Students exult: We won! We re getting a Black Studies Department at @Stanford!
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A Stanford University student walks in front of Hoover Tower on the campus in Palo Alto.Paul Sakuma / Associated Press 2012
Stanford University officials announced Tuesday that they are transforming their 52-year-old program of African and African-American studies into a full-fledged academic department.
The move comes after Stanford’s Black Student Union and Black Graduate Student Association created a petition last summer urging Stanford to make the change, following the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd. The groups noted that elite universities had such a department.
At Stanford, African and African-American studies has been a program for more than half a century and resides in the School of Humanities and Sciences. A department, unlike a program, is an administrative organization that can search for and hire its own faculty.
“I appreciate that. I think that is stepping up to a challenge that is very significant in higher education. It’s a big deal," professor Claude Steele said.
Undergraduate families with annual incomes below $75,000 will not be expected to pay tuition, room or board at Stanford, up from the current $65,000 threshold. General tuition will not increase in 2021-22, while room and board charges will increase modestly.
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The trustees specifically discussed:
The Changing Human Experience and Public Humanities with Lanier Anderson, senior associate dean for the humanities and arts in the School of Humanities and Sciences
Ethics, Society & Technology with Margaret Levi and Rob Reich, both professors of political science
Editor’s note: From time to time, The Conversation asks leaders in America’s colleges and universities to address some of the most pressing issues in our nation. Here we ask Earl Lewis, director and founder of the University of Michigan’s Center for Social Solutions, and Nancy Cantor, chancellor of Rutgers University – Newark, a diverse, urban public research university, about how numbers and statistics matter when examining institutional racism, the Capitol riot and Black Lives Matter.
How has media reporting on numbers and statistics affected the public’s view of race?
Nancy Cantor: Society’s accounting of the summer of 2020 through Inauguration Day 2021 demonstrates the hard way numbers play into a long-standing history of racism and white privilege. Some national leaders equated a crowd of mostly white Capitol Hill rioters to largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests. Yet analyses show that the overall levels of violence and property destruction during BLM protes