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 ack
in 1972, in the wake of student demands to diversify its curriculum,
City College of the City University of New York appointed an obscure
graduate student named Leonard Jeffries to chair its new Black Studies
Department. Jeffries, who hadn't even completed his doctoral dissertation,
was granted immediate tenure — an unheard of perk in the publish-or-perish
world of higher education — and was given free rein to shape
the department. The result, of course, was three decades of university-sponsored
lectures on the sins of aggressive, individualistic "ice people"
(whites) against peace-loving, communal "sun people" (blacks),
lunatic conspiracy theories in which the Italian mafia and Russian
Jews joined forces to denigrate blacks in Hollywood movies, and
outright intimidation from Jeffries's coterie of thuggish bodyguards,
community activists, and benighted student disciples. Whenever a
peep of protest was voiced against him, Jeffries predictably cried
racism, once calling former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane
Ravitch "the ultimate, supreme, sophisticated debonair racist
… a sophisticated Texas Jew."
Though he's
stepped down as chair of Black Studies, Jeffries continues to teach,
and his academic minstrel show stands as an ongoing monument to
the intellectual cowardice of CCNY administrators and trustees.
You'd think it would serve as an object lesson as well — a
reminder of the risks of brushing aside credential requirements
in order to meet a demographic need. Yet the latest issue of the
Modern Language Association's newsletter devotes two full pages
to a statement titled "Guidelines for Good Practice" which
proposes to do just that — in effect, to water down not only
hiring standards but also retention, tenure, and promotion criteria
for "faculty members of color." The statement was authored
by a group called "the Committee on the Literatures of People
of Color in the United States and Canada," an officially recognized
organization with a quarter-century history within the MLA.
In order to
recruit such faculty, the committee suggests, college departments
should "consider creating curricula and positions that either
focus entirely on or include literatures written and spoken by people
of color" — in other words, even though it makes financial
sense to hire generalists who can teach a broad range of courses,
the committee wants colleges to seek out specialists in, let's say,
black feminist authors or postcolonial Latino literature. The unspoken
rationale is that advertising a vacancy for a generalist will bring
stiff competition from non-minority applicants — whereas an
ad for a specialist can be worded so as to discourage non-minorities
from applying.
Once hired,
according to the committee, "junior faculty members of color"
should be mentored, whenever possible, by "senior faculty members
of color." When evaluating the performance of faculty members
of color, college departments "need to be aware of the possible
effects of race, gender, and sexuality bias on teaching evaluations."
In other words, if student feedback and peer observations of a minority
instructor are poor, the instructor should still be given the benefit
of the doubt . . . since, of course, he might be the victim of institutional
prejudice. Departments, moreover, shouldn't expect comparable scholarship
from minority and non-minority faculty "because some of the
important presses publishing research on literatures by people of
color may not be the traditional ones familiar to English and foreign
language departments, colleges and universities." In other
words, a three-paragraph note on an Africana website should count
as much as a 3,000-word essay in the New York Review of Books.
Nor should
the college expect a comparable level of non-classroom service from
minority faculty as from non-minority faculty; rather, the college
should "limit the number of department- or program-related
committees on which junior faculty members of color are asked to
serve." The reason? Minority faculty are needed to "advise
and mentor students of color," supervise projects that "deal
with issues of race," and participate in "community organizations."
(No racist assumptions there!)
The upshot
of the committee's recommendations is twofold. First, by attempting
to go beyond mere affirmative action and actually lower the professional
bar to recruit minority faculty, the committee has increased the
probability that another Leonard Jeffries will eventually rise up
and bite his kowtowing college in the butt. Second, by publicly
weighing in on the subject, the committee has cast a shadow of doubt
on every decision to hire, tenure, and promote minority faculty
from this day forward.
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