Should black studies programs stress historical and cultural subjects or
satisfy the militants' craving for “revolutionary relevance”? Who
should control them, the students, the faculty or the administration?
These now-familiar issues have troubled the new programs everywhere
that they are offered . In California alone, friction
between administrators, faculty members and black students has resulted
in the resignations of department chairmen at both the Los Angeles and
Santa Barbara campuses of the University of California; President S. I.
Hayakawa has been at constant odds with the department at San Francisco
State and has been threatening to close it down.Last week Chancellor Ivan Hinderaker of the University of California at
Riverside beat Hayakawa to the punch. Summoning the faculty to an
emergency meeting, Hinderaker announced that he was dissolving
Riverside's six-month-old department of black studies.Yes or No. The program began peacefully enough last fall, when many of
Riverside's 180 black and 5,180 white students enrolled in the six
courses offered. The trouble began in the middle of the fall quarter
after leadership of the Black Students Union changed hands. The new
leaders asked Hinderaker for $100,000 with which to recruit 450 new
black students to be admitted next September at the sole discretion of
the B.S.U. Pressed for an immediate yes or no answer, the chancellor
demurred.Subsequently, he said, B.S.U. leaders turned to “tactics of threat and
coercion” that resulted in the humiliation of Maurice Jackson, the
department head. Jackson, a black, quit Riverside after signing a
statement giving the B.S.U. central committee broad veto powers over
the hiring of the black studies professors and administrators.”I am committed to helping correct the gross imbalance in the proportion
of minority students who are in the mainstream of higher education,”
Hinderaker told the faculty. But to surrender to the B.S.U. demands, he
argued, would set a destructive precedent.The chancellor's dramatic announcement, in which he said that the black
studies courses would be distributed among several academic
departments, drew loud applause from the faculty. Representatives of
the B.S.U. met with Hinderaker the next day to demand that the
department be reinstated. Nonetheless, some of them seemed to be having
second thoughts. “We think perhaps we made a mistake by demanding veto
power too soon,” said Booker McClain, a member of the B.S.U. central
committee. “We have decided to make a retreat for the time being.”
Preparing for the worst all the same, Hinderaker rescinded Riverside's
policy of permitting students to demonstrate inside campus buildings.
