Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 173
faculty members received research grants; students from the participating
schools were given travel grants that enabled them to attend scholarly conferences
in the field.
In the second year of the grant, the format of the seminar was
much the same as it was in the first. Professor Anne Adams served as the
1997–98 Coordinator. The title of this course was “Movement, Exile, and
(Re)Making Identities in Africa and the Diaspora.” In the third year,
distance-learning technology played a key role in the organization of the
course. This shift was largely due to the fact that family, financial, and
other considerations made it difficult to recruit Morgan State students
able to move to Cornell’s Ithaca campus for four months. Accordingly,
the seminar participants from Cornell, Syracuse, and Binghamton met as
a group three times on each campus; then three times during the semester
(once at each campus), an audio-video hookup was established with
Morgan State. Via teleconferencing, this enabled students to participate
in the common seminar in real time. The Morgan State students then
traveled once during the semester to each of the three New York campuses
for the common seminar meeting.
This model for distance-learning holds considerable promise for
other, similarly constructed multi-institution courses. The key, of course, is
the presence of the requisite hardware and support staff at each site. The facilities
at Cornell, for example, appeared to be state-of-the-art, and one can
imagine that competition over access to them might become fierce in the
near future. Should the problem of disparate resources be solved, however,
such electronic links could facilitate not just courses but also research
workshops, conferences, and other scholarly meetings.
In sum, the common seminars appeared relatively successful in
strengthening institutional ties among the four universities involved. In addition,
the syllabi generated for the three courses (by a committee of faculty
from each campus) could serve as useful models for interdisciplinary offerings
on the African Diaspora elsewhere. The very breadth of the focus of
these courses necessarily entailed some gaps noted by the students who were
enrolled. One student felt that the experience of Hispanic Blacks had been
shortchanged; others noted the relative lack of attention paid to gender