The Black Studies Department was instituted at Mount Holyoke College during the 1970/1971 academic year after students held sit-ins to demonstrate the need for a new department. This was an interdisciplinary department, working with the Five Colleges community.
In the 1990/1991 academic year, the Black Studies Department changed to the African-American and African Studies program with a center modeled on the Women’s Studies program. The major was described as inherently comparative, international, and interdisciplinary in approach. Its intent was to conduct an analysis and investigation of the cultural, historical, political, economic, social, and psychological consequences of the dispersal of Africans from the African continent to diverse regions of the world. The major is now called Africana Studies.
In 1981, students were for the first time required to take a class intended to raise awareness of different world cultures. The faculty of Mount Holyoke voted to add a curriculum requirement that students take a course devoted to the study of non-white populations. Today this is the multicultural perspectives requirement in which students must take a course that incorporates a diversity of perspectives.
