QC African-American Graduates Earning Doctorates in English

Outranking bigger, wealthier schools, Queens College is a national leader in the number of black alums who have completed PhDs in English. A recent study published by the Association of Departments of English (ADE) showed that from 1973 to 2005, QC awarded bachelor’s degrees to eight African-American English majors who subsequently earned doctorates in the field, including QC Assistant Professor Shirley Carrie. This record puts QC in a tie, in terms of the number of undergraduates going on to earn doctorates, with City College, the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia, Rutgers, Pennsylvania, and Illinois—and ahead of Cornell, Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and NYU.

Gathered in Duncan Faherty’s office, several English professors and a prospective grad student celebrated the college’s standing. “Our department is small compared to Harvard’s and Yale’s, and the number of African-American students is, comparatively, even smaller,” noted Wayne Moreland. “So, we are way ahead of much larger schools and departments.” Indeed, that smallness has been critical to QC’s success. The department offers a variety of seminar-sized classes across the major, making it possible for faculty to identify and encourage talented individuals—a mentoring practice the ADE paper recommends. “Many of our students don’t imagine that they can teach at the college level, that this is a career path, and we take our mission of expanding their horizons quite seriously,” said Faherty.

Mariel Rodney ’08, a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow applying to several highly competitive graduate programs, is typical in that regard. She came to QC planning to major in political science and then attend law school. “We saw her in class and converted her,” reported Moreland. Rodney now hopes to study 20th-century African-American literature and become a professor herself.

Changes in how English is taught may give the field additional appeal. “English is more interesting than it used to be,” observed Department Chair Nancy Comley. “Today, it’s a dialogue with students.”

Meanwhile, minority voices are being added to the canon, thanks in no small part to publication of the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, first released in 1996. (Here, too, QC has bragging rights; the late co-editor of the volume, Nellie McKay, was an alum.) In the future, faculty members would like to see their department, and their syllabi, incorporate a still wider range of perspectives and traditions.