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This month's focus: Preserving the Past (Part 2) Zoologists in Africa New Chair English Professor Works With CAS Faculty Profile Dean's Musings Around the College Bookbeat Grants CLASnotes CLASnotes |
The Center for African Studies
There have always been CLAS faculty and graduate students interested in African societies, African geography, African natural resources, African agriculture and African languages. But the idea of founding a Center for African Studies that would bring together all the interested parties and help coor-dinate colla-borative re-search, exchange programs, campus guest speakers and fund-raising did not happen until 1964. In that year a group of far-sighted scholars at CLAS had the Center incorporated as an integral part of the UF's effort to intensify its reach in international graduate scholarship, and extend its contacts with universities abroad. It should be recalled that in the US after the Second World War, contrary to these days, there was very strong popular desire to understand the rest of the world. Much of this had to do with the national trauma caused by involvement of the war itself in practically all the continents of the world. By the 1950s, this concern yielded to the need for containing the sphere of influence of the then Soviet Union. The launching of the Sputnik into outer space by the Soviet Union in 1958 spurred the US federal government to even greater concern for domestic and global policies needed to buttress the base of US scientific knowledge, and to foster a better understanding of nations abroad. The US Congress thereafter approved Title VI funding for the most distinguished "area-studies" university research centers that showed promise in fostering national understanding of foreign languages, cultures, politics, natural and geographic circumstances. These centers were designated "national resource centers" for international area studies. Federal funding under Title VI supports research, exchange programs, fellowships, campus guest speakers from abroad, meetings and outreach activities on whatever region the center concerned deals with--in our case, Africa. In 1971, the University of Florida's Center for African Studies acquired the status of "national resource center" and has remained so since. This is no mean feat. To qualify, a university center must demonstrate to an independent panel of evaluators every three years that it has a faculty of the highest caliber that has shown sustained interest in a given part of the world in a very wide range of disciplinary fields. A successful applicant must also demonstrate that it has credible institutional contacts abroad and can attract top rated graduate students and visiting scholars. And that is what this Center has managed to do, thanks to a succession of competent directors, a vigorous faculty and a keen office staff. This year for instance, the Center is organizing in such African states as Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Malawi and Ethiopia. The Center operates an undergraduate study-abroad program at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. And Center-supported graduate students intend to conduct research in states as diverse as Morocco, Tanzania, Congo, Angola and Mozambique. The disciplines involved range from languages to urban planning and wildlife conservation to science education. UF graduates with an African specialization in many disciplines can be found in African universities as researchers and professors, as experts at the World Bank and the United Nations, in the US army, in the US state department, in other branches of the US government, and in noted international voluntary agencies like Human Rights Watch and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. It is a record of work over 34 years that the UF can be justly proud of.
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It is not easy to explain what a non-teaching research center like ours does at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and how it came to be. We are sometimes mistaken for the African-American Studies program, or the Student Union-funded Institute for Black Culture. Both, however, are separate institutions with which we have intimate professional ties. In fact, our work is closely integrated with that of many regular teaching departments in our College and in other colleges at the UF, all of which have courses or research programs that touch on one aspect or another of the African continent and its peoples. We have over 100 faculty affiliates of this Center spread around the campus, each based in his/her home department. Mine for example is political science.
