Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

General Assessments
Beginning in fiscal year 1988, the Education and Culture Program of the
Ford Foundation awarded three-year grants of approximately $300,000 each
to leading departments, programs, and centers in the field of African American
Studies. These grants went to Cornell, Harvard, Indiana, Michigan,
Michigan State, Pennsylvania, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Wisconsin, and Yale.
These awards were quite timely. During the current economic crisis
(one often compared with the Great Depression), cutbacks and freezes in
the academic sphere have been the difficult order of the day. The American
academy has been a scene of shrinking public funds and private donations,
layoffs, and increases in tuition, alongside reductions in faculty salaries and
stipends to needy students. Of course, the impact of the current crisis has
been harder on schools in some parts of the country than others; but no institution
of higher education has been unshaken. As a comparatively new
field of study on most college and university campuses, African American
Studies and its various components—curricula, faculty, administrative
staff, and student service systems—all are vulnerable in such an unstable
economic climate. At virtually every institution we visited, the Ford grant
helped to brace African American Studies against upending times.
Grants from the Ford Foundation enabled African American Studies at
Michigan State not just to stay afloat but to develop its path-breaking Ph.D.
program in Comparative Black History. Likewise, Ford money permitted the
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