Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

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Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 105 number of faculty, a well-rounded Studies effort should offer courses on other geographical areas of the Black Diaspora—the Caribbean and/or Africa. African and Afro-American and Africana Studies programs and departments should, as their names imply, offer a variety of courses on Black societies in the New World as well as on Africa. Although deciding what to name a unit and developing a sound and coherent curriculum are challenging, a more daunting task is acquiring resources to recruit and retain an appropriate faculty, one that includes assistant, associate, and full professors. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Black Studies units simply drew into their domain whoever happened to be available and willing to join them. Thus, little uniformity in curriculum could be achieved across the country. With the economic difficulties and retrenchment of the late 1970s, many Black Studies faculties declined in size, producing an even more fragmented curriculum. To ensure that existing courses were offered on a reasonable and routine basis, Black Studies administrators had to rely heavily on part-time, visiting, or temporary appointees. Most often those available to accept such positions were in the creative arts: musicians, dancers, poets, and fiction writers. More recently, Black Studies departments have increasingly relied on cross-listing courses to augment curriculum. The cross-listing of courses is both reasonable and advantageous because it builds bridges between Black Studies and the more traditional departments within the university, thus decreasing somewhat tendencies toward isolation and marginality. To be sure, there are pitfalls, and cautious administrators must be ever vigilant. Adaptive “survival” measures may encourage some university administrators to reduce further the resources allocated to Black Studies. After all, if Black Studies is consistently able to “make do” with less, one could logically conclude that it needed fewer resources in the first place. This is a special concern for departments and programs with small numbers of majors and minors and with low course enrollments. All of these factors—lack of a critical mass of well-trained faculty, excessive reliance on temporary hires, absence of a coherent curriculum and of content consensus for even introductory courses, and the increasing use of cross-listing of courses—bespeak the difficulties confronting and per-
106 Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States haps threatening the autonomy of many Black Studies departments. These are certainly among the concerns of the leadership of the National Council for Black Studies (NCBS). I suspect that the officers of NCBS will experience considerable frustration as the organization attempts to design a standardized curriculum. Although it is perhaps perverse to see anything positive in this disarray, the major strength of the Black Studies enterprise may well be its ever-changing and evolving nature. The rapid proliferation of knowledge in the field is a strong argument in support of institutional flexibility. Faculty in this area need to be free to develop new courses, to experiment with different methodologies, and to adopt nontraditional texts, just as quickly as new knowledge is produced. Undergraduate and Graduate Degree Programs in Black Studies One of the characteristics of a viable discipline is the authority to confer degrees and certificates to students who have mastered a particular body of knowledge. Black Studies faculty and administrators have been quite concerned with this issue. The majority of the more autonomous departments of Black Studies do, in fact, award B.A degrees. Programs in Black Studies vary. Some offer majors while most offer at least minors to students receiving a degree from the more traditional academic disciplines. In other words, the student may receive a B.A. degree in history,sociology,political science,or biology,chemistry,business administration, or education—with a concentration in Afro-American Studies. Few Black Studies units offer master’s degrees. Of the half dozen or so that do, the departments at Cornell and UCLA and the program at Yale are the most visible and are highly respected. Most of the M.A. degree students at Cornell and Yale go on to pursue Ph.D. degrees in traditional disciplines at some of the better institutions in the country. Others enter the labor force, working in social service agencies, businesses, or state and local governments. Cornell’s Master of Professional Studies degree is specially designed to prepare students to work in community settings.
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A 25th anniversary retrospective of
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Copyright © 1985, 1990, 1994, 2000
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Table of Contents Acknowledgments P
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Preface The Ford Foundation is prim
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The American University in Crisis a
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The Huggins Report Contents Preface
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Page 101 and 102: African American Studies from Imple
Page 105 and 106: Three Essays: Black Studies in the
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Page 119 and 120: Black Studies: An Overview Darlene
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PART FOUR A Changing Political Cont
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The Pinderhughes, Yarborough Report
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PART FIVE Epilogue: Continuing Chal
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Contributors Farah Jasmine Griffin
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Index Note: Page references in ital
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Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

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