Dr. Maulana Karenga recently led efforts to fight off an attempt at California State University, Long Beach to strip the Africana Studies Department of its departmental status and replace it as a program.
The hearing, which took place at the California African American Art Museum on Friday, was convened in the wake of numerous attacks in recent years against Black studies in particular, and ethnic studies in general, at public institutions across the Golden State.
“We know better than anyone else how important it is to have culture on campus,” said Assembly member Reginald Jones Sawyer, who chairs the state’s 12-person Black Caucus. “We’ve had deep discussions about ethnic studies programs on our campuses and we are very concerned.”
Representatives from the California Community College system and the California State University system testified at the hearing. The University of California system, which is headed by Janet Napolitano — the former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — did not send a representative.
The concerns that many Black studies faculty raised at the two-hour hearing are not all that different from the ongoing battles currently being waged around ethnic studies in other parts of the country.
“Africana Studies has not made a hire in 13 years,” said Dr. Charles Toombs, who chairs the Africana Studies Department at San Diego State University. “We really need to have funding to hire people to do the work.”
Toombs said that one of the biggest misnomers is that anyone can teach Black studies and said that, even though many Black studies programs may not have the robust numbers of majors as some other academic disciplines such as English and history, its courses are often cross-listed and they generally provide a service to the overall campus community by offering courses that can be taken for general education credit.
