Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

132 Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States
To meet this problem of research tool-making, several schools in the
present review were funded specifically to establish or to enhance existing research
components of their African American studies units. UCLA’s grant was
targeted specifically for its Center for Afro-American Studies, the research
component of that school’s operation. Berkeley, Cornell, Harvard, Indiana,
Wisconsin, and Yale all used their grants to improve their research sites and
tools, notably their holdings in film and videotape.At Michigan State, Darlene
Clark Hine edited Black Women in America, a two-volume encyclopedia that
provides an extremely useful source-book for scholars. Though not funded by
this grant specifically, that encyclopedia project stands as a rich research tool, a
model enterprise that will suggest thesis and book projects for years to come.
Likewise, Harvard’s Black Fiction Project, through its publication
programs and consultations with inquiring scholars, has assisted students
of Black literary history in very substantial ways. Building the tools to do
research in Black Studies is an idea that already is working and that may
suggest funding goals for the future. Don’t let us be misunderstood here.
We speak not of a complete change of direction but a nuanced change, a
shifting of the weight in favor of scholars who are building large research
tools. This is not to recommend that Ford purchase research hardware or
other such “tools” in that sense of the term; rather that Ford give more support
to those whose projects are to make such new tools as encyclopedias
and concordances themselves.
One very positive effect of this round of Ford grants to African American
Studies departments, programs, and centers has been to address the
field’s general problem of isolation. Scholars in this field often feel cut off,
as if they were going it entirely alone. Of course, this is an issue for all members
of the contemporary university, with its wide spread of tight specializations.
But it is particularly a concern for African Americanists, so often
marginalized, to put it bluntly, along the color line. To combat this problem
in its myriad guises—including the group’s own temptations in the directions
of provincialism, defensiveness, and romanticism—African
Americanists at the schools we visited discussed how Ford grants helped in
the forging of links: scholar to scholar, department to department, school
to school, school to larger community.