. I want to R.A.P.,” he recalls.

His 1994 album, called “Ahmad,” included a hit single, “Back in the Day,” a nostalgic riff on his south Los Angeles childhood.

…

Looking back, Lewis said he does not regret his teenage decision, even though his early success was followed by struggles in a music industry he criticized as promoting violence in the black community. Now 32 and the father of a 4-year-old son, he is still recording songs but he is also finishing homework.

Ahmad the first-name-only rapper has become Ahmad Ali Lewis the Stanford-bound scholar.

Lewis enrolled two years ago at Long Beach City College and graduated in May as valedictorian, with a 4.0 grade point average. He was accepted as a transfer student by several universities for this fall and chose Stanford. “When I stepped on campus, something in my gut said, ‘Dude, this is where you belong,’ ” said Lewis, who plans to double major in sociology and African-American studies. He expects to get a doctorate in social work and become a professor.”I love teaching,” said Lewis, who tutored at an elementary school. “Rapping and teaching are not that far apart. You’re rapping, you’re talking. You’re a professor, you’re talking.”

…

He speaks of his Christian faith and academic ambitions with enthusiasm, humor and what he jokingly concedes is the “egomania” of a well-loved child. His mother, Paulette Holt, inspired him by starting college when she was a divorced mother of three and also “brainwashed me,” he said. “I always thought I was better than average, that I was handsome, smart and talented. It was a trick,” he said. “Being black in America, from the ghetto, you need that extra little bit of confidence. So that’s kind of my mission to give other kids that kind of confidence.”

The odds were against him at Stanford, which accepted just 20 of this year’s 1,200 transfer applicants. But Lewis was admitted and offered a financial aid package that will cover his tuition, room and board, which total more than $47,000 this school year. He’ll also receive funds for books and living costs each year through a highly competitive grant program the Virginia-based Jack Kent Cooke Foundation offers community college students transferring to four-year schools.

“Ahmad was really a standout in all the areas,” said Vance Lancaster, a Cooke foundation spokesman. “He is truly a scholar and a humanitarian who just happens to be a chart-topping rapper.”

To read this entire article, click HERE.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Kelly Miller (1863 – 1939)

To expect the Negroes of Georgia to produce a great general like Napoleon when they are not even allowed to carry arms, or to deride them for not producing scholars like those of the Renaissance when a few years ago they were forbidden the use of letters, verges closely upon the outer rim of absurdity. Do you look for great Negro statesmen in States where black men are not allowed to vote?

–Kelly Miller in “As to the Leopard’s Spots; An Open Letter to Thomas Dixon, Jr.,” 1905.

Note: Thomas Dixon, Jr. (1864 – 1946) is best known as the author of The Clansman, the novel that became the inspiration for D.W. Griffith’s racist tour de force, Birth of a Nation.

***

Biographical Notes: Kelly Miller, the first African American to pursue graduate studies in mathematics, was born on July 18, 1863 in Winnsboro, South Carolina. The sixth of ten children born to a free Black man and a slave (Kelly MIller, Sr and Elizabeth Roberts Miller), he earned a scholarship to Howard University where he completed both preparatory and baccalaureate studies.

MIller began graduate studies at The John Hopkins University in 1887. According to SUNY Buffalo’s Mathematics in the African Diaspora website, “Johns Hopkins University had recently become the first American school to offer graduate work in mathematics. As Miller was to be the first African American student admitted to the university, the recommendation was decided by the Board of Trustees, who decided to admit Miller based on the university founder’s known Quaker beliefs.” Miller studied mathematics, physics, and astronomy at Hopkins, until a tuition increase (from $100 to $200) brought an end to his term there.

Later, Miller would earn two graduate degrees from Howard University, in mathematics (M.A., 1901) and law (L.L.D., 1903). He joined the Howard faculty in 1895, and remained there until his retirment in 1934. He is remembered his dedication to teaching, recruitment, and the growth of the University, particularly during his tenure as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences (1907 to 1919).

Professor Miller died on December 29, 1939, at his home on the campus of Howard University.

For a more detailed biography, click HERE.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Sincerest thanks to SjP at Sojourner’s Place for recognizing Black on Campus with the Brilliant Weblog Award. This blog is a labor of love for me, and I am humbled that such an outstanding blogger has found  this site worthy of mention.

I encourage you to drop by Sojourner’s Place, and make it a regular stop on your blog itinerary. Once again, my deepest thanks to SjP. I am honored just to be on your radar. I am humbled by your praise.

As a recipient of this award, I am aksed to nominate at least 7 brilliant blogs. In all honestly, I could probably name ten times that many, but that will be a task for another day. In today’s post I recognize 7 of the most outstanding blogs I’ve enocuntered. In turn, awardees, are encouraged to:

1. Add the logo of the award to your blog

2. Add a link to the person who awarded it to you

3. Nominate at least 7 other blogs

4. Add links to those blogs on your blog

5. Leave a message for your nominees on their blogs

The Brilliant Blogs I am nominating for this award are:

1. Stuff Black People Hate: The blogger on this site states that the Stuff Black People Hate will end on August 31st of this year. Check it out before it’s over! The irreverent and quirky perspectives expressed by blogger Chris will inspire, irritate, and enrage you, sometimes all at once; but you’ll never be bored by his passion, wit, and candor. Warning: Language is R-rated. To get a sense where this blogger is coming from, read his F.A.Q.

2. JMCCLURE2’s BLOG: Less than a year old, this blog seems to focus on African American men who are making a difference in the lives of Black youth. I would love to see this blog get more attention, because it documents a phenomenon who few seem to recognize — that there are scores of Black men and women involved in meaningful projects designed to improve the fortunes of our boys and girls.

3. What About Our Daughters: Will anyone speak up for Black women and girls? This blog answers that question with a resounding “yes!” What About Our Daughters brings up-to-the minute news, well-informed commentary, and bold advocacy to the blogosphere. Black women and girls are the focus, but the issues that aaddressed on this site effect us all.

4. Africa Is a Country: I believe that South Africa is to the world what California is to the United States; it provides a glimpse of the future of inter-group relations. What happens in South Africa may well signal what will happen in other similar nations (in which Europeans hold positions of power denied or inaccessible to less affluent people of color). What happens there should matter to all of us. Africa is a Country provides brilliant insights and wry commentary commentary on the western media’s engagement with South Africa and other nations on the African continent.

5. WOC PhD: WOC PhD presents honest, accountable, intelligent and sometimes raw reporting and commentary, from a feminist-of-color perspective. For no-frills intellect and down-to-earth insights on politics and culture, WOC PhD is a must-read.

6. Sisterdoc: If ever there was a blog that could ward off apathy and inspire political engagement, it’s Sisterdoc. This blog offers hard-hitting commentary on both mainstream and underreported news stories race and identity in the U.S. and beyond.

7. Sojourner’s Place: Personal, political, relevant, and responsible, this is a blog that does it right. Every time I visit I learn something new — about blogging, about current events, and about issues and ideas that impact our lives and our world.

To all awardees, heartfelt congratulations, and many thanks for your outstanding controbutions to the blogosphere.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

On June 15, 1955 Walter M. Brown was awared a Ph.D. from what is now North Carolina Central University. Today he is a professor emeritus and former dean of the School of Education at North Carolina Central University. He holds a B.A. and Ph.D. from North Carolina Central, and an M.A. from New York University (NYU). Dr. Brown is also an accomplished calligrapher. He is a member of the Carolina Lettering Arts Society and the Triangle Calligraphers’ Guild, and has taught calligraphy at NCCU, Durham Technical Community College, the Durham Arts Council, Butner Correctional Institution, the Chapel Hill Museum, and the Duke Institute for Learning In Retirement. (Source: Carolina Wren Press)

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Derrick Bell (b. 1930)

After a decade at Harvard, I left to accept the deanship at the University of Oregon Law School. Five years later, I resigned after the faculty voted that I could not offer the position to an Asian American woman who had been placed third on a long list of candidates after the top two choices turned down the position. I returned to Harvard for five years. Then, in an action that received a great deal of public attention, I took a leave without pay to express my disappointment with the school’s failure to appoint a woman of color to the faculty. When after two years, I refused to return, citing the school’s failure to act on my protest, Harvard dismissed me and forfeited my tenured position. And yet, I am still teaching and writing, now at the New York University School of Law. Leaving jobs and engaging in other activities to protest what I felt was wrong did not destroy my career. To the contrary, those actions, while not always easy to take, enriched my life and provided me with the perhaps unrealistic but no less satisfying sense that I was doing God’s work.

–Derrick Bell in Ethical Ambition

***

Biographical Notes: Derrick Bell was born in 1930, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. in 1952, he earned his bachelor’s degree from Duquesne University, becoming the first in his immediate family to graduate from college (only one member of his extended family had ever completed an undergraduate degree). He then served in Korea as part of the U.S. Airforce. Bell attended law school at the University of Pittsburgh and graduated in 1957.

The Historymakers website (historymakers.com) describes Bell’s storied career as a legal scholar:

Bell was hired by the U.S. Justice Department after graduation, but left in 1959 over his refusal to terminate his involvement with the NAACP. Thurgood Marshall recruited him to join the NAACP Legal Defense Fund where he oversaw 300 school desegregation cases. In 1966, Bell was named deputy director of civil rights at the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare before becoming a teacher at UCLA‘s Western Center on Law and Poverty in 1968.

In 1971, Bell became the first African American to become a tenured professor at Harvard Law School. There, he established a course in civil rights law and wrote Race, Racism and American Law, which today is a standard textbook in law schools around the country. Leaving Harvard, Bell became the first African American dean of the University of Oregon Law School, and in 1985, he resigned in protest after the university directed him not to hire an Asian American candidate for a faculty position. Returning to Harvard Law School, Bell would again resign in protest in 1992 over the school’s failure to hire and offer tenure to minority women.

Derrick Bell is the author of several books, including:

• Race, Racism, and American Law (4th ed. 2000)
• And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (1987)
• Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (1992)
• Confronting Authority: Reflections of an Ardent Protester (1994)
• Gospel Choirs: Psalms of Survival in an Alien Land Called Home (1996)
• Afrolantica Legacies (1997)

His most recent book, Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth, was published in 2002 (Bloomsbury).

Posted by Ajuan Mance

This week, prnewswire.com reported on the curious case of Dr. Theresa Cameron, a tenured professor on the faculty at Arizona State. Dr. Cameron, the first African American awarded tenure in ASU’s College of Design, has filed a civil rights lawsuit against the Arizona Board of Regents, ASU President Michael Crow and other ASU officials in response to the University’s decision to terminate her appointment. The prnewswire report summarizes her case:

PHOENIX, Aug. 13 /PRNewswire/ — Dr. Theresa Cameron filed suit today in the U.S. District Court in Phoenix seeking an injunction and other relief against the Arizona Board of Regents; Arizona State University, President Michael Crow; departing Dean of the ASU College of Design, Wellington “Duke” Reiter; Associate Dean Kenneth Brooks; and the former director of the College’s School of Planning, Hemalata Dandekar, alleging violations of federal civil rights and employment laws that make it unlawful to discriminate on the basis of disability, gender or race. Dr. Cameron was the first African-American woman to be awarded tenure in the College of Design when she achieved that accomplishment in 2000. After spending her entire childhood in foster care, Dr. Cameron put her self through college and eventually obtained her Ph.D. in Design from Harvard University in 1991. Her childhood experience is chronicled in her book Foster Care Odyssey in America: A Black Girl’s Story published in 2002. Dr. Cameron and her book were featured in the Arizona Republic in June 2002.

The lawsuit alleges that Dr. Cameron requested adjustments in her teaching schedule and course load beginning in March 2005 when she prepared to return from an approved medical leave of absence and has renewed these requests, all of which were denied, at the beginning of each academic semester. The lawsuit also alleges that at or around the same time, she challenged Dean Reiter on issues relating to pay disparity in the College of Design and offered an affidavit in support of a colleague who had filed suit against the Arizona Board of Regents and ASU President Crow in another federal civil rights lawsuit in Phoenix. The lawsuit further alleges that as a result, Crow, Reiter, Brooks and Dandekar worked together to revoke Dr. Cameron’s tenure and terminate her employment.

While reading of Dr. Cameron’s lawsuit, I was reminded of the precarious position of African American academics — even prominent tenured professors with national and international reputations. I do not know the details of Dr. Cameron’s case, and I am sure that ASU officials believe that they are in the right in terminating her tenure at their institution. Still, the fact that I can easily count of the names of four highly accomplished and prominent Black scholars who have been fired from faculty posts, despite having tenure, concerns me greatly.

Consider the following well-known Black scholars and writers, each of whom was released from a tenured position:

Derrick Bell

Derrick Bell, the Harvard Law School professor who took an unpaid leave of absence two years ago to protest the school’s failure to hire, in his words, “a woman of color,” received notice today that his teaching days there are over because of the university’s two-year limit on leaves of absence.

In a letter from Robert C. Clark, the law school dean, Mr. Bell was told that his refusal to return to the school would be considered a resignation, effective July 1.

Mr. Bell, Harvard’s first black tenured law professor, had asked the law school in February to extend his leave of absence, on the grounds that he left for “reasons of conscience.”

Although Mr. Clark said he was “saddened” by Mr. Bell’s decision not to return to the school, he wrote, “I continue to believe that the path of protest you have chosen — withdrawal from the law school community — is an unfortunate one.” —New York Times, July 1, 1992

David Bradley

Bradley, 45, whose The Chaneysville Incident won the PEN/Faulkner award for best American novel of 1981, said in a recent interview that he had reluctantly concluded that race played a role in his termination. Bradley, an African American, said that he was not granted a hearing before he was fired, but that he knows of a white professor who was. He did not name the professor.

Bradley’s firing sent shock waves through Temple’s teaching ranks, where the action was perceived as a threat to tenure, the tradition of job security for professors.

“The university’s actions in this case constitute a clear violation of national standards for the protection of tenure and academic freedom,” the Faculty Senate Personnel Committee wrote in August, “and contradict the explicit provisions of Temple’s own contract and handbook.”

Bradley, a professor of English, began teaching at Temple 20 years ago and was a tenured faculty member for more than a decade. He was removed after a dispute with Dean Carolyn Adams over the terms of his contract, which called for him to teach four courses a year. That arrangement was negotiated in 1984 when Bradley, enjoying a growing reputation as a novelist, received an attractive offer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Last year, Temple administrators ordered all faculty to add an extra course to their workloads to help ease a financial crunch. Bradley refused to teach the extra class, citing the 1984 agreement. He did conduct tutorials with two students in accordance with his usual teaching load.

In April, Adams notified him that his $80,000-a-year salary was being stopped and that his personnel records would show he had resigned his tenured position as of Dec. 31. Efforts to settle the dispute failed. — The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 15, 1996

Adrian Piper

Recently featured on this blog (in the A Beautiful (Black) Mind series) Dr. Piper was terminated from her tenured position at Wellesley College in 2008. This action came at the end of more than 10-year conflict between Piper and the institution over her contract , the conditions of her employment, her leaves of absence, and other issues. In 2002, Boston Globe reporter Vanessa Jones described the state of the professor’s tense relations with her employer at that time:

The school, [Piper] says, failed to help her juggle demanding careers in philosophy and art. Her hiring brought valuable publicity to the college, she says, but Wellesley refused her the sort of reduced course load and scheduling latitude universities often grant academic stars.

The stress, she asserts, forced her to take three medical leaves that have, together, kept her out of the classroom for three years. In the fascinating, chatty personal chronology she has posted on her Web site (www.adrianpiper.com) she describes herself collapsing from physical exhaustion at the end of fall and spring semesters, year after year. She writes about suffering from a rare spine condition that could only be improved by long sessions of yoga she no longer has the strength to continue.

…

Her most recent medical leave began in 2000. That same year, Piper filed a lawsuit accusing the college of discrimination and breach of contract. The complaint, part of the trove uploaded onto her Web site, details a raft of claims, but boils down to this: Wellesley hired Adrian Piper but wouldn’t let her be Adrian Piper.

The school hit back hard. In a motion to dismiss Piper’s claim filed last year, Wellesley said Piper had “exaggerated her medical condition, was malingering, and was attempting to renege on her teaching responsibilities.” It stopped paying Piper’s $98,000 salary last year; she’s now on unpaid leave. On the advice of college attorneys, Wellesley’s president, Diana Chapman Walsh and college dean Lee Cuba, declined interview requests.

Once again, I do not know the full details of any of these case, but I do believe that, taken together, they could constitute something of a trend. There seem to be common factors linking these conflicts together. For example, at least part of the conflict between each of these professors and his or her institution revolves around teaching responsibilities.

As the Boston Globe story on Piper points out, many high profile academics are given greatly reduced courseloads in order to accomodate what are often globe-spanning schedules of speaking engagements, exhibits, performances, residencies, and other appearances. Though these activities limit the scholar’s contact with students on his or her home campus, his/her high national and international profile benefits his/her institution through increased attention, enhanced reputation and a variety of other tangible and intangible rewards.

Something else that Bell, Cameron, and Piper have in common is the source of their notoriety. All are more widely known for the work they have done outside of their discipline than for publications within their academic field. Could it be that mainstream institutions have not quite developed a useful way of dealing with the African American polymath? Or could it be that the racialized focus of much of the Black polymath’s non-disciplinary work devalues that work in the eyes of their home institutions? Is it possible, for example, that the racialized subject matter of Derrick Bell’s brilliant speculative fiction diminished its significance in the eyes of his administrators?

And, how should an administration deal with faculty who protest against what they perceive as the racism of their institutions? What if that protest involves a withdrawl from teaching responsibilities? Do academic contracts include specific language on the maximum number of consecutive semesters a faculty member can be on leave? Should they?

In at least three of the four cases I mention in this post, the faculty member in question believed that he or she was wrongfully terminated. So, how can Black faculty protect their tenured positions? And how can institutions make clear their limits in terms of unpaid faculty leave and possible changes in courseload? Finally, to what degree does termination of a faculty member who is using unpaid leave as a form of protest constitute a violation of his or her right to freedom of speech?

Posted by Ajuan Mance