Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

162 Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States
University of California, Los Angeles, were chosen to conduct a further site
study of Ford-funded programs.
In tandem with the field it surveyed, the Pinderhughes-Yarborough
report is more in-depth and visionary than its predecessors. It warns of serious
challenges threatening the stability of the field itself, documents the
results of site visits to Ford-funded programs, provides a broad-based
overview of the health of the field, and attempts to inform an agenda for
the future. These are daunting tasks for any one document.
As the authors note, the late 1990s witnessed “a whole-scale brutal assault
both on the goal of increasing educational access through such mechanisms
as affirmative action and also on the most obvious institutional
signs of that hard won access, Ethnic Studies.”For this reason, by 2000 when
Drs. Pinderhughes and Yarborough completed their study, structural stability
remained of utmost importance to the field; on most campuses institutional
stability had not been accomplished. The authors also note that the
healthy presence of African American Studies institutional structures on
campus did not necessarily guarantee the presence of Black scholars on
campus. Thus, despite such gains as more students than ever encountering
Black-authored texts and the heightened professional profile of individual
scholars, “the institutional stability of the majority of African American
Studies units ha[d] not significantly increased over the past decade.” Consequently
the growth of the professoriate—especially in a climate that, even
today, threatens affirmative action—remains crucial.
This problem is not just felt on individual campuses. By 2000, there
still was no national professional meeting regularly attended by administrative
heads of major African American Studies units. Given the growth in
Ph.D. programs, the mechanism by which to evaluate these programs remained
a necessity.“For a range of reasons,” Pinderhughes and Yarborough
concluded, “the National Council for Black Studies has not been able to fill
that role; yet there is little indication that any other organization is better
suited to do so.”
The Pinderhughes-Yarborough report offers a series of suggestions
for future actions that remain relevant. First and foremost they called for a
meeting of the heads of Ford-funded programs or a meeting of a larger