Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 169
still struggling for a solid resource base, even after three decades of existence.
Finally, one would not have predicted in the late 1960s and early
1970s, when many of these units were born, that we would see in the 1990s
a wholesale, 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 programs
and departments.
Indeed, as the findings of this report relate, the undermining of affirmative
action in particular and the accompanying backing away from the
commitment to increase diversity among undergraduate student bodies,
graduate programs, and faculties may have a devastating impact on the institutional
status of African American Studies at many universities and colleges.
That the number of graduate students of all races who are interested
in African American Studies is, at the same time, growing may also portend
a future presence of African American Studies courses independent of the
presence of African American faculty on that campus. This last issue—that
is, the relationship between the growth of the field of African American
Studies and the growth of the African American professorate—is a complex
and politically vexing one that must be faced directly.
Any such report as this one must at some point address the issue of
terminology and the related topic of just how the field is defined. In the
aforementioned 1990 Ford report, Darlene Clark Hine provides an excellent
discussion of the range of ways in which Black Studies units characterize
their missions and thus the parameters of the field in each case. 3 This
issue is no closer to reaching resolution through consensus in 1999 than it
was at the end of the 1980s. Although one can argue that diversity in this
regard is a strength or at least a reality that must be acknowledged, it is increasingly
clear that such distinctions often entail a divergence in ideological
or philosophical thrust which merits serious attention. That is, units
that incorporate both African American Studies and African Studies confront
radically different challenges in the area of curriculum development,
for example, than do those that focus exclusively on the experience of people
of African descent in the United States or the Western Hemisphere. Furthermore,
the rise of Postcolonial and Diaspora Studies in the 1990s has put