Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 221
African American Studies departments and programs, even a well-meaning
but uninformed or unaggressive dean, provost, or chancellor can undermine
such units in short order.
These administrators are so crucial primarily because of their control
of resource allocation. Nearly every unit visited looked to be understaffed
in terms of tenure-track FTE and some expressed scant hopes of receiving
relief in the near future.Although providing FTE to African American Studies
units is a critical way for administrators to be supportive, they must also
be willing to work to ensure the retention and promotion of AAS faculty.
Moreover, they may need to monitor closely and ultimately police the handling
of joint appointments involving AAS and other departments and programs.
At three universities under review, faculty members “walked away”
from African American Studies, as it were, taking their FTE with them as
their appointments migrated to other departments. In each case, it is unclear
that the department was compensated for its significant loss of staff.
If it is clear that high-level administrators need to be committed to
and educated about African American Studies at their campuses, the same
applies to development officers at these schools. Although it constitutes
something of a unique case, Harvard is perhaps the best example of how
much can be accomplished in a relatively short time with a supportive development
office. A more modest model (but only in comparison to Harvard)
might be UCLA, where the four Ethnic Studies units have for the past
two years shared the services of a dedicated development officer. No other
institution under review had created similar development staff support focusing
specifically on Ethnic Studies units. The emphasis on fundraising at
the department and program level will only increase over time, and development
officers will need to learn how to maximize the potential of African
American Studies units to raise extramural funds.
Likewise, African American Studies faculty must be willing to play
major roles in such fundraising efforts. However, the extraordinary workload
of most AAS professors makes it difficult for them to dedicate still
more time and energy to an activity from which faculty traditionally shy
away. One strategy might be to make fundraising considerably more transparent
early in the educational process, so that graduate students are aware