|
« AAUP Homepage
|
To Be an Ordinary Department
Ethnic studies departments and programs have become familiar parts of the academic community. How has this legitimacy affected their unique missions?
By Forrest D. Colburn
During my first day at work at Lehman College, the Bronx campus of the City University of New York, the college mail carrier, an African American, confronted me. In front of three Hispanic colleagues, he asked how I could possibly be the "chair" of the Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies when I was not Hispanic. I replied, "Nobody's perfect." He seemed satisfied with my answer. In the ensuing days—and weeks—I had many other occasions to think quickly. Sometimes, too, I had to make difficult decisions.
During my interview in spring 1997 for the position at Lehman College, I expressed my view that being in a university department is like being on a boat out at sea. No one gets off the boat, so everyone must work together. As it turned out, however, it proved necessary to throw a couple of colleagues overboard. The department secretary had to leave abruptly, and student employees left, too.
In addition to wrestling with agonizing personnel issues, I also did mundane work in those first few months of the 1997-98 academic year. I cleaned the department office, defrosted our refrigerator, found some framed pictures for the walls, and brought in a few potted plants. I got rid of broken computer equipment and had other equipment fixed. I ordered a new sign for the department. Just outside the door of the department office was a bulletin board, which I turned into a showcase for the publications of the department's remaining faculty. And the publications were impressive: books from august university presses such as Cambridge, Princeton, and California, as well as a score of journal articles.
At department meetings my remaining colleagues were supportive. There were no differences of opinion on how to respond to CUNY-wide efforts to tighten academic standards. I had a few ideas and so did others, all of which were heartily embraced. For the most part, my colleagues were already academically rigorous. So more than anything else, I had to promote the department and its good work. These efforts succeeded, but my colleagues wondered out loud if part of my success came from my being, as one of them said, "a white knight from Princeton." The assertion made me uncomfortable, but so did the thought that my colleagues might be right. As another colleague once said, "Not everything here in the Bronx is ethnicity, but it is never far from the surface either."
I soon stopped hearing disheartening stories—many of which were embellished—about my department whenever I walked through campus. Instead, I began to hear compliments. At a meeting of all the chairs and deans of the college, the previous provost even once quipped, "If everyone were doing what the Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies is doing, we would not have to revise the curriculum."
I neither rested nor relaxed, though. I assumed that the former disarray, real and imagined, was just one facet of what was sure to be a difficult challenge: the leadership of an area-studies-cum-ethnic-studies department at a public institution in the Bronx. Our students are poor and poorly educated; nearly half are African American, and the other half are Hispanic. The faculty is older, overwhelmingly white, and housed predominantly in "discipline-based" departments. Where, I wondered, does our department stand within the college? How high are the shoals?
Much to my surprise, the Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies proved to be an "ordinary" department at an "ordinary" liberal arts college. Students are polite, even deferential. To my relief, the intellectual enterprise of our department is accepted, too, by our colleagues in other departments. There is no intellectual—or political—resistance to what we are doing, either as teachers or as scholars. Proposals for new course offerings have been accepted, including, for example, "Latinos in the United States," "Latin American Cinema," and "Literature of the Dominican Republic." Indeed, most of these new courses are cross-listed with those of other departments. The books sprawled out on the shelves of the campus bookstore suggest an intellectual candelabra: Shakespeare, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Paul Gauguin, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert F. Kennedy, and Toni Morrison.
To conclude that we are an ordinary department, however, is to admit that we have lost the political and social fervor, the militancy, the oomph that led to the creation of what was originally called the Department of Puerto Rican Studies. Students take our courses to fulfill requirements, to simplify their schedules, or—at best—out of mild curiosity. Members of the department are too worn down by the heavy teaching load at CUNY (seven courses annually spread out over two semesters) and the pursuit of scholarship to be community activists. Moreover, as my colleagues learned long ago, tenure and promotion committees slight community work.
On campus, we may have a niche, but we scare no one. Our budget is as paltry as that of every other department on the campus. Any request for a faculty "line" is evaluated coldly on the basis of student enrollments. The ethnicity of our student body is ignored, and so are the needs of the community. We have no special intellectual, moral, or political clout. We are an ordinary department in an ordinary liberal arts college. This standing, however, has a positive consequence: we do not suffer discrimination. We are free to teach what we wish (as long as we can fill a classroom). We can publish what we wish (as long as we can find a publisher).
Perhaps the Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College can even be said to be flourishing. In fall 2002, for example, we offered thirty-three classes. We thus offered more courses, for example, than the college's Department of Political Science (which offered twenty-two courses). Every fall, we hold an open house, and the last couple of years we have used the event to celebrate, too, the publication of books by members of our department. We seek to contribute to the intellectual life of the college by offering either a lecture or a film series every year. And every year we hold a department book drive, collecting worthwhile books to donate to the library.
All is not well, though. Students are poorly prepared for college, and most students, burdened with work and family, do not have the time they need to study. The campus is pleasant, safe, even picturesque, but funding is inadequate. We are woefully understaffed. More worrisome, there is a looming storm, one that does not appear to be tied to ethnicity.
We may be an ordinary department at an ordinary liberal arts college, but the conceptualization—and funding—of Lehman College as a liberal arts college is being eroded. What seems to be emerging is a murky view of the college as a high-end vocational school, where we give students the marketable skills to participate in tomorrow's economy. In this new era, computer graphics trump art history, speech pathology trumps theater, "mass communication" (that is, television) trumps English literature, economics shrivels into accounting, and the sciences are crowned and courted for their potential revenue contributions, through grants and patents. More and more "textbooks" appear in the campus bookstore. At faculty meetings, we discuss "the budget," "revenue targets," and "cost cutting."
In this sober setting, Latin American and Latino studies—as well as African American studies—become, as one fellow chair told me, "academic and political window dressing." Worse, a dean told me that our department had outlived its purpose.
This new model of higher education remains poorly defined, perhaps out of political necessity, but it is in the ascendancy. No one in particular is responsible. There is no conspiracy and no ringleader. There are only "the winds of change." Money, however, follows the wind. Moreover, dark clouds over Wall Street—so close to the Bronx and yet so far away—only heighten the allure of money, which has gotten scarcer. Since our department cannot turn money into money, little is allocated to the department. We are just a "cost center."
As chair of the Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies, I do not worry about a political or intellectual confrontation. I have learned to have a sixth sense for noticing ethnocentric behavior, but I have yet to be assaulted with ethnic chauvinism or ethnic skullduggery (directed either at me personally or at my department). My concern as chair is more pedestrian: I worry about our department being slighted, or passed over altogether, when resources are distributed at the college.
At its founding, Lehman College's Department of Puerto Rican Studies surely had enemies. But in the heady 1960s and early 1970s, the department had a star over it, and it had claws. The struggle for room in the academy was bitter and protracted. Intellectual respectability was won, enabling us to be, today, an ordinary department. In the long struggle, however, we lost our star and we lost our claws. We are thus ill prepared to contest a new paradigm in higher education, one in which, at least in public institutions serving poor communities, specialized technical training threatens to crowd out the offerings of a liberal arts education.
A colleague in the Department of Black Studies, William Seraile, has been at Lehman College since 1971. He remembers a different era, when students wore combat boots and flak jackets, came to class with a sense of purpose, and peppered professors with questions. Students, he recalls, were both interesting and interested. The administration was respectful and attentive—maybe even fearful—toward the Department of Black Studies and the Department of Puerto Rican Studies. But Seraile, an accomplished historian, has noted a dramatic change in the status of his department, which has dwindled in size. He, too, feels that his department has become an ordinary department, and he concludes, "To be ordinary is to be ignored."
My window into the lives of our students, their families, and their community is a small, distant window, but I can see clearly. Economic necessity looms large, so students themselves want programs of study that lead to a quick job. So much potential is thwarted, though, by not first learning more about who they are, where they have come from, and how big the world is. Such quests build a stronger sense of identity, pride, possibilities, and ambition, as well as analytical skills and the gift of being articulate in speech and prose.
One of my tasks as chair is to review student evaluations. I feel content when a student scribbles, for example, "The course taught me to be proud to be a Latina." It makes me feel I am from an extraordinary department. I also take comfort in observing visible improvement in students' writing over the course of a single class, and even in just exposing students to books that they otherwise would not read. I am happy to help nurture pride and self-confidence, but I feel best when I can also help broaden the knowledge of students and the analytical skills they possess. These disparate goals of mine, and of my colleagues in our department, are the quintessential objectives of a liberal arts education. Our students here in the Bronx are as well served by them, and deserve them as much, as any other college students.
We in the Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies are not alone in being slighted for our perceived irrelevance in training workers for tomorrow's economy. Pity philosophy, even history. But for us it is bitter to have fought so hard to be part of the academy, only to discover that the heady effort to remake the academy based on the the "business model" (to use the expression of our current provost) makes our victory hollow. Intellectual, and even political, gains are neutered by the ascendancy of an economic calculus to education.
As I shuttle between the Bronx and Manhattan on the subway, I cannot help believing it is premature for our department to have only pedestrian worries and to be treated like an ordinary department. Race and ethnicity loom too large in any effort to explain fortunes and opportunities—or their absence—in the great city of New York.
When I was a boy, growing up in San Diego, I was moved by the life of Abraham Lincoln. As I saw it then, and as I still see it today, the moral of Abraham Lincoln, growing up in poverty and in a rural backwater yet becoming president and emancipator of slaves, is that education is more than "job training": education is an agent for enlightenment and equality.
We are in a welcome era of relative ethnic harmony in the United States, even in the Bronx. I am happy to be spared angry students in combat boots. I lament, though, that this period of calm is not being used to address important social problems, many of which are tied to race and ethnicity. Politics has receded too far into the background for college education to be able to serve effectively its higher calling.
Forrest Colburn is chair of the Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College of the City University of New York. His most recent book is Latin America at the End of Politics (2002).
|