In Black America; The New UT Austin PhD Program in Black Studies with Dr. Edmund T. Gordon

From the University of Texas at Austin, KUT Radio, this is In Black America. They have some very rigorous standards that they want you to meet in terms of the economic viability of the major, the intellectual viability of it, whether it's needed in the state, how it compares to other programs nationally, they also want to know if there's jobs available for people who get the PhD, it was a very, very rigorous process. In fact, they asked us to have, we had to bring in a team of outside reviewers to review the program before they would even consider it. So it was a serious deal. We managed to make it through and I think we made it through well, but they were not fooling around in terms of making sure that we had a program that was viable and that

met the standards of an eminent institution like the University of Texas here at Austin. Dr. Edmund T. Gordon, chair of the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. In October 2012, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board approved a new doctoral program in black studies at the University of Texas at Austin, making it a first for the University, the State of Texas, and in the Southwest. The Department of African and African Diaspora Studies in the College of Liberal Arts will administer the new degree program. Through the new program, the University of Credential Scholars with Eckpurchtees in the discipline created by and about people of African descent. This doctoral program provides a balanced curriculum that will give students a strong foundation in black studies, while also exposing them to the theories and methods of disciplines in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. I'm Johnny Elhanson, Jr. and welcome to another edition of in black America. On this week's program, the new PhD program in black studies at UT Austin, with Dr. Edmund

T. Gordon in black America. We are trying to comply with the recent trends in higher education in this country, trying to keep the numbers of years down in order to be able to get the PhD. Up until recently, it was usual for people to take six years after the BA to get their PhD, and people were taking eight, nine, ten years. We're trying to have this be a five-year PhD. If you're coming in with the Bachelor of Arts, then we'll take you five years to go through and you get the Master's on the way. If you're coming in with the Master's, we're hoping it'll take you three years in order to be able to get through. But you have to be well-qualified, you have to have done well academically in your undergraduate preparation, usually helps if you come from a decent school. The Department of African and African Astros studies at UT Austin was founded in 2009 and has quickly established itself as one of the top departments in the nation.

Work Studies at UT Austin consists of two units in the addition to the AADS, the Johnny and Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, and the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis. These three interrelated entities mutually reinforce the research, teaching, and service mission of black studies, and provide a robust base for advancement of the discipline. The Graduate Program in African and African Astros study is designed to provide students with the skills and analytical framework necessary to engage interdisciplinary approaches for examining the lines of people of African descent throughout Africa, the African diaspora, including the United States. AADS faculty and students understand the urgent need to critically address our aspects of black life. In October 2012, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board approved a new doctoral program in black studies at the University of Texas at Austin, making it a first for the University, the State of Texas, and in the Southwest.

In black America, spoke with Dr. Edmund T. Gordon, Chair of the Department. The discipline of black studies or degree in black studies gives you entree into many other kinds of disciplines. We have people who major in black studies, but then go on to do medical work. In other words, you can be pre-med and a black studies major and go on to be a doctor or a work in public health or nursing or something like that. You've got folks who use the basis for going on to things like law school, public policy. Really it can be an entry way to any kind of discipline that you want to move it onto. If you carefully tool your undergraduate program in order to be able to do the other kinds of preparatory work, which would allow you to move on to these other kinds of professions. What it does is it basically teaches you how to think critically and also teaches you how to look at a set of folks or look at how it is that people who are not privileged in society make it through, understand their culture, et cetera, and then you can apply

that in a number of different kinds of ways as you go through. The courses that taught in the department, electives or some of the courses required for graduation. For the undergraduate degree, there are a few required courses. There is an entry course, a required course that everyone needs to take, it's called AFR 303. It's an introduction to African-African diaspora studies. Everyone must take that and it's taught at an entry level. And then before you leave, you also have to take a course, it's called an internship course in which you go through and you do internships in the community and learn about the application of the kinds of knowledge that you learn in our courses in the community. And then there is a senior seminar in which it's a capstone course, it's taken by all our seniors before the graduate, which really puts the intellectual icing on the cake. So those are the three required courses and then there's various kinds of requirements

that you have to take in order to be a liberal arts major and various other kind of things like that. If you're just joining us, you're listening to In Black America from KUT Radio, I'm John L. Hanson, Jr. and we're speaking with Dr. Edmund T. Gordon, PhD chair of the African and African diaspora studies department at the University of Texas at Austin. Tell us about the process of going through obtaining a PhD program particularly in African studies. You just can't just say we want one, obviously there are some work and research involved in that process. It was a three or four year process, it's relatively demanding at this point. The state in particular has decided that it wants to have very high standards for being able to create a particular doctoral program in the state and they're right to do it. You don't want any fly-by-night operations. The center, the Warfield Center, had already had an undergraduate major and so the undergraduate major from the Warfield Center was transferred over to the new department when the department

was created about three years ago now. Then it took us a year to design the master's program and to get it underway. It meant that we had to go through a number of different levels. We had to design the program at the level of the department. We then had to convince the academic committee at the level of the dean's office, the Office of Liberal Arts or the School of Liberal Arts to approve it that it had to be approved by the associate dean and the dean themselves, it had to be approved by the graduate school, it had to be approved by the provost office, it had to be approved by the president and I believe it also had to be approved at the level of UT system. So it was a fairly rigorous process, I think the regents also had to approve it at some level. It took us about a year to get that done. To get the PhD done was an entirely different story, that was a two year process that went through all those same steps that I mentioned, but also had to be approved directly by the regents and also by the state of Texas's Courtney Boyle for higher education.

And that they have some very rigorous standards that they want you to meet in terms of the economic viability of the major, the intellectual viability of it, whether it's needed in the state, how it compares to other programs nationally, they also want to know if there's jobs available for people who get the PhD, it was a very, very rigorous process. In fact, they asked us to have, we had to bring in a team of outside reviewers to review the program before they would even consider it. So it was a serious deal. We managed to make it through and I think we made it through well, but they were not fooling around in terms of making sure that we had a program that was viable and that met the standards of an eminent institution like the University of Texas here at Austin. Being realistic about it, obviously there is this labor intensive, but they also, you have to do research.

So who finances these type of endeavors, particularly the PhD program and the master's program in African Studies? Well, one thing is that one of the reasons we were able to get a department is because established, there's not that many black studies departments being established these days, we're actually the first one in the state of Texas, first and only one in the state of Texas. And so, but we were, we had been doing work over the last 15 years to build up the faculty here at the University of Texas in this area. And so one of the reasons we were able to get the department is because the university recognized that we had the academic strength already in place in order to be able to do that. It didn't cost a huge amount of money more in order to be able to create the department because you could create the department based on resources, particularly faculty resources that already existed. Beyond that, we had to get some amount of funding for staff and staff and and faculty that pull together to pull together these kinds of poses and push them through. We were also able to get two endowed endowments, so we had some faculty endowments also that

gives us some more funding as well. So it's a combination of things. We already had resources in place. There was an allocation of modest resources for staff and for some additional faculty. And there was also some endowments that were that were developed. And so between those, we were able to have the resources to be able to put these things together. You was an ideal of some of the prerequisites. One must have prior to actually doing a dissertation for the PhD. Well, you got to have quite a lengthy process. I don't want to make it sound too daunting because it actually is doable. But the first thing you have to have at your high school education, you have to do pretty well there. You have to go on and get a degree from a university, a university college degree of BA most often. Then you can either go through a master's program and usually a two year master's program and then apply for the PhD or in our program, you can apply for the PhD program if you

have just a BA. We are trying to comply with the recent trends in higher education in this country trying to keep the numbers of years down in order to be able to get the PhD up until recently it was usual for people to take six years after the BA to get their PhD and people were taking eight, nine, ten years. We're trying to have this be a five year PhD. If you're coming in with the Bachelor of Arts, then we'll take you five years to go through and you get the master's on the way. If you're coming in with the master's, we're hoping it'll take you three years in order to be able to get through. But you have to be well qualified, you have to have done well academically in your undergraduate preparation, usually helps if you come from a decent school, recognize school, and it usually helps if your GRE scores, your standardized scores are pretty good, although we recognize that there's not necessarily a direct relationship between high GRE scores and your ability to

make it through successfully in a PhD program. But you certainly do have to have a good GPA. You have to have demonstrated at the undergraduate or master's level that you are a serious student and that you can do that kind of work, that level of work. I would assume that during that process of developing the PhD program and already having the master's program, you all had an opportunity to talk to students and some of their concerns of why the PhD program was necessary or some of the things they wanted to accomplish with the PhD program. Yeah, so many of the folks who apply for the master's program were interesting going on for the PhD. That's because for a number of reasons. One is that a master's is a good degree. It opens a number of doors to in terms of jobs, but masters are also becoming, I would not say run out of the mill, but there are a lot of people out there with masters. So many of the jobs in which you could qualify for a master's are now you're in better shape

if you got the PhD. One example of that is it used to be that you could teach at the higher education, particularly at a community college with a master's degree and there's still many fine faculty members at community colleges with masters degrees, but it is increasingly the case that if you have a PhD, you're more likely to get that kind of job. Definitely used to be also the case that if you had a master's you could probably teach at a four year university as well. Now it's almost impossible to get a teaching job with a master's, you definitely need the PhD. So many of the folks who were deeply interested in black studies are interested in that field of knowledge and are interested in doing research and teaching in that field of knowledge. And so you're much more likely to be able to get a job and pursue research if you've got the PhD. The other thing with masters is that you're more likely to get a job, if you get a job at all as a teacher, you're going to be doing mostly teaching and not have any time or

ability to do research and the folks who are really interested in these disciplines want to do original research and you really can't do that without a PhD. When were the first incoming PhD candidates participating in the program? We already had our initial selection process. We've got six students who have who we've selected and who agreed to attend our program and so they will be arriving on campus in late August and will begin beginning in the fall semester. That will be our inaugural class. Considering the price of education today, are there any financial assistance for the PhD students? Yes. All our PhD students are fully funded for five years, which is a tremendous sacrifice on our part to be able to pull together the resources to be able to do it. We've had some assistance, actually quite a bit of assistance from the College of Liberal Large, from the Graduate School, from the Provost's Office of Excerics, etc., in order to be able to make that happen.

Every student that we've accepted has a package and they're well deserved. Really, in order to be able to participate or to be competitive in relationship to other top graduate programs in this country, you have to be able to offer fellowships to students, to good students. And in fact, we lost some good students who decided to go elsewhere and the place they decided to go with places like Harvard, Berkeley, places like that. So we're competing Northwest and we're competing with the top universities in the country for black study students. Are the incoming students for this class, they are from Texas, they're from different parts of the country? They're from different parts of the country, we've got some folks from California, some folks from back in the East Coast, few folks from the Midwest, or one or two folks from the Midwest, and then some folks from Latin America as well. Obviously, I would think part of the application process is their interests. Besides attaining the PhD, obviously you don't have to write a dissertation or something. Can you tell us some of the interests that this incoming class has?

Well, there's a broad range of interest. There are a number of folks who are interested in kind of race and race relations in Latin America, particularly Brazil. So there's one student who's interested in kind of performance and race amongst Afro-Brazilians in Brazil. There's another person who's interested in kind of race and gender, Afro-Brazilian women, and the politics of that in Brazil. There's another person who also is interested in Afro-Brazilians, but interested in kind of queer populations in Brazil, gay movement, et cetera, et cetera. Here in the United States, we've got folks who are interested in Afro-Asian relationships. So it's a broad range of interests and subjects that these folks are coming into work on. Okay. If it's just joining us, you're listening to In Black America from KUT Radio. I'm Jan El Hanson, Jr. And we're speaking with Dr. Edmund T. Gordon, PhD chair of the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin.

Obviously, during the ongoing initiation and participation of the PhD program, there are going to be some tweaks. How do you go about re-evaluating what is being offered to students over the long haul? Is that part of the continuation? One of the challenges in building a new department is you have to construct a curriculum. And so we have spent a lot of time trying to get together what we consider to be an adequate curriculum. But like you said, we're just starting out with it. So there are going to be things that have to be addressed. We have, in fact, every department here has a relatively elaborate graduate governance structure. Every member of our faculty is also a member of what they call the GSE, the Graduate Studies Committee. And that group continually looks at your graduate program, tries to decide whether it's adequate or not, tries to tweak the curriculum, choose the courses that are going to be presented

every year, et cetera, et cetera. We've got a large number of faculty members, almost 32 faculty members, and not all of them can teach graduate courses at all the time because we only have, right now, we only have a PhD, we'll have an incoming cohort of six folks. That's clearly enough for every faculty member to be able to teach a graduate course every semester. So what we're doing is each one of our faculty members has an area of expertise, and we're mixing and matching in ways that also correlate with the kinds of students we have and the students and the kinds of interests they have in order to be able to have a good selection of courses taught every semester that meets the needs and interests of the students we have. So it's something, as you said, that's continually being tweaked. It also changes as our faculty members become more interested in other kinds of research areas and teaching other kinds of courses, et cetera, et cetera, which also is an interaction with what they understand the students to need and want. How did you go about selecting the individual who's going to run the PhD program?

Obviously, you had to find a director. Well, there's actually, like I said, it's an elaborate system. Every department has a graduate coordinator, and we have a very good one who we've hired on to. That's a staff member who really oversees the students and staffs, the committees, and this, that, and the other thing. On that, we have a graduate advisor, who's a faculty member who is directly responsible for administering the graduate program, who's the one who advises the students, et cetera, et cetera. Then in addition to that, we have a graduate steering, it's given a graduate steering committee chair, graduate studies chair, who's an elected person who basically oversees, in a legislative way, the decisions that the faculty make in relation to what the curriculum is going to look like and what the rules and regulations are going to be. So the graduate studies committee chair, chairs, the kind of legislative aspect of the graduate program, and the graduate advisor is more the executive administrator of the

graduate studies program, and they're both ably assisted by the graduate coordinator. So it's a complex operation with a number of moving parts. Why is this significant for one UT, but also for the state of Texas and the South and Southwest? Well, there are only a handful, actually more than a handful, two handfuls of programs, black studies programs in the country that offer PhDs, they're at some of the top institutions in the country, Harvard, Yale, Penn, Northwestern, Berkeley, et cetera. So it's significant for UT because it places it in that very select group of elite universities that have PhD programs in black studies. So from that perspective, it means that UT is covering an area of human knowledge that's been deemed to be very important, but that most universities don't have the capacity or

the willpower or the will to provide. Beyond that, there is only, it turns out, one other university in the South of the United States that offers a PhD in black studies, that's at Louisville. If it had not taken us so long to go through all the hoops we had to go through in order to be able to get our program approved, we would have beaten them to it, but they had their first incoming class last year and we'll have our first incoming class this year. So there's only two institutions in the South of the United States that offer PhD in black studies, clearly none other in Texas because our department is the only department in the State of Texas. There is no other institution in the Southwest of this country that offers a PhD in black studies either. So we are very unique in these regions of the country in terms of being able to offer what we consider to be an important discipline and which has been deemed to be an important discipline by virtue of the fact that all, many of these top universities that we like

to compete with are also offering them. Are students other than those of Africa and descent interested in the department with you, Chair? Absolutely. And, you know, this department couldn't exist if we didn't have other kinds of folks who were both faculty members in it and also students of it. This is a discipline like any other and it's open to all kinds of folks and the knowledge that we're talking about are the knowledge is produced in some sense by communities of African descent, but they're not knowledge is that are exclusive to communities of African descent. So not only do we welcome folks of other races and ethnicities and cultures as students and faculty members, but we couldn't exist if we didn't have those folks. You can't have at a university like this a discipline that is only for one kind of person. It's just not feasible. It's also probably not legal, but we don't have to go there. Where you would like to see the department five, ten years from now?

I would like the department to be the top black studies department in the country. We're already the biggest, the largest. Okay. In terms of faculty members, we probably have our thanks to the work of our undergraduate coordinator, the numbers of our majors is skyrocketing. So hopefully we'll soon have more students in terms of majors than any other department in the country. But I would like us to be recognized as the best. One of the things that's keeping us from doing that right now is that we have a large number of associate professors and we don't have that many full professors. We've chosen to grow from the junior ranks up. I think within the next four or five years as our associate professor become full professors and is it continued to produce research and scholarship that will become clear that we are the premier department in the country. So I'm looking forward to that. I also would like us to have a clear impact on policy here in the state and in the country,

nationally. I'd like it to be clear that the kinds of research and knowledge production that we do in our department has actual practical use. I'd like to demonstrate that through the ways in which we translate the kind of research and scholarship we do into actual policy that then can be adopted and implemented both to the state and the national level. Over the years, the University has not had a very impressive legacy towards its treatment of African-American students prior to the human sweat decision. How will this department and this efforts enhance that legacy that University of Texas will have in Texas and around the nation? Well, I hope it actually counteracts that legacy. That's one of the reasons I think that the President of the University has been so proactive President Powers in supporting the development of the department and the Institute. I think that most folks who are fair recognize that the University of Texas has had a pretty poor record in relationship to African-Americans in the Black population in the state of Texas.

62 years ago, there were none of us here. We couldn't be sitting here. We might be sweeping the floors, but that would be it. But I think that going out and hiring faculty members who are many of whom are African-American or African descent, hiring faculty members, all of whom have an interest in the Black experience and in the development of Black acknowledges really made a difference on this campus in terms of both campus's own impression of his own self and also the kind of image that the University is trying to project outward. We have hired more than 70 African-American faculty members in the last 10 or 15 years, which is actually an enormous amount when you consider the legacy here. We've got classes between 10 and 15 classes every semester about the Black experience. I think it demonstrates that the unfortunate legacy of racial exclusion that is the legacy

or the history of this university has been turned. We're not through yet, but it's a far different situation than it was 62 years ago. I think if we keep moving in this direction, there will become a time when people will look to the University of Texas as the place where Black knowledge is emanating from rather as the place where Black bodies and Black knowledge were excluded. Dr. Edmund T. Gordon, Chair of the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin. If you have questions, comments or suggestions ask your student in Black America programs, email us at jhansen at kut.org. Also let us know what radio station you heard us over. The views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or of the University of Texas at Austin. You can hear previous programs online at kut.org. On Sylvia the opportunity again for Technical Producer David Alvarez, I'm John L. Hanson

Jr. Thank you for joining us today. Please join us again next week. CD copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing in Black America CDs, KUT Radio, one university station, Austin, Texas, 78712. This has been a production of KUT Radio.