Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

154 Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States
says. Once again, undergraduate and graduate students were encouraged to
attend the conference. The students to whom we spoke were uniformly delighted
by the opportunity to be exposed to so many points of view, to meet
scholars whose work they had read, to watch African Americanists disagree,
and to learn how to ask questions and participate in debates in a public academic
forum.
In the third year,Ford funds were used to develop a collection of African
American music for research and pedagogical purposes, and to prepare The
Black Scholar volume. In this year, the outreach component was defined more
narrowly, though no less valuably.A portion of the Ford grant was used to cosponsor
a series of colloquia with the University’s Havens Center for the Study
of Social Change. This series brought together faculty and graduate students
from various disciplines to discuss seminal texts in the debate over multiculturalism
and diversity in intellectual life. In the wake of such highly successful
and visible projects as the Black Feminist Symposium and the African
American Studies conference, this colloquium series had the effect of consolidating
the power and visibility of the African American Studies department
as an intellectual center on campus.
A university as large as Wisconsin runs the risk of seeming impersonal
with students left to fend for themselves. We were very impressed by the extent
to which the faculty in African American Studies at Wisconsin displayed
its commitment to each other and to its students. The Ford grant
contributed substantially to the construction of an atmosphere in which
students felt intellectually, financially, and emotionally supported. It also
helped center African American Studies on campus and across the nation
as a key player in the production of ideas across disciplines.
Yale University
Yale’s Department of Afro-American Studies and its uses of the Ford Foundation
grant require the special attention of evaluators. This is because the
proposal was designed in a period of transition by Professor Edmund Gordon,
who left the University just as the Foundation funds became available.
The program’s fine new leadership (with Professor Gerald Jaynes as Chair