The Department of Black Studies seeks to provide students with a comprehensive quality education and the opportunity for a creative intellectual experience based on the critical and systematic study of the life, thought and practice of African peoples in their current and historical expressions. Interdisciplinary in both conception and practice, Black Studies seeks to critically examine and understand the African initiative and experience from an Afrocentric perspective, i.e., from a position internal to the culture, joined with an openness and receptivity to the rich variousness and instructiveness of the total human experience. Thus, Black Studies stresses comparative analysis and holistic thinking as indispensable to the discipline and the general educational enterprise.
Upon graduation, Black Studies majors should be able to demonstrate:
1. a broad and critical overview of the discipline, its intellectual and institutional history, its definitive language and literature, and its multidisciplinary character;
2. a broad and critical overview of the African initiative and experience in the world with special attention to modal periods of African history, from classical to current times, and to the critical issues, ideas and events which informed and shaped them;
3. a critical grasp of the major methodological approaches and schools of thought in the discipline and an ability to criticize and offer supportive arguments for them;
4. effective skills in gathering, organizing, analyzing and presenting Africana Studies data, using varied sources, i.e., libraries, interviews, films and new electronic media such as the Internet and relevant web sites;
5. an increased international and multicultural awareness of and sensitivity to issues of diversity, especially those of race, ethnicity, class and gender and their role in human community and human exchange;
6. an enhanced capacity to think critically and systematically and to apply effectively varied methodologies and theories in Black Studies to engage ideas, issues and events on the local, national and international levels from an African-centered perspective;
7. a developed appreciation for the discipline’s historical and ongoing stress on linking knowledge and practice, learning and service, community and campus, and academic excellence and social responsibility; and
8. a critical understanding of and appreciation for the ethical and social dimensions of the discipline and its commitment to providing an ongoing critique of and correctives for constrains on human freedom and human flourishing, especially those of race, class and gender.
These goals, which are a shared understanding and commitment of the faculty, are communicated to the students in class instruction, advisement, departmental forums and literature, through faculty presentations in the media and faculty professional and community activities which students participate in and/or attend.
