Black Studies Program still lacks a director

The search for a new Black Studies director has not begun yet.

By Ettie Berneking

Published Feb. 15, 2008

MU has not yet started a search for a new director for the Black Studies program, Interim Director Wilma King said.

After former Director and history professor Julius Thompson died last October, the program was without a director until King’s appointment in January.

MU Provost Brian Foster said the process for filling an available position is a long one.

He said the university posts a notification on its Web site and places advertisements in academic newsletters. Then, he said, a search committee would be assembled to look at applications and screen possible candidates.

“It all depends on the nature of the position,” Foster said.

The search committee is usually made up of administrators, professors and students, he said.

Finding a new director for the Black Studies Program means drawing from a national pool of applicants, Foster said.

“It’s very much a recruitment process,” he said.

Foster said the goal of the search is to recruit strong candidates rather than screen them.

“What you want is three or four great people who really want to work here,” he said.

Foster said there is no date set to begin the search, but that it would take several months. A national search “complicates things a lot,” he said.

King said it could take months to find the right applicant for the job.

King is a veteran of the Black Studies Program. She joined the MU faculty in 1999 and is jointly appointed with the history department and the Black Studies Program. After arriving at MU, King developed a course focused on the history of black women in the U.S. The course was approved by the history department cross-listed in the Black Studies Program and the women’s and gender studies department.

Because the Black Studies Program isn’t a department, it doesn’t have a teaching staff of its own.

Instead, the classes offered within the program are cross-listed with academic departments.

Thompson was an outspoken advocate of making the Black Studies Program a full department, said Malachi Crawford, a doctoral candidate who studied with Thompson, in a previous Maneater report.

King said while cross-listing courses can help attract more students to the program, she hopes to continue the effort.

If Black Studies were to become a department, professors would be able to make black studies their home department. They would be able to gain tenure and receive promotions through the department, King said.

“There are benefits to becoming a department for both students and faculty,” she said.

King said affiliates of the program range from a wide selection of programs at MU. Professors from the history, political science, art, English, romance languages and literatures, and sociology departments have cross-listed one or more of their courses to be included in the courses listed within the Black Studies Program.

One benefit to this, according to King, is more students can see which classes are available in the program.

King said she hopes to see the program make other improvements, too.

She said she hoped to revamp the program’s Web site, making it possible for students to pull up an affiliate’s Web site by clicking on a link under the professor’s name.