Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 185
partment’s original concentration on arts and humanities has continued
throughout its existence. Although the departmental core faculty includes an
historian, an historical specialist in Education, and a criminologist, 75 percent
of the faculty concentrates on research in the arts and humanities. These fields
include three faculty members in Ethnomusicology, two in Afro-American
Folklore, two in Creative Writing and African American Literature, and one in
Dance Composition.
Moreover, the department also founded and controls several humanities
archives. The Black Film Center Archive, founded in 1981,“holds a collection
of [6,000] films and related materials by and about Blacks,” the
Archives of African American Music and Culture, founded in 1991 and directed
by Portia Maultsby,includes audio and video recording,photographs,
original scores and oral histories, etc. 12 These archives are unique and very
important, but the information revolution generated by computers and the
World Wide Web pose interesting questions regarding whether and how the
department may want to consider making these materials more easily accessible
to scholars in the future. Faculty members are also involved in the direction
of the African American Choral Ensemble, the African American
Dance Company, and the IU Soul Revue. These performing groups are not
extracurricular activities; they generate course enrollments.
During the 1980s, the department’s enrollments increased dramatically
from eleven hundred students per year in 1982 (which had been the
standard since 1972) to fifteen hundred in 1986, and rose above two thousand
in 1990. In 1985 the department had fifteen majors, but the numbers
exceeded one hundred in the early 1990s. Enrollments and majors increased
because the major was revised to allow students to double major, to
create joint majors with other disciplines (interdepartmental majors) and
to minor in Afro-American Studies and other disciplines. Graduate enrollment
also increased from nine students in 1981 to thirty-six in 1989.
The department’s proposal for a master’s in Afro-American Studies
was approved by all university committees, and by the Indiana Commission
on Higher Education early in 1998. The department began advertising
for student enrollments in February 1998. Eight students are currently enrolled
in fall 1999. The department also offers the Ph.D. minor for students