Time Will Determine Success or Failure of African Initiatives at Columbia

University President Lee Bollinger has said one of his top priorities is making Columbia a leading institution for the study of Africa. But Columbia’s decentralized initiatives regarding the continent, strewn throughout multiple schools, institutes, and departments with no central oversight, inhibit the University’s goals.

Programs like the Medical Center’s dental intervention in Sub-Saharan Africa and numerous internships within the Earth Institute are already well underway. But a few more years will tell if recent changes will produce results in the long run. Columbia’s Africa-related academic programs and its efforts on the continent are separate entities, but both are now fully functioning.

The Institute for African Studies lost its director, Mahmood Mamdani, in 2004, and then ran under a series of interim part-time directors until June 2006, when Lisa Anderson, then dean of the School of International and Public Affairs, suspended it. When the Institute reopened with Mamadou Diouf as director in July 2007, Columbia pledged $200,000 and hired three African studies professors with different academic disciplines to be housed, along with other Africa-focused courses, within the department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures.

During the Institute’s hiatus, Bollinger wrote an e-mail to students in the SIPA Pan-Africa Network, a student group at the School of International and Public Affairs that protested the IAS’ suspension and advocates a larger African awareness in Columbia. In the e-mail, Bollinger wrote, “I assure you that in the next five years, Columbia will become a key center for African studies. ... I understand how frustrating that timeline must be for you, as you will no doubt have completed your SIPA program by the time they are all on campus.”

But many said they felt the response was insufficient. SPAN’s communications chair Christopher Kuonqui, SIPA ’07, fired back at the time: “People are upset ... It shows a lack of political will to find a director.”

Students said last year they could use the temporary closing as an opportunity to rethink African studies in general, and Columbia’s approach to it. “We need to have a discussion of the Institute’s place to have a clear-cut idea of what its goals will be—both short term and long term,” Christabel Dadzie, SIPA ’07 and SPAN president, said in May.

There is no department of African studies at Columbia College. Diouf said African studies work better as an interdisciplinary field because creating a separate department would amount to “ghettoizing” African scholarship. Currently, many courses on the study of Africa are housed in the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department—a name which he said he hopes to change. “It’s called MEALAC. Africa is not there ... It will be something else with Africa in the name.”
Beyond the IAS, University Professor Joseph Stiglitz and Hungarian financier George Soros pledged last September to donate $50 million over the next five years to the Millennium Villages Project. Run by Columbia’s Earth Institute, the initiative stresses sustainable development and strives to relieve rural areas from extreme poverty by 2015 by using a scalable model to help Africans develop autonomously. Currently, there are Millenium Villages Project sites in 76 to 79 Sub-Saharan villages.

According to program coordinator Helena Lee, who works on medical programs for Millennium Villages, one strength of the program is its collaboration across disciplines and between undergraduate and graduate students and professors. One of Lee’s projects, directed by the agriculture and nutrition coordinators, provides lunch and breakfast to students in Africa. The collaboration results in methods of planting different crops to diversify the different vitamins that people are getting to prevent disease from spreading.

While the Millenium Villages Project and the Institute for African Studies are both major pieces of the University’s work regarding Africa, Lee said that there is no direct collaboration between the two. The same can be said of Barnard’s Africana studies program, which, after losing three of its directors in four years, hired two professors last year as part of the University’s efforts to rejuvenate the field. “A lot of professors have their faith in more than one institute,” she said.

“Like most universities, Columbia is struggling to find ways to both combine resources from across the diverse units into which we’re divided and to find ways to make the strengths we have in African studies and the research focused in such a way as to make a whole greater than the sum of its parts,” SIPA’s Acting Dean John Coatsworth said. “One strategy is to allow people to discover ways to relate their interests to each other. Another way is to do it from the top down. Both have been experimented with, and eventually we found the right formula. The Institute for African Studies is now undergoing something of a renaissance.”

There are several ways to pursue African studies at Columbia: Columbia College students can choose regional studies majors focusing on Africa, Barnard College students can major in Africana Studies, SIPA Master of International Affairs candidates may concentrate on regional studies in Africa, and students in all graduate schools may take classes in order to achieve a certificate in African studies separate from their graduate degrees. Diouf said that during IAS’ suspension, these courses and academic programs were still accessible to students.

The role of the Institute, Diouf said, is to be the “interlocutor,” extending beyond the International Affairs Building and consolidating African resources throughout the faculty and departments such as history, sociology, comparative literature, and MEALAC. He said this interdisciplinary convergence is necessary “to make this place ... the greatest place for African issues, and a place where people are coming to debate.”

He said the Institute could also become a venue for migrant Africans in New York City to showcase their culture or take part in discussion, asking, “Can we use our space as a kind of neutral space to have debate we are not having somewhere else?”

Another complaint students had brought—one common to Columbia’s curriculum in many fields—concerned the academic framework of the discipline. As Kuonqui had worded it a year ago, while area studies are well-established, some students want “more economic policy” and less “colonialism.”

Coatsworth said Columbia “needs at least one and perhaps more than one global research center located in Africa. ... To make it [IAS] stronger, we need to increase the faculty who are experts in Africa, who can offer courses on Africa.”

Diouf has spoken of pedagogical shifts as well. Along with the fluctuation in personnel and programs, he said the framework of African-related scholarship should change. “When Europeans are talking about Africa they are talking about themselves more than about the real thing. ... You change it by changing the location of Africa in the global world.”

Diouf teaches Pan-Africanism, a graduate seminar course that compares texts to learn about the way Africans identify themselves, despite and in light of Western depictions. “Africa seems to be a mirror for the West, because this is the failure of their own success. Africa helps them measure the distance, what they have done,” Diouf said.

“The perception of Africa will not change based on what we are teaching. It’s also based on what Africans will be doing. It’s about their own destiny and it’s their own responsibility.”

Joy Resmovits can be reached at joy.resmovits@columbiaspectator.com.