MEALAC to Adopt African Studies

Correction appended.

The Middle East and Asian languages and cultures department will gradually absorb African studies into its fold while the Institute of African Studies relaunches under a new director this summer, a top University official said.

"The Middle East, South Asia, and Africa are going to move together-they're going to try to connect in various kinds of ways," Vice President for Arts and Sciences Nicholas Dirks said. "Africa is the one major world region that doesn't have a department that will take responsibility for certain kinds of things, like some Core courses in the undergraduate curriculum, which SIPA [the School of International and Public Affairs] cannot do, and language teaching. We don't have enough people to just constitute a department of African studies, and we're not sure if that's the best way to go. At least for the beginning period, MEALAC will be the incubator for African studies, and then we'll see."

Dirks said the decision to move African studies into MEALAC fits in with a larger rethinking of area studies at Columbia and should help integrate professors' work with other departments, programs, and individual faculty members. The move was prompted by space constraints in the International Affairs Building, he added-both are housed on the 11th floor. The incoming director of the IAS, Mamadou Diouf, will be appointed through MEALAC.

In that role, Diouf will "be working with departments like political science and economics and sociology and anthropology and history and SIPA to see about building the social science component," Dirks said, adding, "there's potential connections in architecture and business and law and public health and journalism, even in social work, where we hope to see a catalytic effect develop over the next few years."

Students said the decision was recent and that very little has been discussed with them at this point.

"Ultimately," Dirks said, "what we do in terms of space is completely up for grabs, because if the Business School moves to Manhattanville then we might have a lot more space on campus, and we can rethink the spatial locations of things. Right now we're doing some juggling, and we're thinking about immediate connectivities that will help sustain the institutes."

Tom Faure contributed to this article.

CORRECTION: "MEALAC to Adopt Africa Institute" (Dec.11) mistakenly stated that the Middle East and Asian languages and cultures department will oversee the Institute of African Studies. The MEALAC department will absorb African studies but not the IAS.