Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 179
and who brought considerable stability to these units’ relationship to the
rest of the university. His leadership was marked by several important initiatives.
First, he solidified Ford Foundation support for the Du Bois fellows
program and, furthermore, expanded it to include not just doctoral
but predoctoral fellowships. (There are now more than 200 former Du Bois
Fellows.) Second, he sought the involvement of a number of distinguished
senior African Americanists in the Du Bois Institute. Third, by bringing to
Harvard foreign scholars working in the field, he acknowledged the importance
of international perspectives in African American Studies.
The next dramatic development was,of course,the arrival of Henry Louis
Gates at Harvard in 1991. Building on initiatives put in motion by Huggins,
Gates has overseen the development of Afro-American Studies into one of the
more dominant units on campus. His tenure as Chair of the department and
Director of the Du Bois Institute has been marked by a number of notable
achievements. First, one cannot help but attend to the remarkable effectiveness
of his development efforts. Winning support from both foundations and individual
donors,Gates establishedAfro-American Studies as one of the most successful
fundraising units on campus. (At Harvard, every unit raises its own
money.) Indeed, as of late 1998,Afro-American Studies had raised roughly $17
million in the decade, including a $2 million endowment. In addition, the
Alphonse Fletcher Chair was established and used to recruit Cornel West from
Princeton; and the Du Bois Institute library was named for Harvard alumnus,
FranklinRaines,directorof FannieMae,anddirectorandformerdirectorof the
U.S. OMB (Office of Management and Budget), who had contributed money
to the unit.
Ironically, despite the distinction and public notoriety of the faculty and
the financial wherewithal of alumni and others who seek affiliation with Harvard,
development efforts by Afro-American Studies and other high profile
units must actually be restrained on occasion.AsAssociate Dean Carol Thompson
put it,“Institutionally, our goal is to keep fundraising down.”Second, there
istheoft-discussedgroupof well-knownscholars(sometimesdescribedas“The
Dream Team”) whom Professor Gates and Harvard have brought to the university.
Faculty hiring in the Harvard department was thus based on attracting
scholars who were already well established in their disciplines at institutions