Northwestern University to revamp decades-old African Studies program, cut some staffers

CHICAGO — Northwestern University officials deny reports that the school is closing its decades-old Program of African Studies, saying it is instead undergoing administrative changes.

The 78-year-old program will move from being one of the school’s “Research Institutes and Centers” under the university’s Office for Research to being administered under the Office of the Provost, NU’s Vice President for Global Marketing and Communications Jon Yates confirmed in an email to the Tribune.

The Office for Research is NU’s “main hub for supporting, managing, and advancing research,” according to the website, while the Office of the Provost provides resources and infrastructure to the university community, including as it oversees “faculty policies and connects faculty with a wide range of career and work/life resources.”

Several academic programs are affiliated with African Studies, which educates undergraduate students across disciplines through lectures, seminars, workshops, conferences and research programs, according to the program’s website. The number of courses offered will not change with the shift, Yates said.

“The change was implemented to re-energize a valuable program and to ensure its success going forward,” Yates said in the email to the Tribune. “Courses and research will continue, and the program’s current endowment will remain intact.”

The number of faculty positions will also stay the same throughout the transition. However, two staff positions in the Office of Research — where the program was previously housed — are being eliminated. For Meagan Keefe, the program’s director of operations and outreach programming, co-sponsorships, publications and grant development, the shift came as a shock.

Keefe told the Tribune she was notified her position was cut on Aug. 5. In the little over a decade that Keefe was at NU, she and other staff members worked in part on funding, including applying for grants from governmental agencies like the Department of Education, the State Department and the Fulbright Program, as well as with student support.

Now, Keefe is scrambling to tie up loose ends and designate tasks before her job concludes at the end of the month, although she said she feels like she does not have much information about the changes. For Keefe, questions linger about how the program could be reshaped and how it will run with the loss of staff. The program also has a dedicated building with artifacts, archives and art with a future she’s unclear about, she said.

“There’s still academic programs that need to be managed … they have endowment funding that’s dedicated specifically to African Studies students to do fieldwork, language studies,” Keefe said. “All of that has to be managed by somebody else, somewhere else, in whatever part of the university it arrives at.”

According to Yates, the African Studies program will be supported by other, already existing staff positions. The Office of the Provost also announced Monday that current NU political science professor and department Chair William Reno will serve as the program’s interim director come Sept. 1. The position is a return for Reno, who previously led the program for six years from 2012 through 2018.

In an interview with the Tribune Monday evening, Reno described his interim position and the changes as a “holding pattern” for the program, which he said does not easily align under the Office of the Provost or the Office of Research.

“The way that I view it is that the provost is a third party, and [the program] has to sit there for the time being because where it has been at doesn’t want it,” Reno said. “Maybe the College [of Arts and Sciences] gets it, maybe it has divided responsibility, but we don’t know what the destination is yet, and that still has to be negotiated.”

Reno agreed to take the interim position as a way to negotiate for his fellow faculty members and African Studies community over the next four-month period, he said. Though his position starts in September, the last few days have been filled with shepherding questions from lawmakers, alumni and scholars – interest that shows how many people have a stake in the university and its actions, he added.

That’s a signal that, as we come up in the election ahead, there are a lot of eyes that are watching the university to see if it really supports African studies and the people, the alumni, the students, the faculty, the donors that think that this is important,” Reno said.

Beyond that, Reno believes the university’s reputation is tied to what happens with the historic African Studies program. Right now, the university has an opportunity to commit to the program and build confidence – a chance that Reno said he hopes the institution does not disregard.

“They need to show us in the next four months that they are earning the trust of all the people who care about African Studies, and it’s a vast alumni network: heads of state, directors of central banks, regular folks, all kinds of people, and they’re all over the world. And when they think about, what is Northwestern University excellent at, these are people who say, ‘it’s African Studies,’” Reno said.

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