"I knew that killing people was bad," he quips,adding more seriously, "the more I studied it, themore intractable the problems seemed to be--thesame [stuff] keeps happening over and over."
He then turned to gender studies, buteventually decided that race was the more powerful"other," because, unlike gender, it was notnecessarily mitigated by love between groups.
Over the past three years, Goff says he hasfound a home within the Afro-American studiesdepartment, where he has served as a researchfellow for the affiliated DuBois Institute, andcoordinated a mentor program which pairs older andyounger students within the concentration.
In particular, Goff cites his relationshipswith West, Geyser University Professor WilliamJulius Wilson and Professor of Afro-AmericanStudies Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, as crucial toboth his personal and academic development.
"It's like having a wonderful small liberalarts college within a larger University. Cornel islike a father, Bill a kind uncle, and Evelyn likemy mother, always kicking me to get in gear," Goffsays. "They are the reason I'm still here. If I doanything of worth it is a credit to my mentors.They take very seriously both their responsibilitytoward students and toward the outside community."
It is this responsibility of academics, toconsider the effect of their words on the outsideworld, that was the subject of Goff's thesis,which he plans to submit as a journal article nextyear, and eventually develop into a dissertationand book.
In no uncertain terms, the thesis castigatesthe vast majority of social scientists forfocusing only narrowly on the questions at hand(e.g. affirmative action), and failing to broadenthe debate or performing the crucial advocacyfunction they had in earlier periods.
In words that mirror Goff's desires for hislife, he writes that "social science must be tiedto actual social change." While he acknowledgesthat tying together policy with research soclosely could further retard the struggle for