After President Nan Keohane pledged to make Duke's African and African-American Studies program one of the top five in the nation last summer, AAAS faculty say the program is changing steadily--with new emphasis placed on community interaction, faculty recruitment and increased public and campus recognition.
Several AAAS faculty said that although improvement within any department or program is a long process, the progress made within AAAS in the past year--including an internal re-examination, the hiring of an assistant director, expansion of academic research and the potential creation of a master's program--has set a good precedent for further growth. Faculty hope these changes, including Keohane's promise to recognize the program as a department, will contribute to Duke's ongoing race dialogue.
"We do move across various borders of [race and gender] separation," said Houston Baker, Albert M. Greenfield Professor of English and professor in AAAS. "I do believe that the stronger the faculty and presence on campus, the better chance you have of providing different channels of connection across those borders."
History Professor Charles Payne was recently appointed director of AAAS last November after serving as chair of the program's self-study committee--a body dedicated to scrutinizing the existing program and clarifying its mission.
"We're one hell of a group of teachers," Payne said. "I enjoy my colleagues, in terms of what I can learn from them."
Payne said Provost Peter Lange has been actively encouraging AAAS faculty to recruit and hire new members who specialize in the field.
"I think one of the things that's going to represent a major improvement in the program is the hiring of an associate director, a man named Gregory Meyjes," Baker said.
"He will, at first assignment, put the self-study into quite eloquent prose and that will be our mission statement."
In particular, both Payne and Baker said they hope Meyjes will help involve Duke's AAAS faculty with the Durham community.
"He'll allow us to improve what we do in the way of programming," Payne said. "One of the things that we have in the proposal stages is a proposal that will allow AAAS faculty to work with public school teachers to address issues that we are concerned with in their own teaching."
Payne said he also hopes to strengthen the program's interdisciplinary approach by branching out into other fields like economics.
"I think the other thing that it's fair to say is that we're going to become more diasporic," Payne said. "We'd like to think in terms of the African-American experience not specifically in the U.S. sense, but across the diaspora."
Other plans include adding a master's program, which would require an increase in faculty hires.
"We've been encouraged by the college to be searching aggressively," Payne said. "It's possible that we'll do two searches next year instead of the traditional one."
Efforts to improve the program intensified in response to the Duke Student Movement, formed last year to protest the publication of a controversial advertisement in The Chronicle and racial injustice at the University. Keohane promised the DSM the University would aim for a top-five AAAS program.
"A strong AAAS program will benefit the race climate if there are a lot of other students on campus other than African Americans becoming majors," said senior and AAAS major Bianca Williams, who was active in last spring's demonstrations. "I think that the AAAS [program] does a good job of educating the student body as a whole because it does a lot of programming."
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