Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

128 Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States
Black Studies departments at Berkeley, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin to
support graduate student and junior faculty research and to generate nationally
acclaimed meetings. Ford enabled these schools to nurture their fledgling
intellectual communities in African American Studies and, in fact, to
operate as national centers of inquiry in a way that has had the effect of democratizing
the field: ensuring that more than a handful of institutions could
be counted as top leaders.
Coming at a key moment in the field’s evolution,these Ford grants contributed
in a very significant way to the growth and development of African
American Studies as a scholarly/pedagogical enterprise. We agree with
Robert L. Harris, Jr., who, in Three Essays: Black Studies in the United States, 2
observed that in the mid-1980s Afro-American Studies entered the second
stage of its recent manifestation in the U.S. This stage has moved through a
time of “legitimization and institutionalization,” to the present period of
“theoretical refinementandmoresophisticated analysisandinterpretation.”
By the mid-1980s, African American Studies on many campuses was
engaged in a struggle between what appeared to be conflicting agendas. On
one hand, faculty at a wide range of schools felt themselves compelled to
solidify and extend the intellectual bases of the field. On the other hand,
many African American students felt this emphasis on the strictly scholarly
component of Black Studies came at the expense of the field’s keystone social
and/or activist functions, thus betraying its origins on predominately
White campuses in the forthright political struggles of the 1960s.
In its current phase (Harris’s fourth stage), African American Studies
appears to have emerged substantially intact from these struggles. Many institutions
have succeeded in establishing African American cultural centers,
and other such structures where students, diverse in ethnicity, may find
support. Thus freed from the complex of extracurricular duties that
marked the first years of Black Studies, many retooled academic programs
and departments have been able to function as places where students and
faculty could concentrate their best attention on the exigencies of research
and study. In some cases, African American Studies has addressed the old
1960s to 1980s (and 1990s) socio-political action versus the “strictly academic”
split by creating theories and structures that make clear that the