Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 5
of departments. The “most radical kind of Afro-American Studies program”
is a separate college. The department is an autonomous unit with its
own budget and the ability to hire, promote, and tenure its own faculty. Depending
upon the institution, research institutes and centers support advanced
scholarship in the arts and sciences and rarely have a pedagogical
function within the university. Of these, Huggins privileges the program
and the research center because both seem best suited to ensure the legitimization
of the field through the production of new knowledge and by
maintaining contact and relationships with established disciplines. Because
the program shares its faculty with established departments, those scholars
and teachers would be advocates for the field in their home departments
and also inform the curriculum of the mainstream disciplines. Huggins felt
that Yale University (at which Black Studies has since become a department)
and the Institute of the Black World at Atlanta University were two
successful models. At its founding in 1969 the Institute of the Black World
(IBW) was funded in part by the Ford Foundation, but by the 1980’s, it was
forced to close due to lack of resources. The IBW has been called “the most
progressive model of what Black Studies could have been.” 3
Huggins believed the integration and transformation of traditional
disciplines was the fundamental goal of African American Studies. Because
of this mix, his model programs are those that privilege scholarly production,
meet the already existing standards of review and promotion, and
work in conjunction with departments within the arts and sciences:
It seems to me that the movement to make academically legitimate
the study of a wide range of issues and questions having to do with the
Black experience in America has been the most valuable outcome of the
struggles during the last decade. Afro-American Studies will achieve
greater impact and influence the more it is permitted to resonate in the
conventional disciplines. Standard offerings in history, American literature,
economics, political science, and so on should be informed and enriched
by scholarship in African American Studies.
Within a decade, scholarship in African American Studies did indeed inform
a number of disciplines. Huggins recognized the changing political