- Posted in All University
- Category: Campus News
LINCOLN UNIVERSITY, PA – Lincoln University approved a new Pan-Africana Studies major recently – among the first of its kind to include options for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and professional concentrations beginning Fall 2015.
While differing from the previous Black Studies program, which existed from 2003 to 2006 and focused on the history and culture of Blacks in Africa and the Diaspora, the new Pan-Africana Studies program seeks to link the entire study of ancient and modern or contemporary Africa as well as that of Africans in the Diaspora with a goal of creating global leaders and world humanitarians.
“We are hoping that the program recruits not only people of African descent, but Africans throughout the world even non-Africans interested in studying the world through the lens of African culture and interests,” said Dr. D. Zizwe Poe, professor of History in the History, Political Science and Philosophy department and the leading proponent for the new program since 2008. “Pan-Africana Studies being offered at Lincoln is invoking the spirit of Kwame Nkrumah at his alma mater.”
Nkrumah, a 1939 Lincoln graduate, was the first president of Ghana and an influential 20thcentury advocate of Pan-Africanism and a founding member of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), who sought to establish the Encyclopedia Africana to chronicle history and world events from an African perspective of which he made W.E.B. Dubois the editor.
Poe, who is also director of the university’s Horace Mann Bond Honors Program, said he hopes that the program will link in some way to the Pan-African University, which is sponsored by the African Union that currently has five campuses spread throughout Africa, but lacks a campus in its sixth region, the Diaspora.
It is believed that the university is uniquely-positioned to become the foremost-centralized world authority for scholarship and research on Pan-African experiences and initiatives due to its legacy of producing outstanding graduates that have contributed to the Civil Rights Movement in the USA, African liberation movements, and general movements for human well-being, according to the University’s executive summary from its Black Studies Ad-Hoc Committee on Pan-Africana Studies programs at Lincoln.
Poe said that much of the new major’s curriculum is comprised of courses already offered across a number of academic areas. However, two courses will be added, but not needed until a major’s junior year: one that addresses the Eurasian experience of African descendants and another on Blacks in the sciences and/or Africa’s contributions to the sciences.
He explained that those pursuing a Pan-Africana studies major will benefit those across a variety of disciplines and professions.
“(The new major) will increase (one’s) ability to critically think and communicate,” he said. “Our focus is to get our students to go to graduate and professional schools. (Ultimately,) it will help them to be better leaders of the communities from which they come.”
Founded in 1854, The Lincoln University (PA) is the FIRST of four Lincoln Universities in the world and is the nation’s FIRST degree-granting Historically Black College and University (HBCU). The University combines the elements of a liberal arts and science-based undergraduate curriculum along with select graduate programs to meet the needs of those living in a highly technological and global society. Today, Lincoln, which enrolls a diverse student body of approximately 2,000 men and women, possesses an international reputation for preparing and producing world-class leaders such as Thurgood Marshall, the FIRST African American U.S. Supreme Court Justice; Lillian Fishburne, the FIRST African American woman promoted to Rear Admiral in the U.S. Navy; Langston Hughes, the noted poet; Kwame Nkrumah, the FIRST president of Ghana; Nnamdi Azikiwe, the FIRST president of Nigeria and a myriad of others.