Frederick McKindra: Dr. Cooper. I wondered if you could kick us off by defining the humanities for our audience, specifically attempting to differentiate the humanities from STEM fields. I’d love to hear more about how those fields are crucial for change on HBCU campuses.
Dr. Brittney Cooper: The humanities are, in W. E. B. Du Bois’s terms, the kinds of studies that foster broad sympathies. They are the study of literature, of ideas, of ethics, of culture, of human understanding and human experiences around the world, and they are rooted in more ideas around analytics, around debate, around writing, and around discussion and deliberation, rather, for example, than positivist interpretations and empirical research study, which is central to the building of the sciences and the social sciences.
There is some overlap when we talk about social sciences like political science or sociology or anthropology. Sometimes those can be understood as the humanistic social sciences, and these things can also change depending on your educational institution. So sometimes, for example, African American studies is classified as social sciences, like at the university where I work, whereas sometimes it’s classified as the humanities, and that give is one of the things that is very fluid around what we mean by the humanities. That in so many ways we are typically talking about those courses, those disciplines, those studies that ask you to sit with the notion of the idea, its effect on you, and the way that these things affect the lived realities of people, but also of species. Not just people.
So, it’s a broad definition, but I have loved and learned this notion of broad sympathies at Howard, where in the 1990s this was the set of marching orders that governed how we were trained in humanities. At Howard, we were trained to take a set of core courses that inspired us to develop broad sympathies, and one of the things that is important about the humanities at HBCUs is that the heart and the founding of all higher learning has happened at Black colleges. It is seeded in Black colleges. I think we should be very clear that there is no Black humanistic understanding without the pioneering work of Black educators in Black colleges. But there is also no scientific study. All of our opportunities to build fields and say that we are part of these conversations, and to see the sort of affirmation of Black humanity when we’re talking about educational institutions, begins with Black colleges, begins with our own belief in ourselves as folks worthy both of care, concern, and study.
Frederick McKindra: Gabrielle, I wanted to go to you next because there was a moment when I looked up and I realized that so much of the discussion on HBCUs today, the fights over dress codes and respectability politics at Tuskegee, and lieutenant governors being invited to speak at commencement ceremonies, whose politics are anathema to the mission of the university down at South Carolina State, all of those conversations had something to do with the shrinking role of humanities on campus, and one thing that I thought your Substack article did, Gabrielle, really cogently was to put humanities enrichment in opposition to the encroachment of corporatization on HBCUs. I wondered if you could expound on what you were hoping to interrogate in your essay on that point.
Gabrielle Cassell: I think what was coming to mind for me, particularly as a student engaging with the humanities, critical thinking, analysis, and comprehension, they have been significant parts of my education, and I’m seeing that slowly be lost over time. I was thinking about what I understand the mission or the focus of what a liberal arts college should be focused on in general, which is not about just trying to create workers and trying to create a pipeline for students to join corporate America, but it’s to create critical thinkers. Then yes, the job or the next step or grad school comes after, but that’s not necessarily the priority. I think with this wave of corporatization that we’re seeing at Spelman, at HBCUs, but even across the academy in general, and especially with the push for AI to become such a central part of our curriculums, it’s really taking away students’ ability to learn what it means to develop a critical consciousness and to learn how to analyze the world. I think, particularly for me in the socio-political moment we’re in, it’s really dangerous, particularly for young Black people, to not know how to think, because then you can be controlled or you can be misinformed and led astray. So, I think that’s what I was really trying to get at, is that some of the central skills that should be part of our education are being devalued, and it’s going to have a detrimental effect over time. I think we’re already seeing it, but it’s going to get much worse as things continue to escalate on a societal and global level.
Clarissa Brooks: Dr. Imhotep, I wanted to move us to the critical work you’re doing and ask if you could speak to the challenges that are facing the humanities courses in this moment.
Dr. Ra Malika Imhotep: When I think about the challenges facing humanities courses at Spelman, there is institutional divestment. One of my appointments is to support the African Diaspora Studies minor. Not many students know we have an African Diaspora Studies minor, and we currently have no budget, like absolutely none. So, me going into my fourth year at Spelman, with all the dreams, ideas, and initiatives that my brain can hold, I have to start at square one along with my colleague Dr. Sara Busdiecker. Whenever I say to folks that Spelman doesn’t have a Black Studies program, with the exception of our fledgling minor, there’s shock, and there should be. There should be shock and dismay, but there’s this idea that you’re at a Black college, so why do you need Black studies?
I’ll say that some of the challenge to the humanities classroom, to the Black studies classroom, that comparative women’s studies has been able to break through in its brilliance and just overall presence in the field of women and gender studies and on our campus in particular is a cultural attitude that does say, “Well, I know everything to know about being Black, or I know everything to know about this.” It seems more insidious than the typical “get a major that’ll pay you.” When I was discussing Gabrielle’s article in class with my freshmen, there was this sense of like, we shouldn’t limit ourselves to just focusing on this thing, and that does negatively impact how students build their schedules. I’m in a position where my tenure home, Global and Diaspora Studies, is classified as a social science, but our African Diaspora Studies minor is a humanities. So, I have to choose. If I list the class as social science, I might get more students who need that credential. Versus if I list it as a humanities, the class might actually have a more humanities centrality. I do think that humanistic social sciences can be this trickster space. It’s like whatever you need the degree to say, we can figure out, but the work of the classroom is what Jarvis Givens might call fugitive pedagogy.
Frederick McKindra: Dr. Price, I wanted to open the floor to you because you and Dr. Imhotep occupy different ends of the spectrum in terms of the HBCUs that you work in. Are there particular challenges that Dr. Imhotep spoke to that you have seen affecting the work that you all are doing down in Prairie View?
Dr. Melanye Price: We are a publicly funded institution, and so it puts us in a particular kind of jeopardy around what is happening right now. The state of Texas has banned DEI, which means a whole host of things in all publicly funded agencies, including its universities, and so we have seen over the last year minors and majors disappearing, departments being consolidated, which is clearly a move to minimize their impact. What we are trying to do is figure out how we do our work in this moment.
Oftentimes, we tell people to look towards the civil rights movement generation, but I’m trying to think about the people who taught the civil rights movement generation. Who are the people who were on these campuses in the 1940s and 50s, and what did they have to do without Black Studies? What did they have to do without certain kinds of administrative support, and how they managed to still produce a King and a Diane Nash and all of these other people?
What we are doing at the center is we have made a decision that we’re going to do our work until people tell us that it’s no longer in compliance. What we’re not going to do is sort of try to guess what comes next, or to try to contort ourselves into the ways that we believe people want us to behave. Because really, more than anything, this is about trying to scare people into compliance rather than trying to actually create an argument for why people should comply.
So, there are ways in which we are negotiating the ways we talk about things, but not the things we talk about and the ways in which we are telling our students that you can still change the world.