December 7–14, 2000

cover story

A Lighter Shade Of Owl

photo: Ron Coalson

Is Temple University gutting its world-famous African American Studies program?

by Daryl Gale

part 1 | part 2

Pamela Reed came to Philadelphia in 1996 with a master’s degree from Northeast Louisiana University, dreaming of a doctorate from what was considered at the time to be the top school in the country for African-American studies: Temple University. Under the chairmanship of Dr. Molefi Kete Asante, a leading proponent of Afrocentric thinking, Temple’s African-American Studies department had gained national and international recognition.

"It was an exciting time," Reed says over a cup of coffee at a Center City café. "The hallways were buzzing with activity, everybody was so positive. It was a time of great learning and cultural awareness for the students, and the faculty as well."

But the good vibe didn’t last.

What she didn’t know was that the department was in the early stages of an implosion that would eventually result in lawsuits, charges and counter-charges over the next three and a half years, tearing the department apart at the seams and even threatening the degrees of some students.

"Now," she says, "it’s almost like a mausoleum. Through a process of purging and attrition, the department is a shadow of what it was."

Today many of the department’s staff and students, including Dr. Asante, charge Temple with systematically attempting to dismantle and marginalize the African-American Studies department, and for the most insidious of reasons: to lure more white students from the ’burbs to Temple’s North Philly campus.

The infighting at Temple’s African-American Studies department began in the autumn of 1996, when Dr. Asante announced he would be stepping down after 12 years as department chair, effective June 1997, in order to devote more time to his students, his writing and his travels. According to Professor Ama Mazama, that’s when everything went south for the department.

Dr. Mazama, who joined the department while Asante was still chair, is a native of Guadeloupe who earned her undergraduate degrees and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the Sorbonne in Paris. A diminutive black woman with a lilting French accent, Mazama says she saw an immediate change in the attitude of the university toward the department, and began leading the charge to "save the African-American Studies department at Temple."

There was conflict from the very beginning of the search for a replacement for Dr. Asante. The seven-member search committee included three faculty members from the department, including Mazama, but the rest were appointed by the head of the committee, acting dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, Dr. Carolyn Adams.

Mazama resigned from the committee, she says, because "it was clear the committee had no interest in giving candidates a fair chance. Their minds were made up beforehand." The committee recommended Dr. Joyce Joyce, who was subsequently appointed by then Temple President Peter Liacouras.

"At the time, there were 10 faculty members [in the department]," says Mazama, "but we didn’t pick Dr. Joyce. Our choice was Dr. Mwalimu Shujaa, who we thought would be a better candidate. We also offered an alternate choice, Dr. Mary Hoover. Well, they rammed Joyce down our throats by submitting a revote which only four professors participated in. [The other faculty were on vacation at the time, because the revote was held in June.] It was a clear violation of the rules set out by Temple and by our union." According to those rules, as stated in an agreement between the university and the Temple Association of University Professionals (TAUP), faculty members have the right to determine the procedures for selecting department chairs, and chairs must be chosen by a majority faculty vote. Citing violations, eight faculty members filed a grievance with the union, and Mazama sued both the union and the university.

Which is where Leon Williams comes into the picture.

Center City attorney Leon Aristotle Williams has made a name for himself in Philadelphia as a tough-as-nails advocate for underdogs and the victims of discrimination, particularly African Americans. His public feuds with District Attorney Lynne Abraham over the Kenneth Griffin and Donta Dawson affairs, and his subsequent thrashing by Abraham when he ran against her two years ago, have earned him plenty of ink and airtime, as well as a reputation as a legal pit bull. Which is why Dr. Mazama asked him to represent her in the case, and why he jumped at the chance.

"At its core, this case is about bad faith," Williams says, "Temple University violated the process for the election of the department chair, and the TAUP union acted in bad faith by not acting in Dr. Mazama’s and the rest of the faculty’s interests by arbitrarily dismissing their grievances. The union had an obligation to step in and arbitrate an equitable settlement of the issue, but did nothing."

Williams filed a lawsuit on Mazama’s behalf in February 1999, seeking to force TAUP to arbitrate a settlement. A year later, in February 2000, the judge ruled in Mazama’s favor, agreeing that the school and the union indeed acted in bad faith, and that the faculty’s rights to take part in selecting the chairman had been violated. The ruling was immediately appealed, but again upheld just last September. A few weeks later, after the dispute had become public, Dr. Joyce Joyce, in a memo dated Nov. 9, 2000, announced her resignation as chair effective July 2001, when she will transfer to Temple’s Women’s Studies Program, which she’ll co-chair. To the joy of the faculty, the next chairperson will be someone of the department’s own choosing.

With Joyce’s resignation, and Carolyn Adams’ resignation from the Acting Dean position (she is now a professor in the Geography and Urban Studies department), you might think this thing would be nearly over. You’d be wrong.

"This is a clear-cut case," Leon Williams continues. "The process was just plain wrong. We proved it, and we won. But I wouldn’t put it past them to appeal again, to litigate this as long as possible as a matter of precedent. It’s up to them to withdraw, but let’s just say I’m not counting on it."

And Joyce’s opponents still contend that her actions as chairperson — and Temple’s refusal to act in face of the hue and cry that rose up against her — reflect a determined effort on the part of the university to let the department languish.

	The father of afrocentrism: "An attempt was made, and as far as I know, is still being made, to minimize the prestige and importance of the African-American Studies department," says Dr. Molefi Kete Asante. photo: Ron Coalson

Is Temple trying to minimize the importance of its African-American Studies department in order to attract more suburban (read: white) students; students who might be turned off by the image of dashikis, kufi caps, and Afrocentrism in general? The answer, of course, depends greatly upon whom you ask.

At the eye of the storm, soon-to-be ex-department chair Dr. Joyce Joyce seems unflappable. Contacted for this story, Joyce had no comment other than to say, "I’m not interested in discussing this for publication. I’m far too busy working to bother with newspaper articles. Isn’t City Paper that rag that prints all the dirt? Or is that The Daily News?"

Calls to the office of Temple University President David Adamany on the matter were referred to the press office, as were calls to the current acting dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, Morris Vogel. (Carolyn Adams did not return calls, but informed Temple’s Office of News and Media Relations that City Paper had contacted her.) Acting Director of Communications Harriet Goodheart read a statement from the president denying the allegations.

"It is a lie for anyone to assert that this university has a plan to dismantle the African-American Studies program," says Adamany in his statement. "It casts a long shadow over the integrity of those in the program making such unfounded allegations. Indeed," the statement goes on, "the greatest barrier to the program’s prosperity has been the feuding within the department which has distracted it from its academic mission."

But Dr. Asante, the former chair, sees a deliberate pattern of neglect in the university’s treatment of African-American studies. A fixture on the lecture circuit and the author of 48 books (the most recent being Socio-Cultural Conflict Between African-Americans and Korean-Americans), Dr. Asante is the department in many eyes.

He is also the acknowledged "Father of Afrocentrism," the study of world history through the prism of heightened African cultural awareness. Afrocentrists believe that so many of the contributions of African people to the world have been ignored or erased from the annals of history that people of African descent must dig deeper to find those contributions, and attribute their omission to racism.

He sees a pattern of racism in Temple’s dealings with him and his department.

"The white people who control Temple University are not concerned with my accolades from the African community," Asante says. "My work is more respected around the world than it will ever be at Broad and Montgomery. And I’m telling you that without a doubt, an attempt was made, and as far as I know, is still being made, to minimize the prestige and importance of the African-American Studies department. The administration, I believe, wanted to slow the growth of the department, and somehow distance themselves from what we were accomplishing. The administration didn’t want Temple University identified around the country with Afrocentrism or with me. For the university to deliberately stunt the growth of a thriving department can only be attributed to racism or sheer stupidity."

Asante ticks off the list of troubling events he believes back up his claim.

"The African-American Studies department at Temple was the vanguard of the nation," Asante says. "Our fame and our reputation was growing, and the waiting list numbered in the hundreds from students from all over the world who wanted to come here to study. And in the three years since Dr. Joyce took over, we lost two research centers, the graduate and undergraduate student journals, and at least 40 grad students. It was immediately obvious to us that Dr. Joyce had no real interest in the department or in Afrocentricity, and that her appointment was politically motivated. Her chairmanship of the department has been a complete disaster. She had no vision for the department, and was essentially a co-conspirator in its minimization."

As much as Asante blames Joyce for the department’s downward spiral, he credits the staff for valiantly trying to hold it together.

"It is only the resilience of the faculty and students that kept the department from going down the tubes altogether. Dr. Mazama in particular has shown incredible courage and foresight in taking this matter to court, and to the court of public opinion. When the story of this whole sorry episode is told in the history books, it will be noted that Dr. Ama Mazama was the hero of the African-American Studies department at Temple University."

While denying the hero status, Mazama agrees with everything else Asante said.

"In 1997, there were 11 faculty and three dean’s appointments in the department," Mazama says, "and today there are eight faculty and two dean’s appointments. Three years ago, there were dozens of new students in the department every semester; this year, only eight new students showed up. There is a definite attempt to downsize our department to the minor fringes of Temple, to make us into something more easily controlled. I have no doubt that the administration of this school has a problem with African students talking about themselves and looking at themselves through the prism of Afrocentricity. It all comes down to this: The administration wants Temple University to look safer for white students. To do that, the minorities at Temple must be made non-threatening in the eyes of those potential white students. And anything African-centered is threatening. African students speaking positively about their heritage is threatening. African clothing is threatening. African names are threatening. Our department, as far as they’re concerned, is threatening."

Pamela Reed, to support claims of institutional racism, points to a 1997 strategic plan submitted by then-president Liacouras and approved by the Board of Trustees referenced in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 1998. In that plan, Liacouras wrote that "weak students" from the city could be driving away "good students" from the suburbs. The plan also noted the plummeting enrollment statistics for white males at Temple.

Temple spokesperson Goodheart says that the wording of the plan was misunderstood by some members of the department and interpreted in the worst possible light.

"The [African-American Studies] department is still there, and isn’t disappearing as far as I know," Goodheart says. "I know the staff is smaller, and there are fewer students in the department, but I don’t have the actual numbers. I can tell you this, though, that overall, Temple has more minority enrollment, that the numbers of students from Philadelphia are up, that the number of students from all ethnicities are up, and that Temple is actively creating and implementing programs to increase those enrollments."

part 1 | part 2