The mission of the Department of Black Studies is 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 development. Interdisciplinary in both conception and practice, Black Studies seeks to critically examine and understand the African 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.

	To cultivate and increase the international and multicultural awareness of our students and their sensitivity to issues of diversity, race, ethnicity, class and gender;
	To further internationalize the curriculum to include study of African peoples in other parts of the world in addition to those on the Continent and in the USA, i.e., in the Caribbean, Central and South America and the Pacific Rim;
	To expand the curriculum in the areas of gender, class and comparative ethnicity;
	To expand our degree offerings by introducing a master's degree;
	To maintain and increase departmental links with local high schools and community colleges;
	To maintain and increase our links with the community through joint educational and practical projects and exchanges;
	To strengthen our links with other departments through collaboration, course cross-listing and common projects;
	To increase the holding of conferences, seminars, colloquia and other forums devoted to the expansion of the discipline, interdepartmental exchange and international and multicultural issue awareness;
	To encourage expanded scholarly productivity and professional activity by the faculty to maintain currency with the latest developments in the discipline and insure the highest levels of instruction and intellectual exchange;
	To expand and further consolidate the intellectual space of the discipline as an integral and indispensable part of the university's mission to offer a multicultural quality education to its students by providing such an education in the department and cooperating with and aiding other departments in their thrust to meet multicultural and human diversity requirements.

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.