The songs and chants of the Civil Rights Movement echoed through the quiet, empty corridors of the second floor of Syracuse University’s Sims Hall as Herbert Ruffin, associate professor of African American Studies, taught a handful of students about Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Nearly 60 years ago, King spoke at Sims Hall about “inequities in American education.” In 1969, four years after his speech, more than 100 Black students demonstrated on the front steps of the university’s administration building, demanding SU address the needs of Black students. The protest led to the 1971 creation of the AAS program and its Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library, and in 1979, AAS was officially established as a department in the College of Arts & Sciences.

But on Jan. 12, 2024 — the last business day before spring semester classes started — AAS faculty and staff received an email notifying them that their department would have no chair for this semester. The decision was made after no agreement was reached for an interim chair appointment of Ruffin, the email states.

“In the meantime, activity will proceed as normal this semester in the department. Your committees will do the work they normally do,” wrote Gerald R. Greenberg, the senior associate dean for academic affairs.

Just as books by Black authors are banned across the country, Horace Campbell, professor of African American studies and political science, said SU is gradually “destroying” its AAS department — “the only SU unit dedicated to comprehensive academic study of Black lives, histories, political dynamics and cultural practices.”

Department chairs

S. N. Sangmpam, a professor of African American studies and political science, said the AAS department typically follows its set bylaws when selecting a chair. When requesting a new chair in the past, faculty went to a meeting, said they needed a new chair, read the department’s bylaws and began the process, he said.

In his about 35 years with AAS, Sangmpam said he has seen the department follow these procedures when electing chairs internally and functionally working with the university when they needed to find an outside candidate.

“All these chairs were chosen, selected, following procedures. They were elected. There was no fight, no coup d’état, there was no dysfunction,” Sangmpam said. “They did what the department asked them to do.”

A university spokesperson wrote in a statement to The Daily Orange that there have been seven department chairs, including multiple interim chairs, in the last 10 years. Of those seven, the spokesperson wrote, five have served one year or less.

After Ruffin served as chair for four years, AAS faculty decided it was time for new leadership, and he stepped down in 2020. Sangmpam said he remembers a meeting in which he asked for applications for chair, but there was no consensus on who should fill the position.

Joan Bryant, associate professor of African American studies, decided to serve as chair for one year. When she completed her tenure, Sangmpam said he expected the department to follow the same procedures but was instead met with “shocking news” — Arts & Sciences decided to look for an outside chair.

“We believe that, regardless of the reason considered for your approval of the external chair search, you have displayed total disregard for matters of governance of the AAS Department,” department members wrote in an April 2021 email.

Lois Agnew, associate provost for academic programs, served as interim chair of the department from 2021 to 2022 and was tasked with looking for an outside chair, Sangmpam said. Sangmpam said that he and Campbell would “not participate in this masquerade,” and, along with several members of faculty, wrote emails protesting the decisions.

Vlad Dima, who holds a doctoral degree in French studies, came to the department as chair and a professor for the spring 2023 semester. He previously served as the chair of the department of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. According to SU’s website, Dima specializes in African and French cinema and teaches a course about soccer in Africa.

The spokesperson wrote in an email to The D.O. that Dima was hired “with the support and endorsement of Syracuse’s AAS faculty.”

Dima spent one semester as the chair of AAS. Campbell said Dima initially indicated that he would like to be “relieved” of the position after the spring 2023 semester. He officially announced his departure on a Sep. 13 Zoom meeting.

“In the discussion about needing a replacement chair, (Dima) stated, ‘it’s the first step of AAS having to rethink its structure and its future,” Bryant wrote in an email to The D.O.

The university spokesperson confirmed that Dima “recently stepped down from the role.” He did not respond to The D.O.’s request for comment.

As Dima departed, he reported to AAS faculty that Behzad Mortazavi, dean of Arts & Sciences, “called for the names of two professors – full or associate – who could step in as chair,” the faculty statement reads.

Campbell said AAS faculty unanimously nominated Ruffin, who has been with the department for 16 years.

“In an attempt to fill the unanticipated gap, we promptly submitted the name of the one faculty member with chair experience who would not have additional administrative responsibilities this semester,” the statement reads.

Arts & Sciences did not accept the faculty’s nomination because Ruffin is not a full professor, according to Greenberg’s email.

Provost Gretchen Ritter has “strongly encouraged” that department chairs selected by all colleges be “currently either 1) full professors; or 2) associate professors who are coming up for promotion to full professor imminently,” the spokesperson wrote.

“This recommendation is so that the responsibilities associated with a department chair role don’t hinder faculty on their path to promotion. The purpose of this recommendation is to empower and support faculty,” the spokesperson wrote.

Because the department has no chair, AAS faculty are currently tasked with additional duties that impede their work, regardless of their professorial position, Sangmpam said.

“All of us, we have become chairs of the department,” he said. “Speaking of killing a department, that is a recipe.”

Mortazavi did not respond to The D.O.’s request for comment.

Campbell said Ruffin “wants to work on this department” and has been doing so since he became department chair in 2016.

“Professor Ruffin was the one who spent time to change the make-up and look of this hall and corridors, you know, get furniture,” Campbell said. “Everything we got in this department came from struggling.”

AAS faculty stated they view Arts & Sciences’s actions as “arbitrary and capricious.” When AAS faculty met with Mortazavi to voice their concerns, he “chastised” them for their “temerity,” asserting they were “usurping a dean’s prerogative,” the AAS statement reads.

“(Mortazavi) failed to explain why he initially called for names of associate professors, why he never communicated his concerns to the individual we proposed, and why he did not consult either of the department’s eligible full professors about becoming the AAS chair,” it reads.

SU’s political science department recently appointed Seth Jolly, an associate professor, as its new chair.

When asked if Jolly is up for a promotion to full professor “imminently,” SU’s spokesperson wrote that the university does “not discuss the specific details of any professor’s tenure path.”

The dean’s office did not contact the faculty’s candidate for “more than two months,” AAS faculty wrote, and an additional month passed before the office issued its next communication: the Jan. 12 email notifying AAS faculty and staff that the department would have no chair.

“They have made the department — to use their own term — dysfunctional by depriving it of leadership. And they turn around and blame the people in the department who are doing things that they would not do otherwise to keep the place running,” Sangmpam said.

The positions of six faculty — who have either retired or left for other reasons — have not been replaced since their departures, Campbell said.

These replacement hires are necessary to fulfill AAS curriculum in 19th Century Literature, Caribbean Cultural Studies, African American Musicology, Afro-Latin American Studies and Information Science and Librarian Studies, Campbell said.

“Scholarship at any rate is just not their concern,” Sangmpam said.

The Future of African American Studies at SU by The Daily Orange on Scribd

MLK Library

The MLK Library — which is “the work of African American students, who launched it in 1969 with one shelf of books in the former Black Cultural Center,” according to SU’s website — has not had a full-time librarian since its last librarian retired in spring 2022.

“Since then, Syracuse University’s Libraries have been providing staffing support until a permanent solution can be determined with the AAS faculty,” the spokesperson wrote.

In 1989, the department worked with administration, creating a set of bylaws — called the 13-Point Document — that fostered the growth and institutional status of the department, brought esteemed scholars to SU and created the Pan African studies master’s program, according to SU’s website on the history of the AAS department.

The agreement authorized a full-time librarian for the MLK Library and ordered the “search to begin as soon as possible,” according to the document’s plaque in Sims Hall.

Graduate student workers currently run the front desk of the library under the guidance of Bryant, who multiple students said is working “double” and “triple” time as the librarian of the MLK Library.

Jordan Pierre, a master’s student studying television, radio and film, said students have to be aware of “simple things” — for instance that certain books in the MLK Library can’t be found in Bird Library — because “if you don’t know, you just remain the victim.”

“Students fought for this. We fought for the space here. They want to cut students off all of this,” Campbell said, pointing to the books as he walked around the library.

Funding

Both Campbell and Joy Nyokabi Karinge, who was an AAS teaching assistant for two years before graduating in 2023, believe that the department is not considered viable by the university because it does not bring in much money due to its low enrollment.

There are a total of 34 students in the department — 12 undergraduate AAS majors, 8 undergraduate minors and 14 master’s students in the department’s Pan African studies program — according to the spokesperson.

Karinge and multiple students acknowledged that the department isn’t as profitable as other departments.

“I don’t even want to think that it’s like, ‘Oh, the school just doesn’t want to fund the program,’ because that’d be really unfortunate to hear from the school that I’m paying all this money to go to,” said Maria Dut, an undeclared freshman interested in AAS.

Black Student Union President Jordan Beasley emphasized that the department is not being “defunded,” but rather “mismanaged” — citing that he, Dylan France, Aldrick Cade, David Bruen and Adia Santos had “worked on this issue previously” within the Student Association.

“There are very large issues that are going on with the African American Studies department, but I think we need to focus on those issues instead of passing along the message that the department is being defunded,” Beasley said.

Beasley said the main issue is that the department has not had a “stable” chair for the “past three to four years now.” He added that AAS doesn’t see as much promotion as other departments when recruiting students.

“For us, it’s not purely business. It cannot be purely financial,” Karinge said. “We’re talking about students’ lives … the struggle for Blackness in Syracuse in general. All these Black students coming from all over the U.S. and all over the world, trying to get something from here, are being denied access to that history, to that heritage.”

John Bol Ajak, a current master’s student studying television, radio and film and a former SU men’s basketball player, said “people are just so caught up about money” and that it’s “killing society.” He said Campbell’s class “changed the trajectory” of his life.

With the lack of students in the program, he said Black students can “really rally up” to promote AAS.

“We can do that as Black students. We have that power. We can have these influential athletes come. These kids look up to these types of people. That’s something I would suggest we do to really promote this and have more students sign up,” Ajak said.

He said people “could be convinced” and that parents of color want their kids to “understand their history, because that’s the future.”

The importance of AAS

Dut said her favorite classes she’s taken in her first two semesters at SU were in the AAS department.

“I see a future in myself in the African American Studies department, and I know some of the other kids do too,” Dut said.

Ajak said while he failed Campbell’s class, he “passed it in life,” he said.

“I got the message of what the class was teaching me,” he said. “I stopped playing basketball. I started my foundation in Africa. I help students from the refugee camp. I bring them here to go to school.”

He said Campbell’s class is what ultimately inspired him to create his foundation, The HumBol Fund. Ajak’s foundation is working to bring kids from refugee camps in Kenya to the United States, according to its website, and he said he brought his first student to the U.S. last fall.

Ajak said, at the time, he never expressed to Campbell that his class deeply impacted his life. He said as life unfolded, everything Campbell had taught him made sense. This past fall, he went to his professor’s office to say thank you.

Aimée Shukuru, a master’s student in the Pan African studies program, is originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and went to high school in Syracuse. She also earned bachelor’s degrees in international relations and political science from SU.

She said she decided to apply for the master’s program because her undergraduate degrees did not have adequate information about Africa. The master’s program helped her understand what was “missing in international relations and political science,” she said.

“They were very much focused on the Western perspective of the world,” Shukuru said.

Karinge is originally from Kenya. She said the AAS department at SU is the reason she came to the U.S. Similarly to Ajak, she said the master’s program was “very transformational” for her and her “life trajectory.”

Beasley said the department allows Black students to know “more about our history that a lot of people didn’t have the chance to learn back in K–12.”

“It also adds a piece of curriculum to this university that calls out racism and injustice. It speaks to not only the injustice here at Syracuse, but the injustice in the world,” he said. “Having that at a predominantly white institution is extremely important.”

Students also spoke about The Barner-McDuffie House, formerly 119 Euclid, which they said offers them a space to socialize and honor their identities as Black students.

Over 30 racist, antisemetic and homophobic incidents occurred on or near SU’s campus beginning in November 2019. #NotAgainSU, a series of sit-ins protesting the university’s handling of hate incidents, followed. The movement, led by Black students, demanded that university officials support students of color and spurred the creation of 119 Euclid.

The Barner-McDuffie House, however, does not negate the need for AAS, faculty said in their statement.

“We cheer this hard-won outcome of #NotAgainSU protests that maintains a space for students to relax and mingle. We support aims to make the site a resource for individuals ‘interested in Black history and culture.’ We do so, however, understanding that programs at the house are no substitute for systematic and sustained academic explorations by trained scholars,” the AAS faculty statement reads.

The future of AAS

The AAS department has “no assurances” that it will “obtain sufficient resources to function as a normal department,” according to the AAS statement.

Multiple students said they feel the university neglects AAS and the Black student population on campus, emphasizing the campus’s need for the department.

“As a master’s student within this department specifically, but also as a Black student within the university space, I feel like the university does not care about us at all,” Shukuru said.

Ajak said a lot of prospective SU students send him messages on social media asking him for advice about the university.

“How can I tell another Black kid to come to this school and they’re not teaching us about our Black history?” he said. “It just is backwards.”

Students emphasized the need for AAS on campus, especially since the university openly highlights that it is “fully committed to fostering a diverse, inclusive and respectful campus community, not only in vision but in practice,” according to SU’s website.

“Syracuse University needs to stop parading diversity, equity and inclusion — needs to stop parading people of color — if they are not going to actually commit to the change that they say they want to see,” Beasley said.

Pierre, who attended the university during #NotAgainSU, said he sees parallels between AAS’s continued issues and the Black student-led movement.

“It don’t feel the same way as it did with #NotAgainSU because #NotAgainSU we had a video — somebody was vandalizing the dorms, putting n*gga on a mirror. Now, it’s morphed. It’s like, ‘I don’t have to blatantly call you a n*gga. I can just remove your books … make y’all feel like there’s no importance to taking those classes,’” he said. “It don’t feel the same … But it’s even worse now.”

Photo by Surya Vaidy | Staff Photographer

Published on March 28, 2024 at 3:03 am

Contact Kendall: kaluther@syr.edu