Stardate 20020223.1609

(On Screen): Maybe it's because I'm a cranky reactionary middle-aged white guy, but I've never understood just what it was that a "Black Studies" program actually did. I know I'm a grubby utilitarian, but I've always thought that going to college was supposed to prepare you for a career. I studied computer science and went into software engineering. Someone else studies chemistry and ends up working in the petrochemical industry. Even someone who studies Lit can get a job teaching somewhere.

But if you walk out of a university with a degree in Black Studies, what are you supposed to do next? Evidently the answer is that you get a job teaching Black Studies at some other university, which would seem to make it the worst kind of make-work.

Back in the 1960's, when there really began to be a lot of activism to break the glass ceiling for everyone except white men in the nation's corporations, there was a tendency for some companies to immediately take some black guy and give him a high-sounding title but no actual significance. This inspired what is now a classic cartoon showing a black man sitting behind a desk in a suit, with his hands clasped, and a sign on it saying "Vice President in charge of sitting beside the door." It's arguable that this is worse than nothing at all, and fortunately it helped make "token" a dirty word. Thirty years on, now you really do see quite a few non-WM's in places of responsibility. And that is as it should be. Of course, that's in the real world and not in the ivory tower.

A lot of the Black Studies programs were established at about that same time. I always was suspicious that they were really the "university department in charge of sitting beside the door." Token, all the way; really nothing more than a way of appeasing activists.

One of the trustees for the State University of New York appears to be a bit reactionary; she previously got in a brouhaha about a rather seedy conference about women's sexuality which was held at one SUNY campus. Now she's made a speech which, not to put too fine a point on it, says that SUNY's Black Studies programs are a waste of time and should be abolished, with their classes and teachers folded into the History department.

"What happened is they became therapeutic in nature, and the goal became consciousness raising as opposed to conveying solid scholarship."

If true, that's pretty damning. It means that the Black Studies program (which I would bet is overwhelmingly dominated by minority professors) has become a token department where they can be in charge. That lack of "solid scholarship" is a pretty serious claim. Silly me, I assumed that the response to this would be to cite a long list of important scholarship they had accomplished so as to refute that charge. Huh-uh.

The union representing university professors at SUNY has demanded her resignation. No attempt whatever to try to counter her arguments, simply a statement that she has proved that she is unfit to serve. But as a member of the Board of Trustees, isn't it her job to try to identify ways in which SUNY is not operating well and to attempt to fix them? Perhaps she's wrong in this specific instance, but I don't see how she can be wrong for trying.

"She has the right to say anything, no matter how stupid, as an individual, but she is a member of the Board of Trustees of SUNY, so she takes on institutional responsibilities," said William Scheuerman, president of the professors' union.

Indeed! As a private citizen, she has the right to criticize the Black Studies program; as a trustee I think she has an obligation to do so if she thinks it is not serving the needs of the students, not to mention the taxpayers of the State of New York, who are paying the bills.

To an outsider, this looks suspiciously like yet another example of where the academy's actions speak louder than words. They say that they are in favor of free expression and discourse; indeed, they wear it on their sleeves. But they seem to take every opportunity to ruthlessly stamp out any opinions they don't like. It's long been suspected that the nation's universities were hotbeds of censorship and thought control, and this looks like another example of that. Instead of honest intellectual examination of issues, it seems as if they spend all their time defending sacred cows.

The problem with the response in this case is that they are not saying that her criticism is wrong, but rather that she has no right to criticize at all. I can't accept that. It looks suspiciously to me as if they're afraid to actually deal with the issue she raises.