Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 133
At Cornell, one professor met this problem of intellectual isolation by
rewriting his syllabus to encompass not just one or two “data points” but
three or more. According to this strategy, his students were reading about
Blacks throughout the Diaspora. They also read about other groups with
similar concerns relating to cultural expression and political position.
At Cornell and elsewhere, this issue of intellectual isolation was structurally
addressed by team-taught courses and jointly appointed faculty
members. In both instances these collaborations sometimes involved work
between Africana Studies and other academic units. In this same spirit of
university-wide collaboration, certain Africana courses serve the needs of
programs in agriculture and development, as well as in the liberal arts college
as a whole. Such ventures at schools we visited have helped to make
Multicultural Studies more than just a slogan.
Clearly, the Ford-sponsored conferences also addressed this issue of
isolation. Graduate students at Yale who said they sometimes feared that
their highly specialized scholarly“discourse”was spoken only in New Haven
were delighted to have visitors come to town speaking the same language.
Ford money sent such students from Yale (and elsewhere) to conferences
where they met their counterparts and future colleagues. Faculty benefited
from monies to plan and run conferences or just to attend them. Indiana’s
conferences on“Joe Louis and the American Press”and“Black Religious and
Musical Expression in American Cinema” were models of interdisciplinary
work under the aegis of African American Studies. Both represented collaborative
work on a very high level. At Wisconsin and at other schools we visited
we heard about joint projects, conferences, and other evidences of
useful partnerships with departments and institutes studying issues of gender
and sexuality.
Just as significant a model for collaboration on the faculty level is Harvard
University’s “working group.” Set up to involve faculty from a dozen or
so institutions across the nation in quarterly conferences, Harvard working
groups have explored such cross-disciplinary topics as “History and Memory
in African American Culture” and “The Role of the Black Intellectual.”
In many cases, these sessions permitted first hearings of works-in-progress,
with responses from colleagues across a range of disciplines. Two such