The chair of Rutgers University’s Africana-studies department has resigned to protest the university’s proposal to transfer faculty members in African language and literature to another department, a move he asserts is an attempt to undermine his department’s “intellectual legitimacy.”

“Our discipline is founded on the conceptual, intellectual, and pedagogical basis that it makes sense to have people who study Africa and the African diaspora together in one multidisciplinary department,” Walton R. Johnson, the chair, told Diverse: Issues in Higher Education. “If you’ve claimed that there is intellectual merit for Africanist linguists to be with the linguistics and not with the Africanists, then you are undercutting the very raison d’etre of our department.”

The proposal, which has yet to be ratified, would move the language and literature professors into a new department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian languages and literatures, to be created next year. Administrators at Rutgers’s School of Arts and Sciences argue that the plan would benefit both students and Africana studies by focusing language training in a dedicated department and opening up new faculty lines in the Africana-studies department.

At least two faculty members who would be affected by the plan have spoken in its favor. “We see strong merit in the plan,” said Ousseina D. Alidou, director of African languages and literature, and Alamin Mazrui, a newly hired professor who studies the political sociology of language in Africa, in a joint statement.

But, in a public letter of resignation, Mr. Johnson suggested that the proposal was part of a subtle and systematic attempt to dismantle Rutgers’s Africana-studies department.

“At some future point, another dean, perhaps, could think that all of the Africanist political scientists should be in political science, so I am going to move them,” he told Diverse.

The debate at Rutgers highlights tensions within many Africana and African-American-studies departments at large public universities, which in recent years have seen a decline in the number of students choosing to major in those disciplines. —Paula Wasley