NEW YORK
Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley, one of the country’s most prominent Black intellectuals, is leaving Columbia University to join the University of Southern California as a joint professor of history and American studies and ethnicity.
In an age when universities are aggressively courting high-profile Black professors, sometimes offering them lucrative salaries and other perks, Kelley’s departure is one of a string of recent high-profile job moves.
Kelley’s departure from Columbia was the result of USC’s Senior Faculty Hiring Initiative, a drive to bring 100 leading senior-level scholars to the university. But he says his treatment at Columbia made the decision easy. Frustrated by not being able to secure a permanent home in the university’s history department, Kelley was more than receptive when USC contacted him.
“The reality is that the history department at Columbia didn’t want me,” he says, despite the national recognition he received for his books Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression and the collection of essays in Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class.
“Here I am at an Ivy League institution and the senior faculty didn’t think my work was sufficiently historical,” says Kelley, who was appointed to Columbia’s anthropology department and the Institute for Research in African American Studies. Kelley came to Columbia in 2003 after Dr. Manning Marable, one of Columbia’s highest profile professors, lured him away from New York University.
In accepting the position at USC, Kelley is giving up his endowed chair at Columbia. “At this point in my life, my own happiness and psychic peace is much more important than an endowed chair,” he says.
