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Among the most comprehensive programs of black studies is the degree-granting department planned by Dr. Nathan Hare for San Francisco State College. It will open next fall, though Hare, an adversary of acting President S. I. Hayakawa, has been dropped from the faculty. (The students are demanding his reinstatement.) To earn a black B.A., San Francisco students will take four basic courses in Negro history, psychology, science, arts and humanities; after that, two areas of concentration are possible. One consists of 14 courses in behavioral and social sciences, such as "Black Politics" and "Black Nationalism and the International Community." Hare describes the purpose of the department bluntly: "It's to teach black students to deal with a society that is self-defined as racist."
Many blacks, if they had their way, would like to see autonomous black studies programs—administered, taught and attended by blacks only. White professors, they believe, are incapable of really understanding the black experience. White students are a potential embarrassment. Says Indiana's Orlando Taylor: "There is a psychological feeling among blacks against exposing some of the hang-ups they may have as a result of racism in front of a white audience."
One black who opposes such total separatism is Nathan Hare. "We're not racists," he says. "We think that separatism is often a pretext to evade acting in a revolutionary fashion now." He wants to include as many white students as possible (white students, in fact, could greatly benefit from black studies). The shortage of qualified black teachers will keep most faculties of Afro-American studies integrated for some time to come. There are, moreover, legal obstacles to full autonomy. Roy Wilkins, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, warned last winter: "If some white Americans should accede officially to the call for separate dormitories and autonomous racial schools, there will be court action to determine anyone's right to use public tax funds to set up what are, patently, Jim Crow schools." Sure enough, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare last month threatened to withhold federal funds from Ohio's Antioch College unless the school desegregates its blacks-only Afro-American Studies Institute, which opened last fall.
The strongest opposition to autonomous departments of black studies comes from faculty members who see the idea as a threat to academic integrity, their own prerogatives or both. When the Harvard faculty last week voted to include six students on the committee working out plans for the future department of Afro-American studies, Economist Henry Rosovsky indignantly resigned from the committee.