Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

156 Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States
on the world of Blacks in film. With important new “hires” in the offing,
with a new Ph.D. plan on the verge of acceptance, and with a new center for
interdisciplinary research ready to be launched, Yale seems well placed to
again assume a position of very strong leadership in this field.
The “secret weaponry” in this new impetus at Yale is the teamwork
and brilliant leadership of Professors Hazel Carby and Vera Kutzinski. They
are outstanding scholars, teachers, and leaders in the Department. A large
part of what has been working at Yale comes from these two getting together
and making something new happen in an old place.
Summary and Recommendations
This report embodies our findings as evaluators of those African American
Studies programs awarded grants in the period from 1988 to 1991.Ford’s goals
for this cluster of grants were very clear: to offer substantive assistance to the
nation’s top programs (and by extension to the entire field) by encouraging
younger scholars making their way through the pipeline, by funding solid research,
and by spreading the good word of the field’s newest scholarship. Projects
that promoted collaborative work and broadened the community of
participants in the Black Studies enterprise were viewed with special favor.
We wish to underscore our unambiguous finding that—despite wellpublicized
examples of racial romanticism and defensive rigidity at the periphery
of this field—African American Studies has established itself as a
vibrant, expansive area of scholarly work within the liberal arts and sciences.
In our travels across the nation, we saw African American Studies
courses that were fully enrolled at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Black and non-Black students competed for spaces in these courses taught
by Black and non-Black experts in the field.
What is encouraging, too, is that at the schools with top programs
(and elsewhere) students are selecting African American Studies as a field
in which to major or concentrate. And, in significant numbers, these undergraduate
scholars-in-training go on to graduate programs in the field—
quite often at the schools funded by Ford to support or even to help