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BLACK STUDENTS

BROWNE

to black children. Prestigious universities such as Yale and the University of Chicago, as well as some of the large foundations, have brought together black educators, black leaders, and black students to discuss with them what steps to take to make their curricula relevant. Several colleges conducted seminars during the summer of 1968 to brief selected faculty members, mostly white, on how they might begin to make their instruction more meaningful to black students. The black students themselves have organized intensive efforts to develop the outlines of what they feel a black curriculum should include and the product of some of these efforts eloquently testifies to the students' seriousness of purpose.
  It is too early to predict just what form the Black Studies Curriculum is likely to assume. The black students are adamant in their insistence that planning and administration of such curricula should be in black hands if they are to be successful. With rare exceptions, the courses should also be taught by black persons, say the students, for only blacks could bring to them the necessary insights. On the urban campuses at least, there is also an insistence by the black students that the Black Studies Curriculum be related to the local black community, thus creating a fruitful interchange of ideas and resources between the university and the community. This latter demand usually creates no problem for the urban colleges, indeed is often welcomed by them, because such campuses have frequently found themselves isolated academic islands within a spreading black ghetto and are eager to establish healthy relationships with their surroundings.
  One of the earliest colleges to experiment with black-oriented courses was San Francisco State College, which offered a class in Black Nationalism in the Spring of 1966 and in the academic year 1967-68 enacted a Black Studies Curriculum consisting of 11 courses (33 units of college credit). In early 1968 Dr. Nathan Hare, a prominent black sociologist formerly with Howard University, was appointed Director of the program. There are offerings in Anthropology, Dramatic Arts, Education, English, History, Humanities, Psychology, Sociology, American Institutions, and Swahili, all of them taught with a special focus toward the black community. Some of the courses are taught by regular faculty. Others, in a clear demonstration of the type of innovating which will be required to fulfill the personnel needs, are supervised by faculty persons but are actually taught by competent black persons who do not hold the necessary degrees to qualify for faculty status.

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