Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

140 Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States
Weknowweareguessinghere,butourbestguessisthatwhileEthnicStudies
(in one of its various forms) will be bidding for legitimacy in the coming
years, Black Studies will continue to need funding under its own banner. Perhaps
the best partnership between Black Studies and Ethnic Studies will come
about with both camps having their own pots of cash to affect their own programs—and
to collaborate if they wish. Some grants could be set aside specifically
for programs sponsored by both camps; certainly both Ethnic Studies and
Black Studies have much in common and could have much to share.
We have to ask: where did the grants or the grantees go wrong? Where
was there waste or misdirection? These questions are hard to address not
because we flinch from them but because we frankly found so little to dislike
on our tours. Yale would appear to be the easiest to target in this complaints
department. The Chair, Gerald Jaynes, is not a superbly organized
bookkeeper, it appears. But then again it was Jaynes who stepped into an
impossible briar patch of problems—the recent history of departmental
drift, lingering in-house squabbles, sinking faculty and student morale.
Jaynes put the Department back on its feet. Finding the Ford grant a real
boon—but one that he inherited with funds allocated in what struck him
as the wrong categories—Jaynes brought the Department together to decide
how to approach Ford with a new plan of action to meet real needs.
Here’s where there is room for complaint: at times Ford wondered
what Yale was doing with the money. But, as evaluators, we felt strongly that
finally Jaynes and company spent the money with great care, and that he
did his best to consult with Ford about changes in the grant’s specific purposes.
Above all, he and the departmental leaders acted responsibly to serve
the grant’s largest goals. In the end, the proof is that the Department is
growing again; morale has undergone a sea-change. Once again, Yale is a
key player in the national effort to consolidate the gains in Black Studies
and to chart its new directions.
This is as close as we can come to a real complaint to register.And even
here, obviously, we think Yale colleagues are to be praised, on the whole, not
reprimanded. They and the Ford representatives showed the flexibility and
resiliency to look at a plan that did not suit the new Department’s needs
and to improvise one that worked extraordinarily well.