Afro-Am Overseers, Majors Discuss Tenure, Goals

The executive committee on Afro-American Studies yesterday discussed the department's tenure policy and future academic focus in the first of regular meetings with the department's concentrators.

C. Clyde Ferguson Jr., professor of Law and chairman of the executive committee, said yesterday the meetings with students will be one of the committee's many efforts to "get an impression of what students, faculty and other people perceive to be the strengths, weaknesses and possible means of improving the department."

Dean Rosovsky created the executive committee last month to define a sense of intellectual mission for the department, to recruit professors for tenured positions and to act as Afro-Am's senior faculty by making personnel and policy decisions over the next few years.

Orlando Patterson, professor of Sociology and a member of the committee, said yesterday at the meeting he believes the concentration of the department on the study of the black experience from the black perspective is "not focused enough."

Patterson said he believes the department should consider more specific areas of the concentration--either the historical and cultural aspects of Afro-American Studies or the "more contemporary sociopolitical" issues faced by blacks today.

Ricardo Guthrie '80, a concentrator in Afro-American Studies, said yesterday he believes the concentration "is not a traditional discipline but a meld of theory and practice, where students learn the practical problems and issues of the outside world."

The "department should not try to isolate itself from the real world as Harvard has done for centuries," Guthrie added.

Kenneth Walker '82, also a concentrator in Afro-American Studies, said at the meeting that concentrators choose the department "to make contact with the real world--and the department should help us make contact with this world."

Patterson said the Afro-Am department recruited many faculty more on their "availability and willingness to accept a post at the University" than on the department's critical selection of their academic expertise. "The result was really a hodge-podge of areas in which the professors specialized," Patterson said.

Ferguson said four prospective faculty members for the Afro-American Studies Department said they did not want to join the department because of Cambridge's poor racial environment.

"This community does not have a good reputation in terms of race relations," Ferguson said, adding "some people are not comfortable living in this kind of environment."

Eileen J. Southern, former chairman of the department and a member of the committee did not attend the meeting yesterday. She could not be reached for comment.

Southern resigned her post as chairman of the department last month partly because she said she did not understand how she could remain as chairman of a department with a governing executive committee.