Black [Token] Studies at Eastern Michigan [Guilty Whites] University
I had contempt for "black studies" in 1969. I still do.
In order to maintain my equal opportunities approach to life, I had contempt for "women's studies" in 1975. I still do.
In 1968/69, I was a graduate teaching assistant in the compulsory Western Civilization course at the University of California, Riverside. The idea of any course in Western Civilization, let alone a compulsory course, clearly dates me. There was a comparable course at Stanford University, Western Culture, a study of key texts in Western civilization. In 1968, students had been joined by Jesse Jackson in a rally in which they chanted: "Hey, hey, ho ho; Western Culture's got to go." In 1969, Western Culture disappeared at Stanford University. The faculty abolished the program. Students at Stanford voted in the spring of 2016 on whether to restore it. The proposal overwhelmingly failed.
The Ph.D. glut had hit academia in the fall of 1969. It has only grown worse since then. The post-War gravy train for Ph.D.-holding graduates ended abruptly. It had begun with the G.I. Bill of Rights of 1944, one of the two most revered federal government boondoggles in the history of American higher education, the other being the land grant college system of 1862. But all good things must come to an end. The supply of tax-subsidized Ph.D. holders finally overwhelmed the subsidies to undergraduate higher education, whose demand had employed them.
Those of us who were still on the dole were worried. How would we get jobs teaching history, a notoriously unpopular field of study on campus? One of my fellow graduate TA's had at least a fighting chance. He was writing his Ph.D. dissertation on the Detroit race riots of 1943. This would probably qualify him to teach the growing field of Black Studies -- the only growing field -- in which there were not yet any Ph.D. programs to glut the market.
He was talking about his opportunity in the history TA's room. "I think I've got a chance," he said. "I can teach Black Studies."
I chimed in. "I have a chance, too." The other TA's were amazed. I was working on my dissertation in colonial American history. "I can teach black markets." (Deathbed humor.)
That year, the faculty senate at UCR voted to start a degree program in Black Studies. I recall very clearly one faculty member who openly opposed the idea: Carl Uhr, who taught the history of economic thought. He was the nation's leading expert on the economics of Knut Wicksell, a contemporary of the young Ludwig von Mises. I don't recall whether Robert Nisbet voted on this or not. As his student, I never discussed it with him. My guess: as the former Dean of Letters and Science of UCR, he avoided all faculty senate meetings.
The climate of academic opinion in 1969 had shifted to paralyzing self-guilt and reparations-on-demand. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated in 1968. As an act of collective penance, white faculty members across America voted to dilute the curriculum one more time. This had been going on ever since 1870, when Harvard's president Charles Eliot introduced the elective system, but it had escalated drastically after World War II as a result of the G.I. Bill and huge federal grants to individual professors. Nisbet wrote a book on this: The Degradation of the Academic Dogma (1972).
TOKEN IS AS TOKEN DOES
As with all academic fads, this one came and went, leaving behind small departments of Black Studies in which token blacks majored. Some of these students had been able to get into these universities only because the screening committees in the Office of Applications had been given verbal -- never written -- instructions from on high: "Lower the bar." The bar was dutifully lowered.
The faculty knew what was going on. The white students knew. So did the Asian students. They were mostly in the natural sciences, in which the bar had not been lowered, and whose programs had fewer whites and almost no blacks -- virtually none in the graduate programs. The brighter black students began to figure it out after a few years of Black Studies (unfortunate but inevitable code term: BS). These were the blacks who majored in something else. But no one mentioned this except in small, trusted, racially self-screened circles. My guess is that the Black Studies majors knew it, too, but in academia, as in all things bureaucratic, you cash in on whatever boondoggle money is available. Beggars can't be choosers.
Now, in the year of our Lord 2016, two mid-level bureaucrats in the Administration of Eastern Michigan University have joined with the Black Students Union to recommend that every department on campus be required to design a required course in Black Studies. Their slideshow is online for the whole world to see. You can access it here. (Just in case howls of derisive laughter across America persuade the Administration to remove it from the EMU website, a PDF backup is here.)
Note: the proposal is really not the Administration's. It is a proposal of the Black Student Union. Sadly, the BSU's members are not sufficiently self-aware historically to recognize how very, very late 1960's this is. They would not wear Afros. Why would they offer this proposal?
I can almost hear the scuttlebutt inside the faculty rooms of the departments. There will be informal contests for naming hypothetical departmental courses that might qualify.
Economics: black markets
Biology: black lung
Psychology: blackouts
English: black humor
Meteorology: black lightning
Political science: black ops
Physics: dark matter (but not "black holes" -- too close to employment reality)
Academia got silly in the late 1960's. That silliness has continued to escalate. Politically correct speech has been adopted, with institutional sanctions for violations. The BSU's proposal is just one more piece of evidence of this silliness.
The really silly people are all those parents who send their children off to college for $25,000 to $65,000 a year, when their children could earn a liberal arts B.A. from any number of accredited universities for under $15,000, total. I described this a decade ago.
Sucker is as sucker does. Most parents are suckers.