Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

134 Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States
groups have climaxed in international meetings that included African
Americanists beyond the United States. Collections of the finished papers
are to be issued in book form by Oxford and Harvard University Presses.
Again, what is clear from these collections, as well as from many other
important signs, is that the field has become increasingly diasporic; engaging
scholars concerned with blacks in Africa, Europe, and Asia, as well as in
the Americas.
This impulse to reach out beyond immediate boundaries takes other
significant forms sponsored by Ford. Cornell has established programs encompassing
other local colleges and high schools. Penn’s summer program
for college teachers in the Eastern Atlantic region made for collaborative research,
study, and conversation; it also meant that the impact of the seminar
extended to major and not-so-major schools from many states. Many
of last summer’s participants expressed their elation at being in touch with
colleagues who similarly suffered the sense of working with a minimum of
intellectual support.
In certain instances, Ford grants assisted the subtle process of making
or remaking connections within the structures of the Black Studies programs
themselves. At Harvard, where the Department of Afro-American
Studies had dwindled nearly to nothing while the Du Bois Institute for
Afro-American Research had done distinctly better, the Ford grant played
a decisive linking role. As mentioned, Institute fellows were required to
teach in the Department. In addition, however, in formal consultations and
informally, they made themselves available to students and regular colleagues.
Formal presentations by Ford Fellows were well attended by those
affiliated with the Department and Institute; indeed they often attracted
the participation of students and professors campus-wide.
At Yale, the beginning of the current grant cycle coincided with the arrival
of Gerald Jaynes as Chair of the African American Studies department.
Having some money to dream with, Jaynes worked hard to draw his colleagues
into the circle of decision makers and planners. So the grant made
for a new, collaborative spirit that has launched an era of reinvigorated activity
and sense of purpose. As Yale puts into place its new Ph.D. program
in African American Studies, it does so with a spirit that pervades the field: