Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 153
As a public institution, Wisconsin lacked sufficient funding to adequately
support most of its M.A. students and risked the possibility of losing
some of its top students to institutions that could offer them more
lucrative financial aid packages. The Ford grant allowed them to offer research
assistantships to more graduate and undergraduate students. Not
only did these assistantships provide financial support, they allowed the
students to develop more sophisticated research skills that, in turn, improved
the quality of their own papers and theses. Ford monies allowed
graduate students and faculty to travel to academic conferences for which
there would otherwise have been little (if any) financial support. The Ford
grant was also used to provide junior faculty with some release time, given
the disproportionate amounts of time they spent advising students and
serving on university committees.
During 1989–90, a significant portion of the Ford grant was used to
fund a Black Feminist Working Symposium organized by Stanlie James.
The forum brought twenty participants from throughout the African Diaspora
for a three-day period to network, share papers, and rigorously critique
each other’s work. In addition, under the direction of Sandra Adell,
several graduate students were invited to share their work before the participants.
The meeting was repeatedly praised for providing a context
within which Black feminists from a range of disciplinary and cultural perspectives
might productively share insights; for allowing graduate students
to benefit from the group process; and for showcasing the cluster of Black
feminist scholars at Wisconsin (specifically James,Adell, and McKay). From
these meetings, a book entitled Theorizing Black Feminisms 4 was published.
During the second year, Ford funds were used to support a major national
conference on“Afro-American Studies in the 21st Century.”Featured
speakers included Molefi Kete Asante, Houston Baker, Hazel Carby, Henry
Louis Gates, Paula Giddings, Darlene Clark Hine, Manning Marable, Nell
Painter, Arnold Rampersad, Bernice Johnson Reagon, and Cornel West.
The conference explored the various intellectual, ideological, and cultural
meanings that attach to the notion of African American Studies. The conference
achieved national coverage. Several of the papers were published in
a special issue of The Black Scholar; there are plans to anthologize the es-