Spring Break
Chandler forced out amid CAC dispute
The CAC Program, which serves as a center for the interdisciplinary and interdepartmental study of African-American, Asian-American and other Diaspora cultures in the United States, has been under the interim leadership of History Professor Ronald Walters since Jan. 1.
Chandler met with Dean of Faculty Daniel Weiss and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Steven David on Nov. 29 and was informed by them about the decision to have him leave the directorship and return to the Advisory Board. Chandler has since volunteered to take a leave of absence for the spring semester. All of his spring courses were cancelled.
Deans Weiss and David cite the Krieger School Strategic Plan's new stipulations that academic program directors be full, tenured professors as the primary reason for Chandler's removal from that position.
The 17-page Strategic Plan, completed last spring and approved in July, says that junior faculty should be able to direct their time at Hopkins toward increasing their scholarship and academic promotions.
Junior faculty members need to fulfill extensive scholarship requirements in order to achieve tenure at Hopkins, says the administration, and program directorships are distractions to aspiring senior scholars. Program directorships are now reserved for tenured faculty who do not have the same career pressures as junior faculty.
However, a number of faculty, including some of the CAC's Advisory Board members, have questioned the quick process by which Chandler was removed and the lack of discussion that took place among the CAC faculty members.
"Several of the Advisory Board members were consulted with beforehand, so consultations did take place," said David. "Should we have consulted with every member of the Advisory Board? Maybe, I'm not sure. But most of the Board had been talked with, and the decision was undertaken following those consultations."
Apart from Walters CAC Associate Director Jane Dailey, and Political Science Professor Siba Grovogui, however, none of the Advisory Board members interviewed by the News-Letter claimed to have been informed by the administration about the decision to remove Chandler before it had already happened. Many are on leave this semester. Grovogui, though informed, notes that he was not formally consulted about the move, nor was the decision ever formally discussed with him.
"A little democratic process might not have hurt," said Dailey. "They could have informed the Board in the way that we were informed."
History professor Sara Berry resigned from the CAC Advisory Board in Dec. as a result of her disagreement with the removal process.
"I resigned because I don't really understand to this day what the reasons were for abruptly asking Professor Chandler to step down as director of CAC," said Berry. "I support [the Strategic Plan's] policy, but I don't understand why, having appointed a series of non-tenured people as directors of CAC, the administration should turn around in the middle of a semester and remove somebody and say that's the reason."
"It was disturbing as what appeared to be a very arbitrary treatment of a faculty colleague," she said.
David and McCarty would not speak about Chandler's performance or capacity as director or the additional reasons leading to his dismissal.
"There are other things that I'm not at liberty to mention," said McCarty, who gave the approval for Chandler's removal. "But certainly the major, driving force was because of the implementation of our policy."
Chandler was not available to comment.
"I don't know all the details on why they needed to do what they did, but I think the process by which they did it was horrific," said Sociology Professor Katrina Bell McDonald, who was involved in the CAC Program's inception in 1995.
"It happened in a very abrupt manner and at a very inopportune time with no warning," said McDonald. "Their failure to consult the CAC board I think crippled the entire program - the program under Chandler's direction had begun implementing a number of ideas set in motion years before."
"The day before his dismissal there had been a very instrumental meeting of the board," she said.
McDonald thinks that Chandler was singled out. "I don't know that a junior person, not of color, would have been dealt with in the same way," she said. "I truly believe that, for whatever reasons, there were people who were intimidated by him because he was a sharp, black man."
"Perhaps there was some good reason to approach Chandler," she added. "But where was due process?"
David said there were no racial elements involved.
"The notion that any element of racial prejudice entered into this is sheer outrageous and totally wrong," said David.
"What happened with CAC was simply making it consistent with Women, Gender, and Sexuality [Studies], East Asian Studies, Global Studies and Film and Media Studies," said David. All of these programs are run either by a tenured director or by the combination of an associate director, tenured or not, with an activist advisory board.
Ronald Walters, as a senior member of the mostly junior faculty members available on the CAC Advisory Board, was asked to take up the directorship of the program.
"As someone who was on the Strategic Planning Report, I do know there was an enormous amount that I didn't think anybody expected would be implemented immediately," said Walters. Nevertheless, he agreed to take on the vacant directorship for a temporary period.
"Nahum invested a lot intellectually and emotionally to CAC," said Walters. "My chief concerns were for the program as well as Nahum's feelings. I did not want to see the basic mission of CAC compromised, which is the only reason I agreed to do this."
On Nov. 29, Walters "spoke with one of the deans before meeting with Nahum and did emphasize what a positive board meeting we had had before."
Faculty members claim that Chandler had announced his considerations about eventually stepping down from his administrative position.
"I think he realized that his position was difficult if not impossible," said Dailey, who was hired to the History Department and as a CAC Assistant Director over the summer. "He can't have known many people. I think its doubly hard-for someone new to try to navigate these unknown waters at Johns Hopkins."
Although on sabbatical, Chandler continues to be on the faculty rolls of the University. He is now also scheduled to be a Visiting Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of California-Davis for the upcoming spring trimester.
"We don't intend not to have him on the faculty," said McCarty. "If he chooses to go elsewhere that's his problem, and I hope that he doesn't. It's not fair to put untenured faculty in administrative positions."
Students have used the concerns about CAC's present capacity in the wake of Chandler's removal to demand that the University implement a Department for African and African-American Studies at Hopkins. Campus umbrella organization JHUnity staged a rally on Tuesday prior to a Black History Month event.
"We're the black students on campus," said sophomore April Land. "And, is the University sensitive to [black students'] needs? Where are the black faculty? Questions came out like that-.so it was put on to the JHUnity agenda."
Students in JHUnity said they have been working on proposals for a department for more than a semester, and their final report is expected to be complete on Friday. No one has yet confronted or discussed these proposals with administrators.
"International Relations (IR) is a program, a very strong program," said Land. "Because its supported by a department-what kind of state is CAC in now? What if we did have an African or African-American Studies Department that supported CAC?"
Christopher Powers, a doctoral fellow who worked with Chandler in the Humanities Department, believes that now is the time for students to demand a "fully funded, fully staffed, and institutionally supported department rather than a program."
Powers suggested "a form of institutional racism" was behind the University's inability to maintain a viable degree program for the study of African-American culture in a predominantly African-American city such as Baltimore.
Others disagreed.
"What I do think is present at Hopkins is what I'll call a scientific culture or an empirical culture that basically assumes that knowledge is gender- and color-blind," said Walters. "It makes it hard to make the case for women's studies or African-American studies or Jewish studies."
Dailey said that decisions about programs were "rooted maybe more in a certain kind of thinking on scholarship rather than any prejudice or bias."
JHUnity students believe that Hopkins is a step behind the many other comparable universities with departments for African-American Studies, but faculty and administrators consider the nature of Hopkins' size and particular scholarly mission as part of the reason a department seems untenable.
Despite not having a department or culturally-specific program, Hopkins has been listed among the top five graduate programs in African-American History by US News and World Report in recent years.
"All identities are relational and they are relational to where they come from and they are relational to other identities at the same time," said Walters. At CAC, explained Walters, Hopkins can provide a type of program that isn't offered anywhere else. Walters has prioritized getting student ideas about curriculum other issues.
"I need to get a better survey of students' perceptions and student demands," said Walters. He also said that CAC needs to "get a budget."
Dailey notes that the CAC serves as an umbrella "but there's been nobody underneath holding it, and that's part of the problem."
"We're not treating anybody differently," said McCarty. "One thing that I am, and I think that we all are here, is acutely aware of the fact that we have to be equitable."
"Programs are central to the way we do things, but they are not departments," said McCarty. "But they are tied in administratively to departments. All appointments come from our traditional departments."
The Department of History is in the process of attracting a historian to coordinate with the upcoming Program for Jewish Studies that is in the works at Hopkins for the next academic year. The center, also an interdisciplinary program rather than a department, is being funded by an outside gift.
"Unfortunately there's not the same donor base for African-American Studies as there are for some other programs," said Dailey, who would be "delighted" to accept an endowment for a more elaborate center for African-American studies.
"We're not at the position to search for an outside director at this point," said Dailey. "We'd have to lay some groundwork before asking someone to come."
"We want CAC to succeed," said David. "It's extremely important that issues dealing with African-American students, faculty, graduate students, intellectual issues, be addressed on campus. We need that to happen, and so all of our efforts are directed towards providing a platform by which the intellectual and scholarly issues presented by African-Americans and Africa are addressed on campus."
JHUnity has invited Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the Chair of the Department of African-American Studies at Harvard University, to speak at Hopkins in April in order to explain the benefits of having a department.
"I'm very hopeful that we will somehow repair this damage and move forward," said McDonald.
McDonald, who has already viewed JHUnity's proposals, called it "a very well put-together, very comprehensive report that I think cannot be ignored."