October 22nd 2023.
Stanford University has made a monumental step forward in the name of diversity with the official approval of the Board of Trustees to create the Department of African and African American Studies. The new department will open its doors in January and take over the program already in place within the School of Humanities and Sciences.
The approval of the department was the result of years of advocacy from faculty and students alike, and was also sparked by the height of the Black Lives Matter movement and the murder of George Floyd in 2020. R. Lanier Anderson, the J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of the Humanities, said the school needed to make the department a "permanent" fixture in its academia in light of the historical moment.
In 2021, a task force initiated by the university also recommended the departmentalization of the program. Ato Quayson, a professor of English and interdisciplinary studies at the school, was unveiled as the department's inaugural chair. Students in the department will be able to pursue tracks of African, African American, and Global Black Diaspora Studies, and can use courses associated with Black studies to connect their learning to creative means through the Institute for Diversity of the Arts.
When the official vote to approve the department was made, Quayson, an avid reader of Toni Morrison, commenced the vote with a reading from the author's acclaimed work Beloved, which was met with much applause.
The news of the department's approval is the latest effort from Stanford to better the experiences of its diverse student body, which includes advancements to better accommodate disabled students' needs and expansions within the arts.
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