The current issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article entitled “Past Their Prime?” that asks some serious questions about black studies programs. You can read the whole thing here.
Here’s the best line, by Shelby Steele: “It was a bogus concept from the beginning because it was an idea grounded in politics, not in a particular methodology. These programs are dying of their own inertia because they’ve had 30 or 40 years to show us a serious academic program, and they’ve failed.”
When pressed to explain why students should take these programs (and there are very few students who major in them), the best that defenders can come up with is to say that they develop “self-knowledge.”
Why spend years in school and loads of money for that?
