Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 19
Grants, Guaranteed Student Loan Program) made additional funds available.
These programs were followed in 1972 by the Basic Educational Opportunity
Grant Program, which vested funds in individual students who
could take them to the institutions of their choice. In 1976–77, $1.5 billion
were awarded under this program, to nearly two million students. In addition
to federal funds, state aid also became available. In 1977–78, for instance,
there were $756 million in state aid programs.
These figures point to an important characteristic of the growth of
Black student enrollment in the sixties. Not only did many more Black students
attend predominantly White schools in the mid-sixties; those who
did were a different social slice of the Black population than those who had
attended those schools in the fifties and before. Administrators deliberately
set out to recruit poor youngsters from the inner city (so-called ghetto
youth), imagining that the university might rectify failures in the secondary
school system and redeem these students so they might enter mainstream
life. This policy implied a changing (or at least a rethinking) of
standards for admission as they applied to these youngsters. It implied the
establishment of remedial programs, a faculty and a student body genuinely
sympathetic both to the means and the ends of this policy, and innercity
Black students who would be grateful for the opportunity. These
assumptions were only partly to be realized, contributing to the general
malaise among Black students in the mid-sixties and leading in turn to
much of the Black contribution to student unrest in those years.
Being a Black student at a predominantly White institution had never
been easy. Before the sixties, such students had always been few in number,
hardly more than a dozen undergraduates at any time on any college campus.
Sports and other extracurricular activities were sometimes closed to
them. Little deference was given them, and they were likely to feel themselves
alternately exemplars of their race and altogether ignored. Unlike
those who arrived in the mid-sixties, however, they had not been specially
recruited. Those who went to these institutions had made conscious, deliberate
choices to be there, and had undoubtedly made important personal
sacrifices. There had been no special admissions considerations, and
they probably assumed (following conventional Black wisdom) that they