FutureSTATE 2015

Achievements of the past year:
The African American Studies Program was launched on July 1, 2007, when the director began his duties. (The minor program was created in the spring of 2007.) Achievements during the past 9 months include but are not limited to:

• Set-up Offices: The director was responsible for setting up the offices for the African American Studies Program. Office set-up included everything from purchasing office furniture, setting-up the phone system, buying supplies, and promoting the minor in African American Studies to students. Additional achievements include:
• Phi Beta Kappa Hire: The director participated in the campus-wide initiative to bring Phi Beta Kappa faculty candidates to campus. The director succeeded in joining the History Department in a joint hire of Dr. Michael Williams, a specialist in 20th-century African American History.
• Staff Assistant: The director assumed full responsibility for searching and interviewing for a staff assistant, leading to hiring Mrs. Kailé Minor. Mrs. Minor is an experienced administrative assistant. She earned her baccalaureate degree in English from MSU, and was formerly employed in the School of Architecture. She is experienced in university protocols, including Banner.
• Web Presence: The director provided the layout and wrote the script for the African American Studies website. Joey Womack in ITS designed the site. Visitors from all-across the United States, from fields as education, industry, government, agree with Professor Sandra Holstein of Southern Oregon University when she said, "This is an impressive website...."
• Outreach: I have spoken at various programs in Starkville and the Golden Triangle. These venues include Armstrong Middle School in Starkville, Fairview Elementary School in Columbus; and at civic programs sponsored by Delta Sigma Theta; and at various campus programs including the Black Student Alliance and the Anthropology Club.
• Programs: The director played a significant role in planning programs for African American Studies, including the Inaugural Ceremony featuring Dr. Jacqueline Wade of Middle Tennessee State University as the keynote speaker. The director also coordinated with various campus groups to plan the Black History Month programs. The director was responsible for bringing Mr. Joseph Dudley, Sr., an entrepreneur and motivational speaker, to deliver a keynote address. Mr. Dudley was also our luncheon speaker as well as our speaker at the Boys and Girls Club of Starkville. African American Studies maintains that community outreach is an important responsibility of a land grant institution like Mississippi State, and its program at the Boys and Girls Club was consistent with this mission.
• Film Festival: The African American Studies Program launched its Film Series in February, featuring award-winning writer and director Adrena Ifill. Ms. Ifill won an award for her documentary on Robert Smalls, a Civil War hero in the Union. The film chronicled Smalls' escape from slavery after capturing a Confederate ship and sailing it to a Union port. After the war Smalls was elected to Congress.
• African American Studies Curriculum: The director arranged to cross-list courses in African American Studies with other departments. This is vital to help students identify courses when registering for classes. In addition, the director wrote a course proposal for the Introduction to African American Studies. The course proposal has successfully gone through the African American Studies Curriculum Committee (an interdisciplinary committee of faculty who teach courses adopted by African American Studies), the Arts and Sciences Curriculum Committee, and is under review by the University Committee on Courses and Curricula.
• Graduate Online Diversity Certificate: African American Studies has partnered with the History Department, Gender Studies, and Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work, to offer a certificate in diversity in the Campus 5 category. This graduate program is available only to students enrolled in the online program, presumably people who hold full-time jobs. African American Studies offers two courses in this program, one dealing with the color line in the United States and the other dealing with race and cultural diversity in the workplace. The director wrote the course proposal on race and cultural diversity in the workplace.
• Program Promotion: Winning faculty support is vital to the success of African American Studies. The director has made presentations to various groups of faculty, including the meeting of department heads, the Arts and sciences and University Faculty Senate, as well as departments including English, Foreign Languages, Communication, and Psychology.
• African American Studies Committees: The director has organized several committees of faculty to manage the African American Studies Program. These Committees are the Executive Advisory Committee on African American Studies and the African American Studies Advisory Curriculum Committee.
• University Service: The director serves on the Arts and Sciences Curriculum Committee, as well as several committees in the History Department, where he holds tenure.
• Students in the Minor Program: It is difficult to determine the number of students who are pursuing a minor in African American Studies. Students are not required by University policy to declare a minor until they file for graduation. Nevertheless, African American Studies asks students to declare their intention with an application. Ten students have applications on file. The Introduction to African American Studies is the feeder course for students seeking a minor, and I suspect that the number of declared minors will go-up once we start offering that course.

Goals for the next year:

• Curricula Matters: Design additional courses in African American Studies, including a capstone course for a minor. Revise the curriculum to include additional courses created for the African American Studies Minor. Enrollment Campaign: Continue to promote the minor, and encourage students to declare their intention to pursue African American Studies.
• Faculty Diversity: Continue to speak with department heads about faculty diversity, and explore how African American Studies can help them.
• Film Series: Seek funding from an outside donor to finance the film festival. The film festival would screen two films in the Fall Semester and two films in the Spring Semester. In addition to showing films, scholars would be invited to comment and engage our students about the presentation.
• Scholar-in-Residence: Seek funding from an outside donor to finance a Scholar-in-Residence Program. The Scholar-in-Residence Program would bring one scholar to campus in the Fall Semester and one in the Spring Semester, for a one-week period. The scholar would offer workshops and give a public lecture. These individuals would be renown in their fields.
• Community Advisory Committee: Call together a diverse group of people drawn from Mississippi, including people who live out of state. Their charge would be to advise African American Studies on community outreach, as well as assist the program in fund-raising.

Constraints to full implementation of this initiative:

• Diversity Among Students: Achieving diversity among students is one of the reasons for establishing the African American Studies Program. The University must be clear about its objectives with this goal. Also, African American Studies is an academic program, which offers courses to students. From taking our classes students may learn to think more broadly about racial differences among people, but this objective is not a given. Education into a cultural group does not offer any assurance that people will be trained in a way to help them with diversity matters. It is my view that diversity is an invitation for people who are willing to explore their negative thoughts about other people as a group. For this reason I applied for and received a scholarship to attend the Byron Katie School for the Work located in Los Angeles, CA. The School applies a process to help willing people question their stressful thoughts about any subject that applies to them. I believe that this process holds promise for diversity, and I hope to use my time at the School to tease out this process. For more about the School for the Work visit Byron Katie on the web at .
• Diversity Among Faculty: The other part of diversity among students is diversity among faculty. It will be difficult for the University to effectively communicate its interest in diversity among students without commensurate diversity among faculty and administrators. The African American Studies Program has shown that it can help the University attract black faculty. The University is thus advised to charge African American Studies and academic departments to consider joint faculty searches.
• Proposed Modification of this Initiative: The University needs to better articulate African American Studies in its organizational scheme. Best practices suggest that an effective African American Studies Program functions better when it has all the rights and responsibilities as other departments, except the right to grant tenure. As it now stands African American Studies at Mississippi State cannot create its own courses without a department signing-off on it. This limits the autonomy of African American Studies, and such a policy is unwarranted.
• Overall Assessment of the Status of the Initiative or other Comments: The African American Studies Program will need additional operating funds in order to carry out its mission. It got through the 2007-2008 school year with funds transferred to it by the President of the University and from its specially budgeted Start-up Funds provided by the College. These funds will not be available in the fall, and African American Studies may not be able to keep its doors open for business. Also, African American Studies is pursuing opportunities for outside financial support, including grants from foundations and an on-line Graduate Certificate Program. Funds from these initiatives will not be immediate, and this new program will need assistance until it can generate other sources of funding.

Proposed modification of the initiative:
none