Black Studies in Trouble

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 (TIME, Jan. 26). 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.

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