There are certain academic programs and centers within Hopkins that aim to examine the experiences of specific cultures, ethnicities and religions. The students that choose to study these subjects often reflect Hopkins's ethnic makeup, according to Margaret Keck, a professor in the political science department and program in Latin American Studies. Teaching these courses may be more problematic. Professors who focus on the African-American or Jewish experience are often outsiders to their own fields.
Aaron Goodfellow, associate director of the Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality, does not believe that gender matters at all when teaching courses in his field. He quoted Simone de Beauvoir, saying, "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."
"Your saying the knowledge of experience is more pedagogically valuable or in some way more real than other ways of knowing," he said, refuting the idea that one must be a woman to teach women studies.
The Jewish Studies program also has had a number of gentile faculty affiliated with the program. However, in Jewish Studies classes the majority of the students identify themselves as Jews.
"I am not African, but I study African literature; I'm not German but I study German literature; I'm not even a native speaker of Yiddish, but I teach Yiddish literature," Marc Caplan, a professor of Yiddish literature, said.
"The whole point of a university is the belief that knowledge is better acquired through study than through blood lines, so in that regard Jewish Studies should be open to non-Jews as well as Jews at all levels of the program."
Floyd Hayes, a professor at the Center for Africana Studies, believes that a diverse faculty, one that covers a diverse range of perspectives and experiences regarding Africana Studies, is the best way to run the program: "If the professor is well-versed in the culture, knowledgeable and prepared, then the race of the professor doesn't matter."
The two things that would have a negative effect on any of these programs would be racist professors or programs that were homogenized in terms of faculty.
"The [Jewish Studies] program would suffer if only Jewish people were involved in Jewish Studies; this would be a sign that we were doing something terribly wrong," Caplan said.
While these programs deal with specific identities, they would prefer not to be branded by them.
"Why do we need something called an identity department?" Hayes said. He sees the mere designation of programs such as Africana Studies, East Asian Studies, and the myriad of others Hopkins offers as a form of racism - a "diabolical" kind.
The Women and Gender Studies program aims to "enhance students' understanding of gender," according to their Web site. However, the concept of gender is ambiguous, according to Goodfellow.
"There is no universal meaning of gender," he said. "Why would one say that science has the divine right to determine who is a woman?"
Keck, who has done much of her research in Brazil and specializes in Latin American politics, said that the interplay between departments that exists in programs creates an opportunity to pull together dispersed faculty to focus on questions that don't fall within the purview of a particular department. These programs draw their classes from a variety of programs also established within the University, such as political science, history and sociology
Africana Studies has a particularly interesting history of emergence across college campuses nationwide.
"Early on in the 60s, black studies sought to challenge and correct 'white studies,'" Hayes said. By 'white studies' Hayes is referring to every other field, since academia was once dominated by whites. Before the emergence of a black studies field, the culture and history of blacks was misrepresented by the predominantly white academia. Now, programs like Africana Studies aim to correct those misrepresentations, he said.
These programs are intended to challenge students' cultural and social norms, they and have become more and more important as they continue to open students to new perspectives, theories and ideas, according to Hayes.
