In 1969, approximately 70 black Brandeis students occupied Ford Hall to protest mistreatment on the part of the University administration. They issued a list of 10 demands to the University. The very first of these demands was "a department of African Studies with the power to hire and fire its own faculty." On April 24, 1969, after the students had lasted through an 11-day standoff with administrators, the University finally relented and created the Department of African and Afro-American Studies. In the time since then, the department has become a robust source of scholarship with a top-notch faculty, and the occupation has become celebrated on campus as a powerful affirmation of the potential for direct action to force necessary social change.With this history in mind, the recent Curriculum and Academic Restructuring Steering committee proposal to dismantle the AAAS department and transform it into an interdisciplinary program is extremely surprising. Brandeis takes pride in the small part of civil rights/black power era history that occurred on campus, so it's shocking that the University would consider massively undercutting the gains of this student struggle. African-American students here in the 1960s were part of a wider movement for serious black representation in academia, as black students felt alienated and unrepresented.

But even if we set aside the history of the department, the proposal is still worrisome. While the CARS report claims that its plans will somehow strengthen the AAAS program, the proposal includes forcibly reassigning AAAS professors and removing the program's ability to choose its own classes and faculty. Any study of African or African-American issues on campus will have to occur under the umbrella of another department, and there is no evidence that other departments will maintain a strong commitment to the serious study of black issues. There is a need for autonomy of black scholarship, since there has been a historically weak commitment of universities to their AAAS programs and significant prejudices against the academic contributions of non-Western political theorists and historians. Without its own department, the AAAS faculty will lose control over the direction of their program, and AAAS majors like myself are concerned that we will see more generic courses (with titles like "Race, Class, and Gender") instead of a direct focus on specifically African issues.

CARS cites the small number of AAAS majors ("just 7 in [academic year] 2007-2008") and the small size of the faculty (five) as justification for its recommendation. They point out that "This year . when three AAAS faculty members had the opportunity to go on research leave, there were only two department faculty members re-maining at Brandeis." Of course, neither of these reasons actually makes a case for shutting down the department. The CARS report concedes that "although AAAS graduates relatively few majors, . average enrollment in its courses is strong." So the lack of faculty speaks more to a lack of commitment by the University to the department than to any weakness of the department itself. The University's perpetual unwillingness to properly support the AAAS department with adequate faculty is not justification for the department's dissolution.

In a lengthy section of the report, the CARS committee cites Princeton University as an example of an institution which restructured its AAAS program to great effect. But a cursory examination of the case they cite reveals that Princeton was attempting to expand its program and renovated a whole new building to house it. The CARS report proposes nothing of the sort. Here and elsewhere, the CARS committee feebly attempts to spin the dismantlement into a positive, arguing that this will benefit the both the students and the department's faculty. Yet they never address the key question this raises: If, as the report argues, this measure will strengthen the department, how will it possibly save money? Certainly, if this proposal could truly be implemented in a way that both saved money and benefited AAAS students and faculty, we would have no problem with it. But if it is a cost-cutting measure, it is hardly going to be the boon to AAAS students that the report suggests.

Dr. Ronald Walters, the aforementioned original chair of the AAAS department, states that the most worrisome aspect of the proposal is "the casual professionalism with which this it has been offered, somewhat thematic of this age in that it ignores the importance of the symbolic entity of a department to African American students as a place of empowerment, position and academic motivation within a still largely hostile institution." The CARS report is disturbing not simply because it is radical but because for all of its praise for AAAS, it treats the department as a liquid asset, to be dissolved in the case of emergencies. If the University has any commitment to its own history, or to that ambiguous axiom of "social justice," it should understand the absolute necessity of maintaining the department in its current form. AAAS is not expendable, and Brandeis cannot simply wipe the struggles of its black students from the pages of its history.

Editor's Note: Nathan Robinson '11 is an AAAS major.