Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 21
also training the engineers, technicians, and scientists who would put that
knowledge to practical use in industry and government. One aspect of the
university—science and technology—was experiencing dramatic growth,
while the rest was being carried in its wake. The university was becoming,
more than ever, the port of entry into the professions. The social sciences
could help train young people to serve the expanding bureaucracies of government
and industry. A natural consequence of these developments was
the growing pre-professionalism of the undergraduate curriculum.
As faculty members and administrators saw the university in the
terms defined by Kerr, as undergraduate teaching by research-preoccupied
specialists became more problematic, and as the general public increasingly
came to see higher education as training for careers, the pressure to make
the undergraduate curriculum efficient to those ends became even more
compelling. That efficiency, however, came at the expense of the liberal arts
tradition. Public institutions, most having land-grant origins, from the beginning
had appealed to their legislatures for funds by citing their immediate
contribution to agriculture, mining, and business. They had always
found it easy to design undergraduate curricula that allowed students to
avoid “useless” courses in the humanities. In the postwar period, however,
even the prestigious private universities tolerated an erosion of the liberal
arts core.
Kerr’s utilitarian emphasis was echoed by most university administrators,
most notably by James A. Perkins, president of Cornell. 5 By the end of
the sixties, administrators and faculty were forced by both White and Black
students to defend themselves against charges of complicity in the evils of
society and nation. Their defense relied heavily on the university’s traditional
posture of detachment and disinterest. “Relevance,” a word often
used by Kerr and Perkins to distinguish the modern university from the
“ivory tower,” became a student clarion call. Black students wanted courses
and programs “relevant to our Blackness,” relevant to the lives of Blacks in
the ghettos and in the rural South. They wanted to make the university useful
in ending racism in America (as others wanted to make it useful in ending
poverty and the war in Vietnam). They would begin by confronting and
excising the evil at the institution’s heart. By the end of the hubristic sixties,