Scandal Fallout : Black Studies Program Under Scrutiny in Grade-Selling Case

It was supposed to be an evening to relish success. Inside the University Club at Cal State Northridge, 150 people relaxed over $25-a-plate chicken dinners to salute the highest-ranking black administrator on campus.

A gospel group sang and the crowd clapped and stomped to an upbeat tempo, while outside the door sat a red, $22,000 sports car--the prize in a raffle to benefit the poor. In the end, however, the evening’s sponsors would fail to pay off their dinner bill and the raffle would be declared illegal. And the university would accuse two teachers in the Pan-African studies department of offering A grades to students who sold $100 worth of raffle tickets for a charitable foundation founded by one of the instructors.

The grade-selling scandal not only has jeopardized the careers of Prof. Eleazu Obinna and Willie J. Bellamy, a first-year instructor, but also has raised questions about the quality of education in the black studies department and about the role it should play in the university and in the community.

For many in the university, the department is a paradox. On one hand, it is a popular program, recognized as one of the strongest in the state. While other Pan-African studies departments have failed in the 1980s, the Northridge program has flourished, with one of the largest enrollments of any such program.

At the same time, it is a department that has existed largely apart from the rest of the university. Some critics say the department has abused this autonomy by offering snap “field” courses and hiring unqualified faculty. These observers, some of whom have worked with and helped supervise the department and its personnel, say the program has betrayed its early promise--made during the days of student militancy in the 1960s--to promote quality education in the local black community.

Others say the university administration is guilty of “benign neglect”--creating a department in response to student outcry, only to let it languish.

“There was a feeling that the department was established to placate students and as long as they were quiet, everything was OK,” said a former Northridge official who once supervised the department. “They were put off in a corner and nobody paid a lot of attention to them. There was a lot of inattention, unfortunately.”

Serious Damage Feared

Regardless of who is to blame, there is general agreement within the campus community that the damage from the alleged grade-selling incident could be severe and prolonged. As one department professor noted sadly, “It means we have to re-climb portions of a hill that already had been climbed.”

The department entered the spotlight last month when part-time instructor Bellamy, 38, and his mentor, Obinna, 54, were accused of setting up a scheme that would reward students with A grades for selling raffle tickets to benefit Obinna’s United Crusade Foundation, a nonprofit charitable foundation.

The state attorney general’s office, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office and Northridge campus police are investigating Obinna, Bellamy and the activities of the United Crusade Foundation. The foundation says it is “dedicated to the betterment of humankind,” but state records show that its fund-raising events often cost more than they raised. Members of the board of directors said they spent their own money to buy food and clothing for the poor in the Pacoima area.

Disciplinary Action

The university reportedly has begun preparing disciplinary action against both men. Although Cal State Northridge President James Cleary would not comment on what action might be taken, several sources said that he wants to fire both Obinna and Bellamy.

Although Cleary said he remains committed to ethnic studies programs, he said the Pan-African department should review “the objectives of the department, the course offerings, and the way people are hired.”

Bellamy and Obinna have refused to talk to reporters in recent weeks on the advice of their attorney, but when reports of possible scandal first surfaced, Obinna said he had done nothing improper.

The department was created in late 1968 as part of an agreement that ended a student takeover of the Northridge Administration Building. Students were protesting what they viewed as racist conditions on campus, including the inadequate recruiting of minority students.

The mission of the Northridge program was to develop a curriculum that focused on the experience of black Americans, and the works of black writers and musicians. Also, it was to offer college-level courses to the black San Fernando Valley community and recruit black college-bound youngsters.

Not Traditional Goals

It differed from traditional college departments that sought simply to educate students and develop new generations of scholars. Pan-African studies was not supposed to be a traditional department, according to faculty members who served on the committee that created it.

It was designed to be “an activist department,” one that would serve as a catalyst for improving conditions in poor sections of the black community. Its teachers were asked to be pioneers and to forge new scholarly fields.

To some, this meant reaching outside the confines of academia for instructors. Life experience was often considered more valuable than a diploma when hiring a part-time instructor, said Verne Bryant, acting chairman of the department.

For example, instead of seeking a credentialed musicologist to teach “Coltrane,” a course on the works of jazz musician John Coltrane, the department sought musicians who had worked with the saxophonist.

This and other unorthodox appointments bewildered some in the academic community.

No Doctorate Degree

Bellamy was one of those unconventional hires. A 1985 Northridge graduate, he was appointed to teach an upper-division course in field studies although he had only a bachelor’s degree.

It “seemed unusual, but we didn’t question it because we get so many salary requests from Pan-African studies for instructors with non-traditional backgrounds that we’ve learned to go along with them,” said Lyndia Wurthman, an administrator in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, which includes Pan-African studies.

Cleary said he considered it a “shocking bit of information” when he learned of Bellamy’s lack of experience.

Of 23 job applicants in a departmental hiring pool, Bellamy was given a 3 rating on a scale of 1 to 4, with 1 being best and 4 meaning “unqualified,” according to two sources with access to personnel information. He was hired, according to Bryant, because everyone else in the pool already had a job or had turned down the appointment.

Bryant said he went along with the hiring because Bellamy was said to be knowledgeable about Pacoima’s minority community, which the field course was designed to study.

Black Studies Ignored

One professor, who asked not to be identified, said such hiring practices were tolerated by a university administration that had basically ignored the black studies program, at the price of black students’ education. “Minority students are receiving a very shoddy education,” he said.

Administrators denied ignoring the black studies program. The dean of the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Edward Sampson, said he tried a variety of strategies in dealing with the department.

When the department was first established, the administration picked Tiyo Soga III, an anthropologist from UCLA, to be department chairman. Six months after his appointment, Soga was forced to resign. Conflicts developed over Soga’s management style, which some faculty members regarded as aloof and haughty.

Over the next three years, the department was chaired by three different professors from within the department. The faculty complained of a lack of leadership and the school began searching for an outsider for the job.

Obinna Gets Job

In 1971 the job went to Eleazu Obinna, a man described by his colleagues as arrogant, free-wheeling and, according to Pan-African studies professor Rosentene Purnell, who also considers herself a friend, “a man who makes laws unto himself.”

After receiving a bachelor’s degree from Bishop College in Dallas, Obinna earned a master’s in education at Loyola University in Los Angeles. In 1979, after he had been on the Northridge faculty for nine years, he received a doctorate in education from UCLA. His dissertation topic was the aspirations of black business students attending Cal State Northridge.

Friends said Obinna is a charismatic teacher who has made a practice of taking under his wing students active in campus politics. “He has an amazing way of getting students to do anything he wants them to do,” Bryant said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Others described his management style as autocratic and said this led to a revolt in the department.

After one semester, the faculty wanted Obinna ousted, but campus administrators refused, according to James Dennis, a professor and 19-year veteran of the department.

Two years later, after a dispute with the dean, Obinna was forced to resign as chairman but stayed on as a professor in the department. The department was eventually headed by three more professors.

An evaluation of the department written by three professors from other universities reported that the number of Pan-African majors dropped from 39 in the fall term, 1974, to a low of 15 in 1978. At the same time a division grew within the department between instructors who wanted the department to continue its activist bent and those who wanted it to follow a more scholarly route.

But the department not only survived this rocky period but flourished as an informal hub of black social and intellectual life on the Northridge campus, which counts only 1,800 blacks among its 29,000 students. Professors went out of their way to serve as faculty advisers to clubs, gospel choirs and black fraternities and sororities.

Enrollment in department courses stayed high because of an emphasis on lower-division courses that could be applied to meet general liberal arts requirements. In the fall of 1980, 1,582 students were enrolled in Pan-African studies courses. Last fall, the number had increased to 2,500 students.

Growth Continues

By 1987, this strategy allowed the department to grow to 11 full-time faculty, 13 part-time instructors and a healthy 45 majors. The department is larger than many black studies programs, including the Afro-American studies department at Howard University, the nation’s largest predominantly black research university. Howard’s department has three full-time faculty, two part-timers and 18 majors.

Contributing to the Northridge department’s enrollment are a series of remedial courses aimed at improving research and writing skills. Added in the late 1970s, these proved so successful that they became a model for other universities and for Northridge’s English department.

Its ability to adapt to the changing academic environment allowed Northridge’s Pan-African studies to survive while many other black studies programs created in the early 1970s quietly died. The National Council of Black Studies estimates that between 375 and 500 black studies programs still exist, down from a high of about 1,000 in the early 1970s.

While Northridge’s program is rarely mentioned as being among the top scholarly programs such as those at Yale, Stanford, Cornell and Ohio State University, it wins accolades from other educators in the field.

“Across the country, very few black studies programs are able to match the number and variety of courses offered in the curriculum of the Pan-African studies department,” said William Nelson, chairman of the black studies department at Ohio State.

“I look to Northridge as a model,” said Stephanie Evans, acting chairwoman of the Cal State Los Angeles Pan-African studies department. “More black studies department should use general education requirements the way they have.”

However, the academic stature of Northridge’s Pan-African studies department has been hurt, according to the 1979 evaluation report, by its emphasis on high-enrollment lower-division courses.

“An analysis of the initial core curriculum leaves the distinct impression that many courses were introduced without careful consideration as to how they would fit together to produce a well-coordinated program,” the report stated.

Sampson, dean of the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, said the department needs to “re-evaluate what they want to do. What they’ve tried to do is everything . . . to be a mini-university, to bring the black perspective to every field.

“It’s a new field. They need a good chunk of time,” he said, adding that 20 years is not long enough to establish a new discipline.

In the weeks after the grade-selling reports, students, faculty and administrators have rallied in support of the department.

“Basically it is a solid department,” said Bob Suzuki, vice president of academic affairs. “They have something valuable to contribute to the university. I would not denigrate or downplay the importance of Pan-African studies.”