Professor Offers Two Modifications Of Afro Resolution

Azinna Nwafor "63, assistant professor of Afro American Studies, released a statement yesterday offering the modifications to the Faculty Council's resolution Afro American Studies. The resolution had been presented to the Faculty at its December 12 meeting.

Nwafor also reiterated a previous statement he has made urging the Faculty to reject the Review Committee's recommendation that African subjects "are more appropriately dealt with" in other Departments.

H. Stuart Hughes Gurney Professor of History and Political Science, presented a resolution to the Faculty at the December 12 meeting urging it to reaffirm the University's commitment to Afro-American Studies. Nwafor said yesterday that the resolution should be modified to say that the Department be "equipped to bring fresh viewpoints to bear in the study of its subject."

He said that such a modification was necessary "if the progressive content of the held is not to be emasculated."

Nwafor said that it is also necessary for the Faculty Council to specify that the director of the proposed DuBois Research Institute hold a tenured appointment in Afro-American Studies "to provide such an Institute with a coherence and focus as also a determining influence.

In his statement Nwafor disagreed with the Review Committee's assertion that "Afro-American are neither African nor Anglo-American" and that "the unique character of the Afro-American experience may be found in its essential dissimilarity to that of these two groups."

He said that "one could equally state--more correctly even if as one sidedly--that the Afro-American is both African and Anglo-American." He said that the man whom the research institute is named after. W.F.B. DuBois, recognized "the two-ness of the Afro-American."

"It is not merely the academic indulgence of an over-refined dialectical mind that leads one into stating that in reality the Afro-American is fully captured only when it is seen that he is at once both African and Anglo-American at the same time as he is equally neither African nor Anglo-American," he said. "This purview alone succeeds in defining the Afro-American in his uniqueness."