Over 30 years ago, Thurgood Marshall College was founded to provide more opportunities in higher education for underrepresented groups. Starting in fall 2006, a new African-American studies minor will be offered through the college to provide a deeper insight into the black experience.

Marshall College has been employing the talents and expertise of a small group of faculty in the fine arts department under UCSD’s contemporary black arts minor, according to music professor Cecil Lytle. Recently, however, Lytle and other faculty members thought it was time to revise the program. The new African-American studies minor will expand the former minor beyond the arts.

Some faculty members have described the minor as academically rigorous and could be a way to possibly attract more black students to UCSD in the future.

“The African-American studies minor will help guide undergraduates to a fuller understanding of the unique attitudes, circumstances and experiences of African Americans,” ethnic studies professor David Pellow said in an e-mail.

The newborn minor is especially interesting in light of this year’s Black History Month. In a recent interview with “60 Minutes,” actor Morgan Freeman expressed his dissatisfaction with the idea of Black History Month, calling it “ridiculous” and arguing that “black history is American history” and should not be relegated to a month.

Is the African-American studies minor similarly separating “black history” from the general curriculum? Literature professor Robert Cancel and other board members of the minor do not think so.

“It [black history] should be dispersed into the general curriculum. But the way we do classes here, there’s only so much room. Every department has specialized classes. African-American culture is so large it can’t be encapsulated into a survey course,” Cancel said. “I think it’s a study in its own right.”

So why an African-American studies minor now? “The study of African-American culture is a defining element of a modern university,” Lytle stated in an e-mail. UCSD lags behind many universities in implementing such studies and in recruiting a diverse student body representative of the general population.

“Even though history books have sort of been modernized, they’re still pretty far behind,” Cancel said. “It’s important that everyone knows about things like the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights struggle.”

One of the main objectives of the new minor is to educate students about what has remained largely a misunderstood, even neglected subject.

“Few ethnic or racial groups have had so indelible an impact on American cultural tastes and habits than African-American culture,” Lytle said. “However, few groups have been so misunderstood.”

LaCandice McCray of UCSD’s Black Student Union reiterated that the minor would be “a great way to raise consciousness. People will learn the contributions that African Americans have made to literature and art and history.”

The minor aims to raise such consciousness among black students but also for the many other ethnic groups at UCSD. “The minor isn’t intended for only African Americans but all segments of the UCSD population,” Marshall Interim Provost Robert Kluender said.

Associate Vice Chancellor of Undergraduate Education Mark Appelbaum added that the fundamental idea of the minor was for students “no matter what their background” to take a series of courses that would enable them to understand some aspects of the African-American community.”

This sort of knowledge is, Lytle explained, immediately important and applicable at a time when “most knowledge young people have today about the lives and contributions of African Americans comes through fashion, music and politics.”

“The minor hopes to show that the descendants of the Africans brought to these shores in chains combined with many other elements of the broader African diaspora to create an identifiable cultural idiom,” Lytle stated. “African-American identity is uniquely an American phenomena and could not have been created anywhere else in the world.”

The other main objective of the minor is to help attract and recruit more black students to UCSD, because, Kluender said, “the campus hasn’t done the best job it can do in attracting people of color.”

Cancel added that qualified black students turn down UCSD at a higher rate than other ethnic groups. Part of that, Cancel said, is due to a feeling that there is no black community at UCSD after Californian outlawed affirmative action.

With the introduction of the minor, however, Lytle expects that “African-American students, in particular, would find some comfort in knowing that UCSD, a modern public research university, puts forward a study relevant to their lives and experiences.”

Kluender explained that even for nonhumanities majors, an African-American studies minor would aid students in finding jobs as it suggests knowledge in dealing with diverse peoples and serving minority populations.