Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

190 Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States
and ethnically heterogeneous population means that the African American
Studies unit is in a potentially competitive environment with regard to
shaping curricular and intellectual developments in Ethnic Studies and
African American Studies at Berkeley. The unit began in 1970 as a program
within Ethnic Studies. In 1975, it became the only one of four Ethnic Studies
programs to achieve departmental status. Since then, African American
Studies, though independent, has remained closely allied with the Ethnic
Studies department—particularly through the doctoral program in Comparative
Ethnic Studies that was created in 1984.
In 1997, the Department of African American Studies began offering
its own Ph.D. program in African Diaspora Studies, with specializations in
two areas: Issues of Development in the Diaspora and Cultural Studies.
The department has grown into one of the strongest, most competitive research
universities in the country, if not the world. Therefore, the unit’s
focus has been national, as well as international, with a significant number
of study abroad opportunities for its students. However, the department’s
capacity to promote its faculty to tenure has been particularly difficult
since its early years. Its faculty, for examples, does not hold joint appointments
in other major departments and thus cannot chair dissertations of
students in those departments even though they can serve on their doctoral
committees, sometimes to an extraordinary extent. 16 In general, the
department must attend to a more complex intellectual, administrative,
curricular, and developmental agenda than do programs at some of the
other institutions examined.
The African American Studies department also has ties with the Division
of International and Area Studies (IAS), which includes the Center
for African Studies. Headed by a dean, IAS oversees an undergraduate degree
program with roughly 700 majors drawn from both the social sciences
and the humanities. The unit is well networked within the university and
apparently healthily funded. (Recently, it has received a Rockefeller grant
for faculty development.) It is important to note, however, that undergraduate
degrees are offered by IAS in Asian Studies, Latin American Studies,
Middle Eastern Studies, but not African Studies. Moreover, there are M.A.