Conversation Of The Week XII: Preparing For a Multicultural Future: The Africa and African-American Studies Program at Rollins College

African-American Studies, Africana Studies, Afro-American Studies, Black Studies, Pan-African Studies are all descriptors for academic and intellectual endeavors in the United States that were developed in response to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. These programs struggle to attract students, obtain funding, and integrate within the broader curriculum on campuses across the country. This year, Rollins College, the oldest recognized college in the state of Florida is celebrating its 125th year anniversary. This year also marks the 40th anniversary of the College’s first African-American graduates. As the College charts a vision for liberal art education in the new millennia, finding a sustainable posture for the Africa and African-American Studies (AAAS) program is an ongoing challenge.

In December 2007, I began a process to revive the AAAS program at Rollins College. At the time, the program suffered from the loss of two faculty coordinators over five years and no student participation. While the college promotes the value of interdisciplinary programs, the AAAS program’s lack of visibility combined with limited faculty participation offered inadequate opportunity for program development. My decision to take on coordinator duties came after long period of careful deliberation of departmental needs versus institutional benefits, student diversity concerns, and community engagement possibilities. Considering these issues, my goal was to enhance student awareness, promote campus engagement, and link AAAS to the wider community.

The AAAS Program at Rollins began in 1986 with a meeting of five faculty members who saw a need for an interdisciplinary program to expand student understanding of the African experience and stimulate a greater dialogue about race issues in the United States. Despite the laudable goal generally associated with ethnic studies, the reality is that these programs face an uphill battle. While most administrators and faculty voice support for such programs, without concerted and organized efforts to integrate them into the college community, neither students nor faculty from non-diverse backgrounds are likely to participate in a consistent manner. The history of the AAAS program at Rollins reflects this fact. After its initial creation, the program enjoyed several years of robust growth developing new courses in several departments, exploring opportunity for study abroad partnerships and supporting student groups on campus. Over time however, the program has struggled as the founding cadre of professors and students have graduated, retired, or moved to new institutions. Faced with the need to consistently reconnect with students, attract faculty and reach out to the community outside the college, the program has struggled.

Exposing students to diversity is not the same as dedicating resources to insure meaningful learning integrated within the core educational experience. Finding a mechanism to support diversity in a consistent manner while preventing marginalization is an ongoing process. In this regard, Rollins reflects national development. Like many institutions of higher education, Rollins has dedicated resources and manpower to define the best practice to integrate diversity into the liberal art education.

With rising educational costs, concerns about science and math proficiency, and the push for greater informational expertise, the time to address diversity is difficult to achieve. For faculty concerned with diversity, this is a challenging reality. Several ethnic programs are offered at the college with varying degrees of student, faculty, and staff involvement. Despite the vast literature about the need to negotiate a diverse social landscape in the new millennium, the importance of studying African, Asian, Latin America, or other minorities groups is a complicated calculation for any institution with limited resources.

The benefits associated with the AAAS program are not in question from my perspective. The task is to make the AAAS program functional, visible, and relevant to the community. I believe Rollins benefits from a dynamic and engaged AAAS program for several reasons.

First, our college has a unique link to the African-American experience. Rollins’ eighth president, Hamilton Holt was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Second, our college is located two miles from Eatonville, Fla. the oldest incorporated African-American community in the United States and the home of Zora Neale Hurston. A novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist, Hurston was a star of the Harlem Renaissance and leading academic advocating for greater understanding of African-American culture. Today, Hurston is lauded for her efforts to document African-American life with novels such as Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), Tell My Horse (1937) Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). These works, combined with her non-fiction writing and autobiography, rejected ideas of black victimhood and emphasized a vibrant African-American self. Rollins has a unique link to Hurston's work and legacy. While it is not well known today, Hurston was affiliated with our institution. In 1932 Edwin Osgood Grover, Professor of Books helped Hurston to develop her idea about black folk theater while working at Rollins. With assistance from Theater Professor Robert Wunsch, Hurston wrote and produced two plays, From Sun to Sun (1933) and All De Live Long Day (1935) and staged them on campus. Hurston thanked Wunsch in the dedication to Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934) and Grover in the dedication for Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939).

Third, our college is currently exploring a new general education curriculum. The Rollins Plan (RP) offers students an alternative to satisfy general education requirements. The essence of the Rollins Plan program is a series of integrated courses balanced across the expressive arts, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences and focused on a grand theme. Given the diversity in our region, and the emphasis on internationalization within our institution, the African Diaspora represents a vital link to understand shifting global circumstances and viable future thematic subject for the new curriculum. Taken together, all of these factors offered a solid opportunity to revitalize the AAAS program.

Reviewing the AAAS at Rollins, we approached re-structuring the program to refocus attention on the original programmatic objectives. Our goal was to highlight the AAAS as a multi-disciplinary field that analyzes peoples of African descent’s past and present culture, achievements, characteristics, and issues in a global context. Under our new organizational model inter-departmental participation is maximized, a global perspective is reinforced by linking AAAS to the college mission of educating students for global citizenship and responsible leadership. The new configuration approved by our Academic Affairs Committee is more international in scope, has greater opportunity for independent study, and insures sustainability by limiting departmental elective courses as primary courses in the minor. The resulting curriculum requires three introductory courses from a possible six, two secondary courses from a possible six, and two advanced courses from a possible five. In addition, all minors are required to complete a senior independent study that integrates African or African-American content into a senior project based on their major.

While curricular re-organization was a necessary step to stabilize the AAAS program, the process alone is no guarantee of student or faculty participation. In order to engage the campus community with AAAS program, a new method of faculty and student engagement needed to be created. To achieve that goal, I crafted a campus-wide program designed to engage faculty and students with the AAAS program. Project Mosaic is designed to link together several classes in exploration of an African or African-American subject. Faculty time is a crucial resource, so participants were asked to look for linkages within an already established class. By approaching faculty with the idea of enhancing classroom experience through multicultural exploration, rather than adding work, several faculty members saw value in participating. During the 2010-2011 academic year, Zora Neale Hurston serves as Project Mosaic’s thematic foundation. Participating faculty from the anthropology, history, art and art history, and the education department will explore Hurston’s cultural impact through their distinct disciplinary lens.

The Mosaic Project facilitates the inclusion of AAAS content into participating classes and enhances student learning by highlighting the influence of the chosen thematic focus within distinct academic subfields. Enhanced through the support of an Associated Colleges of the South (ACS) Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Renewal grant, Project Mosaic allows faculty to explore new techniques and content, expands classroom experience by integrating diverse perspective, and promotes interdisciplinary collaboration across departments and divisions. Individual class projects will be preserved in the College’s online archive and accessible for review and future learning. The goal is to make Project Mosaic a recurring AAAS activity incorporating new thematic foci with rotating faculty participation. This model will aid student and faculty participation in the AAAS program and make it possible for the program to easily integrate with ongoing service-learning projects, student-faculty collaborative research, and innovative pedagogical inquiry at our institution. To further support classroom activities, the AAAS is organizing a speaker series to bring scholars to campus to discuss a wide variety of issues related to the African-American experience.

These efforts will expose more students and faculty AAAS, but the Rollins tradition is one that emphasizes community outreach. With this in mind, the AAAS program is developing a project exploring the civil rights legacy in Florida. Working with the Olin Library Special Collections and Archives, we are digitizing the personal papers of forgotten civil right leader Harry T. Moore. Moore was field secretary for the NAACP in Florida. A resident of Mims, Fla., Moore traveled across the state establishing new NAACP chapters between 1934 and 1950. In addition, Moore founded the Progressive Voters’ League to encourage African-Americans voters to hold elected official accountable. Moore urged African-Americans to register as democrats and vote against discriminatory policies and politicians. Murdered in 1951 and largely omitted from the traditional civil rights narrative, Moore’s work offers important insight into the civil right experience in the twentieth century. By taking his papers and incorporating them into our digital archives, we will be able to bring this forgotten history to the wider world. Over time, we hope to include students in the program to catalogue and digitize the materials and encourage senior thesis and other class projects around these materials.

Despite these efforts, more remains to be done to make the AAAS program a stable presence on campus. Building links between student groups on campus and the community off campus is an ongoing process. While it is vital for students of African descent to know that the AAAS is functional, participation in ethnic studies programs needs to appeal to students from every background. Crafting a message that cultural knowledge bolsters opportunities for all majors is an important process. In addition, securing resources for innovative programs is an ongoing process that requires a systematic appeal to administrative sources, grant funding, and fundraising. The resources examining continental Africa are limited and we are actively investigating opportunities to bring African scholars to campus, promote student study abroad in Africa and link examinations of African circumstances to other regional study areas. Finally, faculty participation must be nurtured at the departmental and administrative level. These concerns do not overshadow the progress made to bolster Africa and African-American Studies at Rollins. With the dedicated faculty, students, and staff at our institution the future of the AAAS program looks bright.