After 25 Years, Asante Comes Full Circle at Temple - Higher Education

After 25 Years, Asante Comes Full Circle at Temple - Higher Education: Twenty-five years after he founded the nation’s first doctoral program in African-American Studies, Dr. Molefi Kete Asante will once again take helm of Temple University’s Department of African-American Studies, which has been operating since last July without a permanent chair from among its faculty.

It will be Asante’s second time running the department, which he chaired from 1984 until 1997. Allegations that he plagiarized the work of a former colleague in the department forced him to step down. At the time, Asante vehemently denied the allegations that were leveled against him by Dr. Ella Forbes.

But after a two-year investigation, Temple’s former president, Peter J. Liacouras, rejected a faculty committee’s unanimous recommendation that the university discipline Asante for what they called “grave misconduct.”