Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

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Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 193 garet Wilkerson—former Chair of both the Theatre and the African American Studies departments and Director of the Center for the Study, Education, and Advancement of Women—is now on a leave as a Program Director with the Ford Foundation. 17 In addition, Charles Henry is on leave from the department while he works with the Chancellor to develop faculty hiring and student recruitment programs. Both of these individuals have played key leaderships roles in African American Studies over the past decade or two. (Earl Lewis’s move from Berkeley to Michigan in the early 1990s constituted a major loss as well.) Indeed, with the inevitable faculty departures, leaves, and retirements, African American Studies could find itself in the near future in an even more desperate situation. The administration’s reluctance to allocate additional FTEs to the department after faculty have retired, as well as the recent migration of a faculty member from African American Studies (on whose FTE she was hired), to English, with apparently no compensation provided in return, point up a lack of institutional support for the unit that must change if the department is to survive, much less thrive. That the university faculty has been limited to a fixed size for some time means that growth in any one department requires the subtraction of faculty from another unit. When tenured faculty retire, their FTEs frequently return to the university’s Senate Budget Committee, which makes recommendations to the Vice Chancellor about where to allocate these resources. This practice only worsens the staffing problems faced by African American Studies. Not surprisingly, some of the concerns voiced by African American graduate students in interviews conducted as part of this review reflect anxiety about these staffing problems. Specifically, students bemoaned the absence of specialists in both African and African American History; some anticipated problems fulfilling core course requirements in light of the faculty shortage. Particularly frustrating for a few students were the institutional barriers that prevented their taking advantage of relevant faculty resources in other departments. For example, the English department had just recently brought in a distinguished visiting scholar to teach a graduate seminar. Because doctoral studies in African American Studies were not members of the department sponsoring this professor’s course, they felt
194 Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States unable to benefit from her presence on campus. Some mentioned that they did not even know about the seminar; much less have a chance to enroll in it. (These and related anxieties on the part of students in Ethnic Studies climaxed at the end of the 1998–99 academic year with a protest and sit-in that received little major media coverage but which was commented on widely in academic channels.) That said, the Department of African American Studies is to be commended not only for maintaining ambitious undergraduate and graduate degree programs,but for overseeing a striking number of important and diverse outreach efforts.Among the most noteworthy (and one that holds a key place in the department’s regular undergraduate curriculum) is Professor VeVe Clark’s “Their University or Ours.” This orientation to academic culture at Berkeley has reportedly had a positive impact on the retention of first-year students and might be usefully replicated at other schools.In addition,the department sponsors African American Studies workshops for high school and community college teachers. It participates in the Ford-funded “Diversifying African Studies”project in collaboration with Stanford University, and it supports “Break the Cycle,” an after-school math tutorial program staffed by Berkeley students. The department has also initiated an overseas studies program, which sponsors faculty-supervised, student travel to Barbados, Zimbabwe, and Kenya. And, in what is surely among the most ambitious and wide-reaching international networks maintained by the African American Studies units under review, the department has developed institutional links with the University of Namibia,University of Warwick,University of the West Indies, University of Western Ontario, and the University of Zimbabwe. Another notable achievement is the inauguration of the department’s Ph.D. program, certainly a difficult and substantial undertaking. The department has positioned itself as possessing the only such graduate program in the state—a status none of the other U.C. campuses apparently intend to match. Given the department’s close affiliation with the Ethnic Studies department and with the Center for the Study and Teaching of American Cultures, the African American Studies Ph.D. program is wellsituated to address such key African Diasporan issues as multiculturalism, race and ethnicity, and identity formation.
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A 25th anniversary retrospective of
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Copyright © 1985, 1990, 1994, 2000
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Table of Contents Acknowledgments P
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Preface The Ford Foundation is prim
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viii Inclusive Scholarship: Develo
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The American University in Crisis a
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Inclusive Scholarship: Developing B
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The Huggins Report Contents Preface
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African American Studies from Imple
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Three Essays: Black Studies in the
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Preface to the Harris, Hine, McKay
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Black Studies: An Overview Darlene
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professional scholars engaged in re
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Funding Change: Introduction to the
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Evaluation of Ford-Funded African A
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Introduction Beginning in fiscal ye
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General Assessments Beginning in fi
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Page 177 and 178: PART FOUR A Changing Political Cont
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Page 247 and 248: PART FIVE Epilogue: Continuing Chal
Page 255 and 256: Contributors Farah Jasmine Griffin
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Index Note: Page references in ital
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