For the past two weeks Oberlin’s African American Studies department has been celebrating its thirtieth anniversary with a series of speeches, concerts, panels and banquets. The events have been well attended by crowds of students, professors and townspeople eager to sing the program’s praises.
“I think that this is a time of a lot of negativity and fear,” said one sophomore. “This anniversary celebration is something that is just good, something we can be proud of and feel good about.”
Incredibly, one of the distinguishing marks of Oberlin’s AAS department is that it has survived. In the late sixties and early seventies many American colleges began developing AAS departments, only to have them fall apart or diminish in size from lack of resources or interest. In the world of African American Studies, a department of thirty years is venerable, and Oberlin’s program is one of the largest and wealthiest in the country for a college of its size.
The department has come far since its inception in 1972. Other changes have come about since.
“Initially it was rare to have any white students in African American Studies classes,” chair and co-founder of the department Yakubu Saaka said. “Now it is not uncommon to have the majority of students in the class be white. That was impossible in the 1970’s.”
This fact has not escaped some students, such as one first-year who preferred not to give her name. “To be honest, I thought when I got to college that I would be in the majority with other black kids in African American studies classes, and that wasn’t really true. It’s fine and it doesn’t matter, but I just thought they wouldn’t be interested.”
While AAS students and faculty spend the month celebrating the department’s progress, they are also deciding what its future should look like. The first step may be filling in some of the gaps in the curriculum. The department is actively searching for a professor who specializes in African history and African/African American politics. Professor Saaka says he is proud of the department’s growth since 1972 when there were two full-time professors and no students majoring in AAS. Today there are ten professors and thirty majors. Saaka added, however, that he realizes the department will only be maintained with a struggle.
The position of a retiring professor is not automatically filled. The professor’s department must justify the necessity of the position, which may be transferred to another department with a greater need for new faculty. With three AAS professors possibly retiring in the next five years, the future of the department is a real concern.
“We have made the black experience an integral part of the academy,” he said. “But part of the idea of the 30th anniversary is to make people think about the future. If we just keep saying that we’ve done well, we become complacent and irrelevant.”