The Samkange Affair

AN INCIDENT in an Afro-American Studies class last spring has achieved more general significance this fall. Angela M. Leonard '76 and Stanlake Samkange, then a lecturer in Afro-American Studies, disagreed about the extent of Leonard's obligation to find out what she had missed in absence from Samkange's course. Samkange attempted to call Walter J. Leonard, Angela Leonard's father and special assistant to President Bok. He recalled last week that he told Florence Leonard, Angela Leonard's mother, that a child from a decent home shouldn't have been as rude to him as he said Angela Leonard was. This fall, the Commission of Inquiry took up Angela Leonard's complaint denouncing Samkange for trying to involve her parents in her academic affairs.

Angela Leonard was right. Students in college have reached their intellectual majority and should be considered as individuals separate from their parents in academic matters. Even problems considered emotional should be the province of senior tutors before an instructor approaches a parent.

But the commission's decision to recommend placing Leonard's letter in her file went beyond this recognition, and challenged the grade she received in the course. Leonard contended that Samkange had been prejudiced against her after the incident; on the face of it, her complaint is plausible, since all five other students in Afro 115b received As or A-minuses while she received a C. And Dean Whitlock explained last week that in such a case the commission has to determine not whether a complaint is correct but whether it is plausible. But commission members never spoke to Samkange, who is now a professor of African-American Studies at Northeastern University. Their feeble excuse is that they were told in early fall that he was abroad.

Samkange is willing to produce figures and explanations that on the face of it exonerate him entirely from the charge of prejudice in his grading. For instance, Samkange claims that by the time Leonard entered the course, a thinning-out process had already eliminated the poorer students, so that it was natural that most of the class would receive As. But whether he should be vindicated or Leonard should be redressed is not the issue here. The important thing is that the commission reconsider the case, this time with a steadier eye towards the truth. And in the future it should do its legwork in the first place.