Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 215
that the Afro-American Studies department’s Ford funds enabled her to pay for
a computer aide in a course that she taught using these digitized images.
African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin
At the University of Wisconsin, the African American Studies unit has departmental
status with (at the time of the review) approximately fifteen faculty
members; over sixty-five undergraduate majors, and up to twenty
M.A. students. The undergraduate program particularly benefits from the
existence on campus of an Ethnic Studies requirement; at the time of the
review, approximately 40 percent of the Ethnic Studies courses at the university
were African American Studies offerings. (One obvious result of this
fact is the large size of many of the department’s classes.) The curriculum
is organized into three foci: culture, history, and society, with the last area
perhaps less strong than the first two in terms of faculty resources. Indeed,
with a sizable portion of the department rapidly approaching retirement
age, faculty development is a major concern.
As at a number of institutions, faculty recruitment over the next five
to ten years will be critical if African American Studies is to maintain its current
strength, much less grow. A cause for concern at Wisconsin, according
to several faculty members, is the apparent slackening of administrative
commitment to diversity in hiring over the past decade; such commitment
being critical to the future of the unit, despite its departmental status.
The department is also constrained by ongoing budgetary problems,
which affect its programming as well as how it must staff its courses. For
instance, it offers few, if any, courses that are restricted to graduate students.
At present, Ph.D. students carry a portion of the teaching load in the department.
And while this practice, in itself, is not necessarily a problem, it
is clear that the department at Wisconsin is understaffed.
Finally, a word must be said here about the Wisconsin State Historical
Library, which is located on campus even though its funding is separate
from the state allocation to the university. Among its most notable holdings
is the largest collection of African American serials in the world (a collec-