Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

224 Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States
of African American Studies graduate programs for a discussion of goals
and strategies for dealing with student financial aid, collaboration with
other departments on campus, curricula, introductory courses, job placement,
research planning, and the like. One can envision the benefits to be
gained from a published volume of papers from such a meeting—especially
one appended with syllabi and program descriptions. 37
Finally, the Foundation might itself take on the creation and maintenance
of a database of information regarding AAS graduate programs or,
in the alternative, provide the funds necessary for an AAS program to set
up such a database. In sum, greater intellectual consistency will be crucial
in order to facilitate and sustain the construction of graduate programs that
will produce scholars promote the field across narrow disciplinary lines.
The response to the renaissance of the Department of Afro-American
Studies at Harvard raises the issue of intellectual consistency. First, there is
no single or dominant disciplinary organization. Faculty participates in the
National Council for Black Studies (NCBS), the Association for the Study
of Afro-American Life and History (ASALH), the American Studies Association,
and national disciplinary organizations. These groups reflect generational
differences, philosophical distinctions, and differently designed
intellectual approaches. In a number of cases, we found that units had their
own networks but did not consistently interact with each other. In other
cases, the Ford grant stimulated outreach. UVa’s Woodson Center reached
out to regional HBCUs; Cornell’s Africana Studies and Research Center
partnered with regional colleges and universities, and an HBCU several
states away. And, at Wisconsin, an African American Studies consortium
was created linking Midwestern universities: Carnegie Mellon Michigan,
and Michigan State. The University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University
have also formed an alliance, inspired by a Ford grant.
Another important collaboration that we encountered in our review
involved linkages being established between large research universities and
small colleges. The Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia had
taken a leadership role in developing a regional consortium “of schools interested
in sharing resources and developing programs related to African