Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

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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:
Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 135 one of collaborative leadership within the department itself and of vigorous partnership with other departments, too. What makes the winning teams we surveyed work? There are no secrets here. The programs that have prevailed have done so because of familiar ingredients: smart programmatic leadership; solid funding, particularly from within the school itself; fine staff support; and committed partnership from the school’s top administrators. Crucially, the successful program leader(s) perceived with creative insight the peculiar mission and culture of the institution as a whole, and they designed courses of study and other structures accordingly. So at Cornell, where the university’s mission encompasses agricultural studies on an international scale, it made good sense for Africana Studies to offer courses to complement this broad institutionwide goal. With this idea in mind, Africana’s courses in African languages and cultures (taken by students preparing to work in the context of Africa’s agricultural projects) have a context that is central to things Cornellian. Similarly, Harvard has dropped its plan to establish an M.A. program; the M.A. is not generally regarded as a terminal degree at Harvard. Instead it is working to set up the more typically Harvardian Ph.D. program. The other obvious characteristic of the most enduring programs is that they are flexible and expansive in scope. They are seizing the current moment, which is distinctly favorable to African American Studies. They are doing so by sponsoring cross-cultural, interdisciplinary courses and professional meetings that encompass issues of race, gender, nationality and social status—current campus-wide concerns which have been debated in Black Studies since its inception. Each one of the schools we reviewed was planning in terms of broad-based leadership in the academy, not just regionally and nationally but in some cases also internationally. These Ford grants yielded a number of significant unforeseen benefits. Black Studies leaders at every school we visited felt the boon of having extra money during our era of general financial tightening. The extra money allowed for reassessment and planning. Through the grants, African Americanists had the chance to meet together when, instead of a crisis, there was an agenda for intellectual comradeship and challenge. This boon made way for expanding and crisscrossing networks. It also made for
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A 25th anniversary retrospective of
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Copyright © 1985, 1990, 1994, 2000
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Table of Contents Acknowledgments P
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Preface The Ford Foundation is prim
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The American University in Crisis a
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The Huggins Report Contents Preface
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Page 101 and 102: African American Studies from Imple
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Page 119 and 120: Black Studies: An Overview Darlene
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Page 131 and 132: professional scholars engaged in re
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Page 177 and 178: PART FOUR A Changing Political Cont
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PART FIVE Epilogue: Continuing Chal
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Contributors Farah Jasmine Griffin
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