Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 223
tional strategies. Directors of Afro-American Studies programs in the Big
Ten met twice over the last ten years, but meetings have not been organized
in some time due to scheduling difficulties. Dianne Pinderhughes (Chair of
Afro-American Studies at the University of Illinois) has worked with the
CIC administrator to resume these meetings. One will be held in May 2000,
and another should follow in the 2000–01 academic year. Similar working
groups of the African and African American Studies faculty in the University
of California system generated the conference on the “African Diaspora
Studies on the Eve of the 21st Century” at Berkeley in May 1998.
What all of these gatherings have in common is the goal of generating
scholarly exchange across institutional lines but within a relatively narrowly
defined region. All are designed to facilitate the flow of administrative, curricular,
and research-planning information. Such events certainly need to
occur at the national level as well, but too little attention has been paid to
extending these meetings to the local level. The national meetings tend to
enable individual scholars to establish professional networks; they do not
consistently enable the building of links among universities and colleges in
which these scholars labor.
What appears to be desperately needed at both the national and local
levels is sustained and open conversation regarding the growing number of
advanced degree programs in African American Studies. At present, there
has been no real attempt to keep track of such programs and, more importantly,
there is no clearinghouse of information such as course syllabi, curriculum
designs, and program proposals through which schools might
learn from each other’s experiences.
On one hand, the diversity of M.A. and Ph.D. programs is such that
what might work for one may not work for another. On the other hand, if a
coherent field called African American Studies can be said to exist, then it
behooves those active in it to strive for some coherence in the training of future
scholars. One option is the accrediting system proposed by the National
Council for Black Studies. Given the independence of these graduate programs,
such a system is doomed to failure without universal approval,which
is simply not reasonable to expect. Another less prescriptive step, and one
that Ford could facilitate, would be the convening of a meeting of the heads