Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

222 Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States
of its necessity and of how it is done. This is clearly an administrative priority
that deserves continued attention.
Given the critical nature of all these factors to the institutional health
of African American Studies units, Ford might consider ways it might educate
administrators and development officers to the particular needs and institutional
value of African American Studies departments and programs.
For example, Ford might convene a meeting of development officers from
universities with major African American Studies units to discuss fundraising
strategies.
The Foundation might want to play a similar role in facilitating interinstitutional
exchanges among African American Studies units, for it is
clear from our review that there is far too little consistent communication
between these programs.
In our research, we encountered several platform models that Ford
might support in order to encourage such exchange. One was the conference
entitled “Black Agenda for the 21st Century: Toward a Synthesis of
Culture, History, and Social Policy” and convened at the University of
Michigan. Drawing primarily but not exclusively upon scholars from the
four member institutions of the Midwest Consortium for Black Studies,
this meeting focused upon African American Studies and public policy issues
and thus, by design, had little humanities contact. Nonetheless, its format
of formal papers followed by respondent commentary and open
discussion worked well and spawned some constructive conversations.
A second model was the “African Diaspora Studies on the Eve of the
21st Century” conference held at the University of California at Berkeley.
The first day of this two-day event involved a number of workshops to which
AAS faculty throughout the University of California system were invited.
A third example is the Committee on Institutional Cooperation
(CIC) meeting to be convened at the University of Illinois. The CIC is the
Midwestern association of public institutions known as the “Big Ten” and
Penn State University. It coordinates interinstitutional exchanges among
deans, unit heads, and administrators at a variety of levels. These meetings
allow peers at eleven institutions the opportunity to compare notes on such
issues as curriculum, administration, research, development, and organiza-