Over the last decade, academe has witnessed a renaissance in African American studies. Across the country new life has been breathed into moribund programs. Old fears of ghettoization have given way to an ebullient embrace of diversity. The field attracts scholars and students from various racial and ethnic backgrounds, and can be found at the center of intellectual life in the humanities and social sciences.

Under the leadership of former Dean Will Harrison and Interim Dean Neil Sullivan, CLAS has committed itself to rebuilding African American studies. Over the next several years, African American studies will take its place among other programs and centers, contributing to the university's intellectual life and enhancing its reputation. My confidence is a reflection of the support that most everyone has extended to the program. My belief is that the university already has a sound basis on which to build.

As director, it is my charge to marshal the resources of the college and the university and to build a program that serves the university and is recognized as outstanding by peer institutions. Recently, programs and centers that focus on cultural and diaspora studies have dominated the field. Yet research on social problems and their solutions continues to be important, especially outside of the academy. Rather than concentrating on a single trend, our program will seek to attract an intellectually diverse faculty that produces quality work in the social sciences and the humanities.

For students, it is always best to build a program that reflects the breadth of the field. By recruiting a core faculty with broad research interests, the program will be able to develop a strong major and a well-rounded graduate program. As a major, African American studies will concentrate on cultural studies (broadly defined), society and social policy (including critical race theory), and African Americans as part of the African diaspora. Students who major or minor in this field will be able to take their knowledge into various professions ranging from social work to policy making, and from primary and secondary teaching to law and law enforcement.

While there is much work to be done, UF is poised to become a national leader in African American studies. The university is rich in faculty resources in the field and in cognate fields. In the various departments of the college, there are many scholars who have done groundbreaking research on people of African descent in the New World and on related topics such as racial and ethnic studies. From Joe Feagin in sociology and Jon Sensbach in history to Irma McClaurin in anthropology and Jim Haskins in English, to name just a few, CLAS faculty members have already made major contributions to the field. UF can boast of having a past president, John Lombardi, and a current provost, David Colburn, who made pioneering contributions to the study of African Americans before it was academic fashion. In anthropology, the university has a department responsible for producing the lion's share of the nation's anthropologists of African decent.

The university is also fortunate to have research centers that are related to African American studies. UF's long-standing excellence in African and Latin American studies places our program in an enviable position among programs at other major research institutions. With a number of prominent scholars who focus on people of African descent, the Latin American Studies Center, along with the African American Studies Program, will make UF a leading institution for the study of the African disapora in the New World.

Given the university's strengths in this field, the program will seek to develop an infrastructure that will bring the existing faculty into its activities. Once this is accomplished, the resources of the college and the university will be more effectively utilized.

--Daryl Michael Scott

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