“Black Students Refuse to Pass the Buck”: The Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education

Abstract

Two days after armed black Cornell students marched out of their occupied building, professors at Harvard paced into a faculty meeting prompted by the BCM. In January 1969, a Harvard committee recommended the establishment of an Afro-American Studies major in an interdepartmental center. The New York Times praised the “important step in depoliticizing an issue that has become enmeshed in unnecessary controversy at many colleges.” Harvard’s black students were not nearly as pleased, especially in early April when they came across an outline of the new program. They were dismayed that Afro-American Studies majors had to combine their studies into one of the existing, and to the students’ thinking, “racist” disciplines. The setup presupposed “Afro-American Studies is less than a legitimate and valid intellectual endeavor,” said sophomore Fran Farmer. In turn, African and Afro-American Association (AAAS) members demanded an autonomous department to give the academy’s latest intellectual endeavor that legitimacy and validity.