Since the Indiana Commission for Higher Education announced the approval of the new doctoral program in African American and African Diaspora Studies (AAADS) at Indiana University Bloomington more than a week ago, John McCluskey Jr. says he has felt both elated and relieved.
This announcement was four years and countless meetings in the making.
“On the one hand I have been elated,” says McCluskey, an AASDS professor who chaired the faculty committee that wrote the proposal for the new degree program. “On the other hand, because we’ve put so much work into it, it is almost anti-climatic.”
The faculty have not celebrated together yet, but in the days since the decision was handed down they’ve already begun recruiting students for their first cohort of five or six students for the fall of 2009, McCluskey says.
“We have a year to recruit, and let students know who we are,” he says. “We are already looking forward to the first class.”
