What Does African American Studies Need to Thrive?

A couple of Robin D.G. Kelley’s colleagues are not speaking to him right now — colleagues for whom he’s written book blurbs and recommendation letters, colleagues he’s known for years.

Those relationships have been collateral damage in a crisis that has rocked the African American-studies department at the University of California at Los Angeles — and spurred a small faculty exodus.

The crisis began in March, when a group of master’s students anonymously posted criticisms of the department and its chair, Marcus Anthony Hunter, on social media. Students complained of, among other things, inadequate funding and alleged a Title IX violation in the department. They said Hunter had ignored their concerns and engaged in unethical, unprofessional behavior.

Publicly, Hunter said nothing. Months later, through an attorney, he called the statements by the students — who were now going by the moniker “Concerned AfAm” — “libelous.” And he claimed that Kelley, a professor of history and African American studies, along with a junior professor in the department had either helped the students prepare their allegations or endorsed them.

Delete and retract, the lawyer demanded, or “we will commence appropriate legal action against all those responsible.”

Now, Kelley and at least three of his colleagues have taken steps to leave the department. A couple others are considering it.

Academic culture is notorious for big fights over stakes large and small. But the accusations and counter-accusations that have rocked this well-respected department point to more than just clashing personalities or ego run amok. They offer a cautionary tale of what can happen to a department when a university neglects it for years.

In any department, people will make mistakes. But when a department is starved of resources, those mistakes are much more difficult to mend.

As more African American students gained entry into predominantly white colleges in the 1950s and 1960s, they clamored for those institutions to admit more Black students and to support the study of Black history and culture.

That energy percolated at UCLA. During “Negro History Week” in 1967, a year before the first Black-studies department would be founded at San Francisco State University, students demonstrated with signs that read “Why one week?” the Daily Bruin, the student newspaper, reported. They wanted a center that would launch the field at UCLA.

The university committed to it. The following year, students met with administrators to establish the center’s protocols. But leadership at the brand new center became a revolving door. Even as Black-studies programs sprung up across the country — hundreds existed by the early 1970s — many white scholars at UCLA viewed the field with suspicion. “Almost all of the UCLA faculty thought that Negroes had no history,” a former interim director told the Daily Bruin.

The center, later named the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, eventually found steady leadership. Under Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, who directed it from 1976 to 1989, the center produced a wide range of research, publications, and special projects. Academics who went on to have distinguished careers taught courses for the program. The field grew in stature.

But as at many other institutions, African American studies remained an interdepartmental program, meaning it was unable to tenure faculty members and lacked access to many institutional resources.

Over the years, reviews of the program suggested or recommended that it be made a department. Meanwhile, other ethnic-studies programs were raised to that status at UCLA. So were African American-studies programs at other institutions.

Madelene Cronjé, UCLA

By the 2010s, the wind had finally shifted. After meeting with frustrated faculty members, Alessandro Duranti, dean of social sciences at the time, got to work. At the time, finances were exceedingly tight. Space was scarce, and there were no extra faculty lines to give away, Duranti said, though he was able to make one available after someone retired.

Kelley, who was tapped to steer the process, encouraged senior faculty members across campus to move parts of their lines into the new department, and moved 50 percent of his own line.

He also made the case for a department to the UCLA community. In 2014, Black students made up just 3.8 percent of undergraduates, he wrote in an op-ed. A good number of those students were athletes, and UCLA paid millions in coaches salaries. But “when it comes to teaching our students why college-age Black men are overrepresented in our nation’s prisons,” for example, “we are reluctant to spend the money.”

It also became clear to Kelley that before he got involved, slim resources had been earmarked for the new department. It wouldn’t have its own staff, he said.

So he used what power he had: “I went on the job market.” It wasn’t entirely altruistic, he admits, but he got an offer, which he leveraged to get three faculty lines, all of which would have a primary appointment in the department. (Duranti declined to go into specifics about the negotiation but said Kelley played a role in identifying at least two scholars for target-of-opportunity hires.)

In the spring of 2014 — 47 years after students demonstrated on campus in support of the field — the university announced that Black studies would be a full department.

But granting a program departmental status is one thing. Treating it like a department is another.

The department’s early years brought both promise and frustration. The faculty is “unmatched” in its scholarship production, an external reviewer would later comment.

But even with its new status, the department had to rely on faculty with split appointments. It did not offer a doctoral degree. And money was a constant struggle.

Faculty members could feel overburdened as they performed “double work” for both of their units, according to a recent department self-review, which examined the past 10 years. And, according to the self-review, instead of hiring tenure-track faculty, UCLA’s administration would allocate temporary resources to hire lecturers. That money was never set in stone, and it often wasn’t enough. Or if it was, the commitment came too late to hire all the lecturers needed, the review says.

Students felt the pinch, especially master’s students. They complained of a narrow range of courses, and a lack of teacher training, and of advising. The assistant to the chair took on advising duties, along with student-affairs and department management. That person, Eboni Shaw, is clearly overworked and underpaid, one student commented on a graduate-council survey. But students felt they had “no one else to go to.” (Shaw did not respond to an interview request.)

Kelley, who began a stint as chair in 2016, remembers fighting for more staff members and for a raise and promotion for Shaw, which ultimately failed.

The budget was always tight. Kelley says he would sometimes pay the honorarium for department-sponsored events out of his own research funds. The department wanted to fund its master’s students, Kelley said, but with no firm commitment from the graduate school, every year was a scramble. Second-year students often felt “underfunded and financially neglected,” according to the department’s self-review.

And many thought the physical site of the department in the basement of Rolfe Hall was evidence of the university’s lack of investment. It was too small to host events or department meetings. Just a few faculty members and the chair had their office there, which could feel isolating.

When Marcus Hunter became chair in 2017, the bathroom near the department wasn’t being regularly cleaned, he said, and dust and debris from nearby construction filtered into the building. These space issues could make people feel “deeply shameful,” he said. Something as simple as getting a sign that said the department’s name was a struggle, he said.

Despite these challenges, the department did blossom in some areas. After Hunter took over, the faculty FTE nearly doubled, including through a few 100-percent hires. He also set up what he called a wellness lounge, a space where Black students could just be themselves and “not feel surveilled,” he said.

And many students had a good experience. Master’s students often gained entry to top-rated Ph.D. programs. But faculty members in the department thought that very success allowed the university to overlook the program’s needs. The department was treated, said Hunter, like an “unfunded mandate.”

Mary Braswell, UCLA

Scot Brown, an associate professor of African American studies and history, admired Hunter for his initiative. He got students to actually show up and participate in department events, Brown said.

Others were put off by how he operated. He would work “quite independently” of other faculty members in the department, which alienated some people, said Shana L. Redmond, a professor of musicology and African American studies.

Dominic Taylor, a professor of theater and African American studies, remembers one disagreement. Hunter wanted to explore recruiting famed writer Roxane Gay to UCLA and had discussed this possibility with the chair of another department on campus, Taylor recalled.

At a faculty meeting, some professors questioned why Hunter hadn’t discussed it with them first. (In an email, Gay confirmed that she was recruited and got relatively far in the process but said that after negotiations started, “they ghosted me.” It was “the strangest experience of my career,” she added.)

Taylor, the acting chair of the theater department, said he understood that Hunter was trying to be enterprising. “UCLA is a gigantic ship,” he said, and as department chair, “you’re trying to navigate your little buoy.”

For Redmond and for two other faculty members who spoke to The Chronicle anonymously, for fear of being retaliated against, the department’s culture under Hunter’s leadership quickly soured. Discussion and debate were not encouraged, Redmond said, and requests from certain faculty members for a curriculum review, particularly at the graduate level, went unheeded.

The environment “became one of foreclosure and toxicity,” she said.

In January, those festering problems came to the surface. An external review of the department cited low morale, which one reviewer observed was “not simply the byproduct of failed relationships, but of institutional neglect.”

Reviewers also heard of “situations” that contravened Title IX guidelines, including verbal and sexual harassment, and incorrect responses to reports of harassment. Graduate students complained of late paychecks and delayed teaching-assistant assignments, saying Shaw told them their Social Security numbers had been lost. And some — primarily women, one reviewer observed — said they were discouraged from writing a thesis, as if, another reviewer commented, the department thought they were incapable of rigorous research.

The disappointed grad students, the first reviewer wrote, felt they had been sold “a fake bill of goods.”

By early March, some students had reached a boiling point. An unknown number of them wrote a letter under the signature “Graduate Students of African American Studies at UCLA” to express their concerns regarding the “condition, climate, and experiences” in the department.

It’s unclear what, exactly, prompted them to go public. The anonymous group did not make anyone available for an interview and would not send a statement to The Chronicle without advance access to the article. Questions sent by The Chronicle went unanswered.

Some of their complaints echoed what external reviewers had heard, including inconsistent funding and a lack of training.

Amid the program-wide critiques, the group also lobbed criticism at Hunter and Shaw. Students had brought their concerns to them “to no avail,” the letter said. The funding problems revealed Hunter and Shaw’s “lack of financial integrity,” they said. They claimed “administrators” had “forced” grade changes. And they said “administrators” in the department had been informed of “a Title IX concern” and done “nothing.”

They demanded a full faculty meeting and an “assessment” of Hunter and Shaw by the faculty and by “relevant campus administrators.”

The March 3 letter was posted on social media the same day. It detonated. People scrambled to react to the fallout.

The dean of social sciences, Darnell Hunt, told the department that several university offices, including his, would be investigating the allegations and scheduled a “town hall” between faculty members and students. Some master’s students reached out to Hunt, telling him they didn’t agree with the letter and felt their voices had been co-opted.

UCLA

Department faculty grappled with how to respond. Some saw the letter as an affront to be countered. They thought it unfairly blamed Hunter and Shaw for problems outside their control and that some of the claims were salacious.

Those faculty members were also worried about the department’s reputation. Nobody wanted the outside world to think that a group of African American faculty members couldn’t run their own unit, said Uri McMillan, an associate professor of African American studies and English. Black-studies departments have been historically stereotyped as sites of dysfunction, antagonism, and financial mismanagement.

Others, including Redmond, felt frustration on behalf of the students, and sympathy for them. She said she’d heard some of their concerns before, at a December workshop organized by junior faculty, which only three senior faculty members attended.

Kelley thought the faculty was obligated to listen to the students’ allegations, even if they didn’t agree with all of them, and even if some were framed as personal attacks. Giving them the benefit of the doubt “doesn’t mean that they’re right,” he said. “It means that they’re students.”

One junior faculty member, SA Smythe, whose pronouns are they/them, decided to voice their general support of the students and share some of their own negative experiences. In a five-page letter, obtained by The Chronicle, Smythe told their colleagues that they had been telling staff and senior faculty members about those student concerns since the fall term began. “That is how I know that we did not need to get to this point,” they wrote.

Smythe, who was hired in 2018 and began their appointment in 2019, also detailed their own problems with department management: a missing paycheck, an accommodations request that went mostly ignored, an outsized expectation on junior faculty to advise graduate students with little to no guidance.

And, Smythe said, they had been routinely “antagonized, misgendered, and isolated” since joining the faculty, despite their attempts to talk to staff members and Hunter about their concerns. Smythe said that Hunter told them, “We cannot change what people think.” (Hunter in an email to The Chronicle called Smythe’s characterization “false and misleading,” saying he promptly took several steps to address their concerns, including by inviting a UCLA discrimination-prevention officer to give a training at a faculty meeting.)

However, Smythe wrote, the issues the department now faced were bigger than two people. They implored senior faculty members to reflect on what went wrong in order to “restore faith in our ability to right this ship.”

What was needed, Smythe wrote, was “a reckoning, a clearing of the air.”

No such reckoning came.

Instead, faculty members aligned behind competing drafts of public statements. One associate professor circulated a letter that defended Hunter and Shaw. But a few were too concerned about Smythe’s experiences to sign onto that draft. They and others also thought it was too harsh toward, and too dismissive of, the students — who had since surfaced a second letter focused more on calling for program changes, like appointing a full-time graduate-student adviser.

Kelley and some other faculty members signed onto a different letter that they thought was more evenhanded, that acknowledged the students’ concerns and still defended Hunter and Shaw’s right to be protected from reputational harm. But some thought that version didn’t defend Hunter and Shaw enough.

Twenty-two faculty members signed a version of the initial draft, which was posted on Twitter and instructed UCLA to not treat the “damning and condemnatory allegations” as facts.

Eleven others did not.

The department held the “town hall,” which Concerned AfAm declined to attend, saying its members feared retaliation. At some point, the department’s executive committee assembled. The three members examined the latter student letter and made some immediate recommendations for improving the graduate-student experience, including pairing each master’s student with a faculty adviser.

By late March, the coronavirus pandemic was in full swing, upending all university operations. Weeks later, at least a few faculty members began to worry that the department was not coordinating its response to the student complaints.

In early May, Kelley wrote a letter to Hunter and the dean, which he also sent to the faculty and the Concerned AfAm email address. First citing his own failures as chair years ago, he implored the department to collectively respond to the students’ demands. “Most of their requests are not complicated,” he wrote. And he urged that students and faculty members be protected from retaliation for criticizing the department. A climate of fear was already brewing.

“If we cannot move forward on these demands,” he wrote, then “I doubt we will survive very long as a department.”

Concerned AfAm on Twitter thanked Kelley for his support.

Hunter never responded.

Six weeks later, Kelley received a letter from Hunter’s lawyer.

Where others saw a group of students voicing their concerns, Marcus Hunter saw a conspiracy against him.

In an interview with The Chronicle, in emails he provided, and in letters his attorney would send, Hunter claimed that the March letters were a coordinated campaign, led by what he called a rogue group of students, encouraged by what he saw as a rogue group of professors who’ve had problems with his leadership for years.

And, Hunter believes, rather than defend him against such a campaign, the university left him in a lurch.

Hunter felt he was being both blamed for problems that were not in his job description and being branded with a “scarlet letter,” especially because he was accused of ignoring conduct that violated Title IX — a claim he denied to The Chronicle. An employee in the Title IX office later told Hunter that no complaints had been filed against him before the March letters, according to emails that Hunter provided to The Chronicle.

On March 6, Hunter wrote to the chancellor, provost, and vice chancellor, saying he was disappointed by the university’s lack of response or defense of him as an employee. “The current silence by UCLA, in all its muteness, actually speaks very loudly,” he said.

He demanded an investigation of the allegations against him. His reputation was at stake, he told them. If UCLA did not “promptly address this issue,” he said, he’d seek a lawyer.

On March 12, the provost, Emily A. Carter, responded. She commiserated with Hunter, saying she, too, was “very concerned about your and Ms. Eboni Shaw’s reputation.” UCLA’s practice, Carter continued, has been to not engage with the claims on social media. “So please do not take our standard approach as somehow singling you or the department out,” she wrote.

Days went by. Then, on March 26, Hunter got an email from Hunt, the dean, asking if, given the added responsibilities the pandemic had thrust upon department chairs, he planned on continuing in his role. Hunter took that as a threat. He forwarded the email to the provost, saying he was “bewildered, anxious, stressed, and worried, with an increasing concern about the overall lack of support, action, and process due to me given the current climate.”

David Kelly Crow, UCLA

In response, Carter said the dean had tried to get in touch with Hunter for the past two weeks and had not been successful. “As you must know, being department chair requires that you be responsive to your dean,” she said. “No threat was intended by his letter, rather we just need to get on with business.” Hunter replied that he’d been unable to speak with the dean because of previously scheduled dental surgery.

Hunter wanted a meeting. He wanted a public rebuke of the allegations. At that point, he got an attorney, Daniel J. Kolodziej. “I had no other recourse,” Hunter said. Kolodziej went on the offensive, sending letters to administrators at Duke University, where a professor had served as an external reviewer in the department’s recent review; to a host of UCLA administrators; to assumed members of Concerned AfAm; and even to Kelley and Smythe.

Of UCLA, the letter demanded, among other things, that anyone who had prepared or spread false and defamatory information about Hunter be disciplined, that the university refute the allegations in the student letters, and that it specifically investigate faculty members who were involved.

Kolodziej demanded that the faculty and students immediately delete the defamatory material from their social-media accounts and publish a retraction to avoid legal action.

In June, Concerned AfAm shared screenshots of Kolodziej’s letter on Twitter alongside an interview that Hunter once gave to NPR. Hunter told the outlet in 2019 that social media was one of the best places for people without power to go to start a conversation. It “democratizes your access to power,” he said at the time.

UCLA

Now, Concerned AfAm was doing just that, the group wrote in a tweet, and was being threatened. “THIS is what retaliation and harassment looks like,” it wrote in another.

Hunter’s decision was an act of psychological violence, one of the anonymous faculty members told The Chronicle. Redmond, too, was angry. That last quarter, Hunter “completely disappeared,” she said. No emails, no faculty meetings. So it was “pathetic and unfortunate” that legal threats would be the last word of his administration, she said.

Smythe, the assistant professor, declined to comment for this story, but provided a letter to Kolodziej from their attorney, denying that the Concerned AfAm letters had been written by Smythe.

They also reached out to Hunt for support, according to emails obtained by The Chronicle, writing that Hunter’s legal threats were a further escalation of the hostile work environment they had experienced. The dean responded that “the whole matter” was “very unfortunate” and said he “sincerely hope[d]” for a resolution.

But did he intend to help? Smythe asked. The dean suggested that they ask the university legal counsel for advice. As far as he knew, the university is not party to the legal dispute, he said, and “as dean, I have no official response to it.”

When Kelley got the lawyer’s letter, he was stunned. He’d written a letter of recommendation in Hunter’s Guggenheim Fellowship application, blurbed one of Hunter’s books, and made the written case for various promotions. In a long response to Kolodziej, Kelley rejected the claims one by one. He had nothing to do with the student letters or sharing them. He doesn’t even have a Twitter account. Nor was he involved in “hatching some kind of plot” against Hunter.

What’s more, Kelley said, it’s a professor’s obligation to respond to student concerns. Supporting students is not evidence of scheming against Hunter. In the scholarly world, anyone with authority will be criticized. But “criticism,” he wrote, “is not defamation.”

Kelley sent his response to not just Kolodziej but to everyone in the department.

On the thread, Gaye Theresa Johnson, an associate professor of Chicana and Chicano studies and African American studies, appealed to her fellow faculty members. Now was the time for unity.

“Some of you have really been needed for a long time. The students needed us, the junior faculty needed us, and [Hunter] needed us too,” she wrote. But Kelley’s letter was a chance to reconcile, Johnson wrote. Or at the “very, very least” not harm one another.

“Because all this among us — at any time but especially now — is a tragedy.”

A faculty member responded to Johnson’s plea with one request: “Please remove me from this email thread.”

When puzzling over what went wrong, Kelley says he doesn’t think Hunter is to blame. Rather, a larger question is at play: What does a Black-studies department at a premier research institution need to truly thrive?

It’s clear, at least to some professors, that they weren’t getting it. The department was long starved of adequate space, staff, faculty positions, and funding. It was a “second-class citizen” on its own campus, one external reviewer remarked.

The dominoes fell from there.

Hunt doesn’t see it that way. The “issues in question,” he said in an email, stemmed from “the growing pains of a young department, animated by passionate faculty members” who were “endeavoring to get on the same page with respect to the unit’s future direction.”

Department defenders think that there’s a risk of blowing the situation out of proportion. Cheryl L. Keyes, the new chair who took over this summer after Hunter’s term was up, says it’s had “challenges” but not the type of turmoil that would permanently destabilize it. Scot Brown, an associate professor who is now the department’s vice chair, warned against the “pathologization of Black studies.” If all departments were put under the same microscope, he said, “you wouldn’t have enough pages in The Chronicle.”

And some of the department’s issues seem to have been sewn up. Back in March, when the student letters first emerged, various university offices began investigating the allegations. The registrar’s office did not find any evidence of improper grade changes for the course in question, Hunt said. In regard to insufficient financial support for incoming graduate students, “three cases” required attention, including one that involved a “significant amount of funding due to a misunderstanding about a promised teaching-assistant position,” Hunt said. All three have been resolved.

Hunt said he could not say if the Title IX investigation was still underway. But so far, he has not been notified by that office, or by the Discrimination Prevention Office, of any violations that required his attention, he said.

And he has “complete confidence” in Keyes to lead the department and thoroughly address “all of the issues raised.”

He called attention to the university’s June announcement of a slew of resources to support Black students and scholars, including a commitment over the next five years to recruit 10 faculty members whose scholarly work “addresses issues of Black experience.” Those faculty lines will reside in the Bunche Center with appointments in other departments. And Carter, the provost, said in an emailed statement that UCLA also began to update a “space utilization study” to improve the department’s physical home.

It’s the sort of investment for which Black scholars have long been advocating. It will eventually make the department, according to Hunt, one of the most highly resourced among its peers.

But those promises may have come too late. Black faculty members at the university feel “borderline despair at the lack of support, compensation, resources, and recognition,” said Safiya U. Noble, an associate professor of information studies and African American studies, in an email. Their work commands those things outside of UCLA, she said, but not within it.

Some faculty members are leaving the department. At least four — Johnson, Smythe, Kelley, and McMillan — have now either moved or taken steps to move out. Redmond said she’s considering it, as is one of the faculty members who asked to remain anonymous.

Leaving wasn’t an easy decision, said McMillan. But “the toxicity in the department had just become too much.”

Even if Kelley doesn’t blame Hunter, he says the former chair’s decision to threaten legal action against students and Smythe is partly what prompted him to step away. All students have the right to complain, even if it’s not the right tone or venue, Kelley said. You don’t punish them for it.

Johnson, who was vice chair and had stepped in to steer the department, went so far as to resign from that position two weeks before it was up. (She did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

In an email obtained by The Chronicle, Johnson told Hunt that given the path Hunter had taken, she could not “in good conscience be vice chair any longer.”

“Things had gone far enough long ago,” she continued. “But to hear that students and junior faculty are suffering in this way, people over whom a full professor and chair has so much power, is much more than a final straw.”

“I am frankly embarrassed,” she continued, “that I hung in this long.”