When he finished studying physics and philosophy at Cal State Fresno, Dustin Ancalade spent a year doing nonprofit work in Atlanta. There, for the first time, he found himself examining questions of race, culture and, most importantly, what he thought it meant to be black.
What began as a personal search for his identity shifted into something more as Ancalade decided to study the black experience more formally. He enrolled as a master’s student in UCLA’s interdepartmental program in Afro-American studies.
“(My) research turns all this confusion in my life into something worthwhile,” Ancalade said.
But since coming to UCLA, an easy choice for the California native, Ancalade has faced challenges in the program that he said has left him feeling frustrated and unsupported.
With few classes offered solely for graduate students alone, only one staff member dedicated to Afro-American studies full-time and difficulties securing graduate student funding, Ancalade said his time at UCLA has not been what he expected.
“It hasn’t been easy for me. It’s been tough being here,” he said.
Many of the structural challenges students are facing can be attributed to the status of Afro-American studies as an interdepartmental program as opposed to a department, said Brenda Stevenson, chair of the program.
Started in 1974, the Afro-American studies program is one of the oldest of its kind for students to study questions of black identity and diaspora. Since then, a few ethnic studies programs at UCLA, including Asian American studies and Chicana and Chicano studies, have departmentalized in the last few years.
But, while the Afro-American studies program has developed in many ways, Stevenson said the program has not received the resources and attention it needs to fully develop into a department.
“I think the university has not been interested in developing ethnic studies. It’s a much more conservative traditional outlook on academia,” Stevenson said.
In fact, students said they’ve felt it, too. Ancalade said he feels like he’s had to prove his intelligence as a student in the program and feels the university may not value the program as much as it should.
“It’s a reflection on the fact that these types of programs are on the defensive,” he said.
Because the program has not developed into a department, it cannot hire full-time faculty responsible only for teaching Afro-American studies. The professors who do teach in the program now are shared with other departments, Stevenson said.
As a result, students can’t be sure when their classes will be offered or if they can meet with professors to work on their master’s theses because professors are responsible to their departments first, Stevenson said.
Chris Sewell, a first-year master’s student in Afro-American studies, said he appreciates the interdisciplinary nature of the program ““ he takes classes that would fall under the history and sociology departments ““ but he said a lack of formalized class schedules and departmental structure makes sticking to his graduate time line a challenge.
“You can say you want to take things, but you’re sort of at a whim,” he said.
Sewell came to UCLA after his undergraduate education at Williams College, a small liberal arts college in northwest Massachusetts, where he was active in the Black Student Union.
Ancalade said that all year he has had to wait well into the quarter before his classes have been finalized and has had trouble securing a professor to work closely with him on his thesis because they have had to focus on work within their own departments.
“I had to hope and pray they’d say yes, or I didn’t know what I was going to do,” he said.
The program also lacks important resources in terms of space and funding, Stevenson said.
Though it isn’t uncommon for master’s students to struggle to secure funding for their education ““ Ancalade was given a full fellowship for his first year but had to figure out his own funding for his second year ““ the program has no independent space on campus and has to share space in Bunche Hall.
The program is making progress in fixing its structural shortcomings, mainly by putting itself on the road to departmentalization.
For the past two years, Stevenson has been working with administrators to get the program to departmentalize. Stevenson said she plans on finalizing their proposal and meeting with Chancellor Gene Block at the end of the quarter. If all goes well, the proposal will go through the necessary committees and evaluations and the program will be a department as early as next fall.
“It’s been a hardship on our students, and its been a hardship on all master’s students in programs which is why we want desperately to departmentalize,” she said.