Jeffries Redux
Same old world at City College.

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.