Recent news that an esteemed Jazz education program based at North Carolina Central University (NCCU) was among 46 programs within the 17-campus University of North Carolina system targeted for elimination proved disruptive for the Durham-based historically Black institution.
As it turns out, a number of news media outlets, including newspapers and TV stations, had the story wrong. News organizations had misinterpreted a move by the UNC Board of Governors allowing realignment of NCCU music concentrations as a purging of the undergraduate Jazz studies major.
“When it was reported, it was reported that Jazz studies had been cut and that was not the case. So all [last] week we’ve been under damage control, trying to make sure that the message got out rapidly” that Jazz studies had not been eliminated, Dr. Ira Wiggins, director of Jazz Studies in the NCCU music department, told Diverse.
“We were flooded with calls and emails from people around the country and as far away as Germany, including current students, alumni, incoming students and their parents,” he said.
The NCCU Jazz studies program has brought national and international acclaim to the university largely due to the high-caliber, award-winning student ensembles that Wiggins has led for nearly three decades. Prominent musicians, such as Branford Marsalis, have enjoyed NCCU artist residencies, and others have played in the program’s annual Jazz festival. And the program is one of only two among the nation’s 105 historically Black colleges and universities to offer a master’s degree in Jazz studies.
Wiggins said it caught the NCCU community by surprise last week when final results of the UNC Board of Governors’ biennial Academic Degree Productivity Review prompted news organizations to specifically cite the school’s Jazz studies program as a casualty. Early this past academic year, the 2014 state review had flagged 221 programs, including those of Jazz and theater at NCCU, as “low-producing” based on enrollment and graduation criteria.
While the UNC Board of Governors has approved degree program eliminations and consolidations since 1995, the May 21 vote by the board’s educational planning committee has drawn fire from the public, including critics of the Republican-appointed board. A May 28 editorial from the Star-News newspaper of Wilmington, N.C., took issue with the pattern of program cuts, decrying them as a politically-motivated attack on liberal arts education in North Carolina.
